describe, satirize the evil of society. Then, as now, the bulk of Englishmen were honest and rightminded. 'Between the mud at the bottom and the scum of its surface,' says Mons. Taine fairly enough, 'rolled on the great current of the national life.' Widely as it had parted from the theological and political doctrines of Puritanism, the moral conceptions of Puritanism lived on in the nation at large. The popular book of the upper and middle classes, the book that was in every lady's closet, was 'The whole Duty of Man.' But then, for the first time, this moral temper of the individual Englishman quickened into a passion for moral reform in the whole structure of English society. The moral preaching which bores the reader of to-day was the popular literature of the eighteenth century. Not only can the essayist make conduct the groundwork of his essays, but the novelist takes it as the groundwork of his novels, the play-wright as the basis of his plays. The Beggar's Opera, in which Gay quizzes political corruption, is played amidst thunders of applause. Everybody reads Pope's Satires. Whatever in fact men put their hands to takes somehow this shape of moral reform. I Give us some models of letters for servant maids to write to their homes,' said the publishers to Richardson; and Richardson, honestly striving to produce a Complete Letter-writer, gave them 'Pamela.'

What Addison did for this general impulse was to give it guidance, to stamp it with a larger, a more

liberal, a more harmonious character, than it might otherwise have had. While Puritanism aimed at the culture of 'the best,' the Essayists aimed at the culture of all. Puritanism again had concentrated itself on the development of the religious side of man, as the Renascence had spent itself on the development of his intellectual, his artistic, his physical side. But what Addison aimed at was the development of man as a whole. He would have had men love God as Cromwell loved him, and freedom better than Cromwell loved it, but he would have had liberty and religion associate themselves with all that was human; he would have had no 'horse-play' at the signing of the king's death-warrant. And it is only fair to remember that what he aimed at, he in no small measure actually brought about. The men who sneered in our fathers' day at the preaching of the Essayists were the men whom that preaching had formed. Formal and external as the moral drill of the eighteenth century seems to us, it wrought a revolution in social manners. We smile perhaps at the minuteness of the drill, as when Chesterfield bids his son never pare his nails in society; but even in these minute matters it has succeeded. And its success is just as great in the greater matters. It is no small triumph to have dissociated learning from pedantry, courage from the quarrelsomeness of the bravo; to have got rid of the brutalities and brutal pleasures of that older life, of its 'grinning matches' and bull-baitings, its drunkenness and oaths, its

rakes and its mohawks; to have no more Parson Trullibers, to have superseded the Squire Westerns by the Squire Allworthys, and to have made Lovelace impossible. No doubt a thousand influences had been telling on English society through these hundred years to produce such a change as this; but Addison was certainly one of these influences, and he was not the one that told least, for through the whole of those years men and women alike were reading and smiling, and chatting and thinking, over the Essays of the Spectator. And yet, as I have said, I cannot feel that there is anything living, anything that really helps or interests us to-day, in the speculations of Addison. His religion is not our religion, for it starts from assumptions which we cannot grant; its conceptions, whether of God or man, strike us as inadequate and poor; its ideal of life has lost its charm. We do not care 'to be easy here and happy afterwards.' And grateful as we must be to Addison's morality, yet here again we can but feel that his work is dead. It was far from being common-place to men who had left behind them ages in which morals had been lost in theology, and to whom the very notion of conduct was a new and fascinating thing; it has become common-place to us just through its very success, through the charm it exercised over men for a hundred years; but still it has become commonplace. Graceful and earnest as such speculations may be, it is hard to read them without a yawn.

When these then have been deducted, when we

cease to study Addison as a statesman or a critic, or a theologian or a moralist, what of him remains? Well, I think we may fairly answer, all that is individually and distinctively Addison. There remains his light and playful fancy. There remains his incomparable humour. There remains, pervading all, his large and generous humanity. I know no writer whose moral temper so perfectly reflects itself in his work. His style, with its free, unaffected, movement, its clear distinctness, its graceful transitions, its delicate harmonies, its appropriateness of tone; the temperance and moderation of his treatment, the effortless self-mastery, the sense of quiet power, the absence of exaggeration or extravagance, the perfect keeping with which he deals with his subjects; or again the exquisite reserve, the subtle tenderness, the geniality, the pathos of his humour-what are these but the literary reflexion of Addison himself, of that temper so pure and lofty yet so sympathetic, so strong yet so loveable? In the midst of that explosion of individuality, of individual energy and force, which marked the eighteenth century, Addison stands out individual, full of force, but of a force harmonious, self-controlled, instinct with the sense of measure, of good taste, good humour, culture, urbanity. It seems natural to him that this temper should find its expression in the highest literature. 'The greatest wits I have conversed with,' he says, 'were men eminent for their humanity'; and it is this for which he is himself so eminent as a wit, he is humane.

Man is the one interesting thing to him; he is never weary of tracking out human character into its shyest recesses, of studying human conduct, of watching the play of human thought and feeling, and of contrasting man's infinite capacities of greatness with his infinite capacities of littleness. But the sight stirs in him not only interest, but sympathy; he looks on it with eyes as keen as those of Swift, but with a calmer and juster intelligence; and as he looks it moves him not to the 'saeva indignatio' of the Dean, but to that mingled smile and tear, that blending of 'how wonderful a thing is man,' with, 'but oh! the pity of it!' which had found equal utterance but once before in Shakespeare. It was the sense of this that won him so wide a love in his own day; and it is the sense of this that still makes his memory so dear to Englishmen. 'To Addison,' says Lord Macaulay, we are bound by a sentiment as much like affection as any sentiment can be, which is inspired by one who has been sleeping a hundred and twenty years in Westminster Abbey.' It is because I have felt this affection from my own boyhood, when I read my Spectator beneath the shadows of the trees in 'Addison's Walk,' that I have attempted in these Selections to bring Addison home to readers of to-day.