a

person was guilty of a worse act : To oblige a friend collector' - he actually tore out the leaf of the parish register which contained the entry of Joseph Addison's birth.

Milston Church does not display the texts of Scripture attributed to the Coverley edifice. If any existed when Addison wrote, they must have been since effaced by white wash.

CHAP. VIII. SIR ROGER IN LOVE.

No. 113. Tuesday, July 10, 1711. By Steele. Page 60. The Widow is the secret Cause of all that Inconsistency which appears in some Parts of my Friend's Discourse. The notion that the perverse widow had a living, charming, provoking, original, has been more prevalent and better supported than that respecting any of the rest of the Coverley characters. Although a mere outline, - hinted rather than delineated amidst the picturesque group of last century figures she is so suggestively shadowed forth that the reader himself insensibly vivifies the outline, feels her ascendency and doubles his pity for her kind-hearted victim. 'The dignity of her aspect, the composure of her motion,' and the polish of her repartee heightened by the foil of her spiteful confidant — make us participate in Sir ROGER'S awe; and, while we sympathize with his ardent admiration, we tremble for the hapless presumption that aspires to the finest Hand of any Woman in the World.' — Her subtlety was unbounded. No coquette commands success who, besides varied resources, cannot ply her art with the chastest

dexterity; and the Widow's omnipotence was attained less by her personal charms and mental graces, than by the delicacy of her lures, and the nice discrimination with which they were spread.

These faint but variegated tints are so truthfully blended in the Widow, that not only general readers, but acute critics have believed, that nothing short of the minutest experience of an equally desperate suit to an equally coy and fascinating original, could have inspired and executed the likeness. Both Addison and Steele had suffered from perverse Widows; and who knows but this confluence of congenial sentiment springing from a like source was one cause of these differently constituted men being long united in friendship?

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The tantalizing dominion under which Addison suffered when the Coverley papers were in progress, was exercised by the Countess Dowager of Warwick, whom he was anxiously courting; 'perhaps,' says Dr. Johnson, 'with behaviour not very unlike that of Sir ROGER to his disdainful widow.' The result, though different, was not happier than Sir ROGER'S destiny. Not till four years after the Coverley papers had been finished did Addison succeed in his suit. On the 2nd August, 1716,' continues the biographer of the poets,‘he married the Countess, on terms much like those on which a Turkish Princess is espoused; to whom the Sultan is reported to pronounce, "Daughter, I give thee this man for thy slave!"' This marriage was only a change from one sort of unhappiness to another, from the intermittent vexations of a slighted lover, to the chronic miseries of an ill-matched husband.

Probability, however, rejects Lady Warwick as the model we seek. To find it we must, it is said, turn to Steele's tormentress. Addison's sufferings were in full force when the sketch was made; Steele's were past. Addison's tortures were too real and operative for the unchecked flow of that genial humour-for that fine tolerance of the Widow's cruelty which pervades every allusion to her: Steele's pains had, on the contrary, been first assuaged by time and then, let us hope, extinguished by matrimony with anotherand another. While therefore experience had made him master of a Widow's arts, the retrospect of what he had suffered from them was too remote to darken the shadows, or to sour the expression of the portrait. Hence it is his signature that appears to this paper, and his Widow who is said to have inspired them.

The information on which this belief is grounded is derived from Chalmers through Archdeacon Nares, to whom it was communicated by the Rev. Duke Yonge of Plympton in Devonshire. My attention,' says the reverend gentleman, was first drawn to this subject by a very vague tradition in the family of Sir Thomas Crawley Boevey, of Flaxley Abbey in Gloucestershire, that Mrs. Catherine Boevey, widow of William Boevey, Esq., and who died January 21, 1726, was the original from whence the picture of the perverse widow in the Spectator was drawn. She was left a widow at the early age of 22, and by her portrait (now at Flaxley Abbey, and drawn at a more advanced period of her life) appears to have been a woman of a handsome, dignified figure,

as she is described to have been in the 113th No. of the Spectator. She was a personage well known and much distinguished in her day, and is described very respectably in the New Atalantis, under the name of Portia. From these facts I was induced to examine whether any internal evidence could be traced in the Spectator to justify the tradition. The result of that enquiry is as follows:

"The papers in the Spectator which give the description of the widow, were certainly written by Steele, and that Mrs. Boevey was well known to Steele, and held by him in high estimation, is equally certain. He dedicates the three volumes of the "Lady's Library " to three different ladies, Lady Burlington, Mrs. Boevey, and Mrs. Steele; he describes each of them in terms of the highest commendation, but each of them is distinguished by very discriminating characteristics. However exalted the characters of Lady Burlington, or Mrs. Steele, there is not one word in the dedication to either which corresponds to the character of the widow; but the characters of Mrs. Boevey and the Widow are drawn with marks of very striking coincidence. No. 113 of the Spectator, as far as it relates to the Widow, is almost a parody on the character of Mrs. Boevey, as shown in the dedication. Sir ROGER tells his friend that she is a reading lady, and that her discourse was as learned as the best philosopher could possibly make. She reads upon the nature of plants, and understands everything. In the dedication Steele says, "instead of assemblies and conversations, books and solitude have been your choice you have charms of your own sex, and knowledge not inferior to the most learned of ours." In No. 118," her

superior merit is such," says Sir ROGER, "that I cannot approach her without awe, my heart is checked by too much

esteem.' Dedication. "Your person and fortune equally raise the admiration and awe of our whole sex.

'She is described as having a Confidant, as the Knight calls her, to whom he expresses a peculiar aversion, No. 118 being chiefly on that subject. "Of all persons," says the good old Knight, "be sure to set a mark on confidants." I know not whether the lady was deserving of the Knight's reprobation, but Mrs. Boevey certainly had a female friend of this description, of the name of Pope, who lived with her more than forty years, whom she left executrix, and who it is believed in the family did not execute her office in the most liberal manner.'

The communication goes on to state that Mrs. Boevey's residence, Flaxley Abbey, was not far from the borders of Worcestershire; but that there was no tradition in the family of her having had such a law-suit as is described by Sir ROGER. Indeed, a reference to dates shows such a circumstance to have been impossible, unless the phenomenon of a widow of nine years old could be credited. Mr. Boevey died in 1691, when his wife was twenty-two; now as the Spectator fixed the old Knight's age at fifty-six, and as Sir ROGER himself affirms that the Widow first cast her bewitching eye upon him' in his twenty-third year, that fatal glance must have flashed in 1678, when Mrs. Boevey was in her girlhood. But this weighs not a feather in the scale of evidence; no true artist copies every trait of his subject, and the verisimilitude is not diminished because the Gloucestershire