willingly persuade myself we may have yet a chance of seeing you here. I hear very little in this place of any body's Homer. Mr. Pope's does not much appear, nor show itself to any but where it is subscribed for; only Dr. Farrer of Mag. Coll. has read both, and is much pleased with your performance. We found fault with "Pluto's gloomy reign" in Pope v. 3. since Reign denotes time not place. E. g. K. Ch.'s Reign, K. George's Reign, signifie two different times not places. Pope has this Reign more than once, so that I suppose you Poets may have authority for it; and I find Nonsense gains Authority every day. I lately saw a dedication to Robert Earl of Oxford and it began "If I was" &c., instead of "If I were," which was laught at till the Report came **** Was is used with If before it. In our new prayers for Aug *** stead of “For that it hath pleased Thee," as is usual in prayers we have now got, "For that thou wast pleased" &c. I think it the first time that ever I met with "Wast" in my life unless in Quaker's Book. So then and than. I remember there was a dispute about those two words and it was referr'd to Sir Roger L'Estrange, who writ a discourse about them and concluded that Than ought not to be admitted into the English Tongue * * I have many more observations of this kind, but Mr. Web is come to call for this Epistle otherwise I would have made it a finish'd learned Discourse, such as I made once to your friend the Master, in behalf of Printing upon Brown paper rather than White.* I am, Dear Sir, Yours Q. C. July 3. 1715. * The manuscript is somewhat mutilated. W. L. CHAPTER XII. 1713 to 1715. Peace of Utrecht attacked by Whigs. Addison's Count Tariff. Pamphlet ascribed to him perhaps wrongfully. The Crisis. Steele expelled the House of Commons for it. Assisted in his defence by Addison and Walpole. Bolingbroke attempts to bring him over to his party, but fails. His Treatise on the Evidences of Christianity. Character of the work. Steele puts a stop to the Spectator at the end of the seventh volume and sets up the Guardian. Character of Addison's papers in it. Termination of the Guardian. Eighth volume of the Spectator. Correspondence respecting a New Periodical Work. State of public affairs. Declining health of the queen. Treachery of the ministers who conspire to bring in the Pretender. Efforts of the Jacobites. Counter-measures of Whig Peers. Quarrels of Oxford and Bolingbroke. Death of the queen. Vigorous measures of the council. George I. proclaimed. Lords Justices appointed. Addison chosen their secretary. Foolish tale concerning him. Letter to M. De Robethon. His memorial to the king. Lord Sunderland, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, appoints him chief secretary. He refuses to give up the acquaintance of Swift. Correspondence of Archbishop King. Letters of Major Dunbar. Remarks. Anecdote. Authorship of the Drummer. We now return from this unwelcome digression to trace the main stream of the life of Addison, which at this time flowed with a somewhat hurried course. The peace of Utrecht, the signature of which the queen announced on the meeting of Parliament in April 1713, roused the indignant zeal of all lovers of the honor and the interests of their country. The ministers were loudly denounced as adherents and pensioners of France; and the storm of pamphlets with which they were assailed urged them to prompt her majesty to demand of her faithful Commons stronger laws for the repression of libels. No portion of the treaty was exposed to stronger animadversion than the articles concerning commerce, in which it was obvious that British interests had been shamefully sacrificed through the inadvertence or corruption of the negotiators. In this part of the quarrel Addison engaged with weapons peculiarly his own. Even now that the subject itself has lost all its interest, his allegory of the lawsuit between Count Tariff and Goodman Fact, may be read with pleasure for its ingenuity, its humor, and the happy colloquialisms of the style. By way of feeling the pulse of the English people, the agents or favorers of the French king now published, and circulated widely, an Address to the queen from the magistrates of Dunkirk; modestly petitioning her to dispense with the execution of an article by which Louis had bound himself to secure England for the future against the annoyance of that nest of pirates, by the demolition of its harbor and fortifications. Instantly a whole troop of answerers was in the field; among whom are enumerated, Steele, Manwaring and Addison. In Tickell's edition, however, no piece of Addison's on this subject appears, nor is any such alluded to in his prefatory memoir; therefore the truth of this matter is somewhat uncertain. More doubt was thought to hang over the authorship of a pamphlet of greater notoriety, but small literary merit, entitled the Crisis, and designed to alarm the nation with apprehensions of arbitrary power and a popish successor. Steele avowed it and received subscriptions for it, and certainly suffered for it; yet before the publication of Steele's Correspondence, which plainly fixes it upon him, it was commonly supposed to be the work of a Whig junto, of whom Addison is named as one; with regard to him, however, the suspicion was not only untrue but absurd; and we have proof that he strongly disapproved a vehemence so contrary to his own habits and disposition. The piece was censured in Parliament, together with some passages in two numbers of the Englishman,—a political paper allowed on all hands to be Steele's,-as a scandalous and seditious libel; and a motion was made for his expulsion from the House, he being at this time member for Stockbridge. He obtained permission, though with difficulty, to speak first in his own defence. Hereupon, "Mr. Walpole, Mr. Pultney, and Mr. Addison were commissioned to go to him from the Kitcat club, with their positive order and determination that Steele should not make his own speech, but that Addison should make it for him, and he should read it from the other's writing without any insertion or addition of his own. Addison thought this a hard injunction, and said he 'must be like a schoolboy, and desire the gentleman to give him a little sense. Walpole said that it was impossible to speak a speech in cold blood: but being pressed, said he would try; and immediately spoke a very good speech of what he thought proper for Steele to say on the occasion, and the next day in the House made another speech as good or better on the same subject, but so totally different from the former, that there was scarce a single thought or argument the same."* *Life of Bishop Newton by himself in Coxe's Walpole, i. 45. It is not improbable, after all, that the speech made by Steele was in fact supplied to him by Addison, since he is said to have "entered on his defence with a temper, modesty and eloquence quite unusual to him." He continued speaking three hours: but was unable to avert the vote of expulsion which was carried against him. While Addison chid, without being able to moderate the headlong zeal of his old associate, and lamented in vain the ruin in which it was contributing to involve him, his own moderation, which was in reality the result of good sense, not indifference, inspired one of the opposite leaders with hopes of his conversion. The value of such an accession to a party now shaken at once by assaults from without and dissensions within, justified a decided effort; and Bolingbroke, to whom he was previously no stranger, asked of him a confidential interview. They conversed freely together for two hours, but parted with the full knowledge that "they differed toto cœlo in politics." Addison, indeed, had long since penetrated into the true character of this accomplished man, but ambitious, resentful and totally unprincipled politician. Spence relates from Pope, that on Parnell's having been introduced into Lord Bolingbroke's company, and speaking afterwards of the great pleasure he had in his conversation, Mr. Addison "came out with his usual expression, 'If he had but as good a heart as he has a head,'" and applied to him that "cankered Bolingbroke" from Shakspeare. In the midst of these busy scenes Addison, by meritorious diligence, found means to rescue from the service of party a portion of that precious time on which he felt that there were higher claims. It was in this year that he began that treatise on the Evidences of Christianity which was left a fragment of small extent at his death. How much of time and labor he actually gave to this object we have not the means of knowing, nor whether it was a design which with longer life he would have carried to completion, or one that he had laid aside. His real modesty and the general soundness of his judgment considered, it is highly probable that he must soon have abandoned it, on coming to a perception that to do justice to such a subject would demand wider research, other and deeper learning, and a mind more formed to the strictness of logical deduction, than were at present his; or were, perhaps, within his powers of acquisition. In any case, it is certain that of this effort of his pen, highly as it was com + Life of Bishop Newton by himself in Coxe's Walpole, i. 43. mended at the time of its first appearance,- as any contribution of such a man to such a cause was sure of being, the intrinsic value is very small. Prodigious advances, it should in candor be recollected, have since been made in all the branches of erudition and knowledge applicable to the study and illustration of this important topic. Thanks to the learned labors of Lardner and others, much less than the abilities and accomplishments of an Addison, would now suffice for the preparation of a popular summary of the Historical Evidences of Christianity incomparably superior to his in correctness and cogency. In December 1712, Steele, at the conclusion of the seventh volume of the Spectator, took leave of the world in this character; and in the month of March following reappeared in that of the Guardian. We now know that both these steps were taken by him for reasons of his own, and without the concurrence or even the knowledge, of Addison. Accordingly, the first volume of the Guardian is not enriched with any contributions of his; to the second he gave about fifty numbers. Of those rarest of intellectual products, when exquisite in their kind, wit and humor, these papers have a smaller proportion than those of their author in the Tatler and Spectator;-of grave moralizing they have more. Little or nothing of literary criticism is found in them, but an agreeable variety is made by the introduction of some letters, which we now know to have been real ones written to friends while the author was on his travels, and there are fancy-pieces which rank with his very best. But the frame of the work was a dull one; it suggested no fresh topics, afforded no happy hints; even the genius of Addison began perhaps to feel that its brightest inspirations had been uttered, and his papers have somewhat less of animation than before. The work however was acceptable; it had able contributors, and it seems to have been a disappointment both to them and to the public, when Steele, having carried it on through no more than two volumes, suddenly dropped it, in October 1713, to give himself up entirely to politics and his new party-paper the Englishman. Apparently, a considerable quantity of unused material was still left in the hands of Addison and other contributors; and after some time they agreed to give the public the benefit of it by resuscitating the defunct Spectator, of which an eighth volume appeared between the months of June and December, 1714, in which Steele had no concern. Even in the brief interval between the termination of the Guardian and this revival, he whose genius had been the animating soul of both, was plied with earnest solicitations to extend his aid to other |