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ADDISON’S FAMILY AND EDUCATION.

Joseph Addison was born on the 1st of May, 1672. He was the eldest son of Lancelot Addison, at the time of his birth rector of Milston, near Amesbury, in Wiltshire, and afterwards Dean of Lichfield. His father was a man of character and accomplishments. Educated at Oxford, while that University was under the control of the famous Puritan Visitation, he made no secret of his contempt for principles to which he was forced to submit, or of his preferences for Monarchy and Episcopacy. His boldness was not agreeable to the University authorities, and being forced to leave Oxford, he maintained himself for a time near Petworth, in Sussex, by acting as chaplain or tutor in families attached to the Royalist cause. After the Restoration he obtained the appointment of chaplain to the garrison of Dunkirk, and when that town was ceded to France in 1662, he was removed in a similar capacity to Tangier. Here he remained eight years, but, venturing on a visit to England, his post was bestowed upon another, and he would have been left without resources had not one of his friends presented him with the living of Milston, valued at £120 a year. With the courage of his order he thereupon took a wife, Jane, daughter of Dr. Nathaniel Gulston, and sister of William Gulston, Bishop of Bristol, by whom he had six children, three sons and three daughters, all born at Milston. In 1675 he was made a prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral and Chaplain-in-Ordinary to the King; and in 1683 he was promoted to the Deanery of Lichfield, as a reward for his services at Tangier, and out of consideration of losses which he had sustained by a fire at Milston. His literary reputation stood high, and it is said that he would have been made a bishop, if his old zeal for legitimacy had not prompted him to manifest in the Convocation of 1689 his hostility to the Revolution. He died in 1703.

Lancelot was a writer at once voluminous and lively. In the latter part of his life he produced several treatises on theological subjects, the most popular of which was called An Introduction to the Sacrament. This book passed through many editions. The doctrine it contains leans rather to the Low Church side. But much the most characteristic of his writings were his works on Mahommedanism and Judaism, the results of his studies during his residence in Barbary. These show not only considerable industry and research and powers of shrewd observation, but that genuine literary faculty which enables a writer to leave upon a subject of a general nature the impression of his own character. While there is nothing forced or exaggerated in his historical style, a vein of allegory runs through the narrative of the Revolutions of the Kingdoms of Fez and Morocco, which must have had a piquant flavour for the orthodox English reader of that day. Recollections of the Protectorate would have taken nothing of its vividness from the portrait of the Moorish priest who “began to grow into reputation with the people by reason of his high pretensions to piety and fervent zeal for their law, illustrated by a stubborn rigidity of conversation and outward sanctity of life.” When the Zeriffe, with ambitious designs on the throne, sent his sons on a pilgrimage to Mecca, the religious buffooneries practised by the young men must have recalled to the reader circumstances more recent and personal than those which the author was apparently describing. “Much was the reverence and reputation of holiness which they thereby acquired among the superstitious people, who could hardly be kept from kissing their garments and adoring them as saints, while they failed not in their parts, but acted as much devotion as high contemplative looks, deep sighs, tragical gestures, and other passionate interjections of holiness could express. ‘Allah, allah!’ was their doleful note, their sustenance the people’s alms.” And when these impostors had inveigled the King of Fez into a religious war, the description of those who “mistrusted their own safety, and began, but too late, to repent their approving of an armed hypocrisy,” was not more applicable to the rulers of Barbary than to the people of England. “Puffed up with their successes, they forgot their obedience, and these saints denied the king the fifth part of their spoils. … By which it appeared that they took up arms, not out of love for their country and zeal for their religion, but out of desire of rule.” There is, indeed, nothing in these utterances which need have prevented the writer from consistently promoting the Revolution of 1688; yet his principles seem to have carried him far in the opposite direction; and it is interesting to remember that the assertor in Convocation of the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right was the father of the author of the Whig Examiner and the Freeholder. However decidedly Joseph may have dissented from his father’s political creed, we know that he entertained admiration and respect for his memory, and that death alone prevented him from completing the monument afterwards erected in Lancelot’s honour in Lichfield Cathedral.

Of Addison’s mother nothing of importance is recorded. His second brother, Gulston, became Governor of Fort St. George, in the East Indies; and the third, Lancelot, followed in Joseph’s footsteps so far as to obtain a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. His sisters, Jane and Anna, died young; but Dorothy was twice married, and Swift records in her honour that she was “a kind of wit, and very like her brother.” We may readily believe that a writer so lively as Lancelot would have had clever children, but Steele was perhaps carried away by the zeal of friendship or the love of epigram when he said, in his dedication to the Drummer: “Mr. Dean Addison left behind him four children, each of whom, for excellent talents and singular perfections, was as much above the ordinary world as their brother Joseph was above them.” But that Steele had a sincere admiration for the whole family is sufficiently shown by his using them as an example in one of his early Tatlers:

“I remember among all my acquaintance but one man whom I have thought to live with his children with equanimity and a good grace. He had three sons and one daughter, whom he bred with all the care imaginable in a liberal and ingenuous way. I have often heard him say he had the weakness to love one much better than the other, but that he took as much pains to correct that as any other criminal passion that could arise in his mind. His method was to make it the only pretension in his children to his favour to be kind to each other, and he would tell them that he who was the best brother he would reckon the best son. This turned their thoughts into an emulation for the superiority in kind and tender affection towards each other. The boys behaved themselves very early with a manly friendship; and their sister, instead of the gross familiarities and impertinent freedoms in behaviour usual in other houses, was always treated by them with as much complaisance as any other young lady of their acquaintance. It was an unspeakable pleasure to visit or sit at a meal in that family. I have often seen the old man’s heart flow at his eyes with joy upon occasions which would appear indifferent to such as were strangers to the turn of his mind; but a very slight accident, wherein he saw his children’s good-will to one another, created in him the god-like pleasure of loving them because they loved each other. This great command of himself in hiding his first impulse to partiality at last improved to a steady justice towards them, and that which at first was but an expedient to correct his weakness was afterwards the measure of his virtue.”[5]

This, no doubt, is the set description of a moralist, and to an age in which the liberty of manners has grown into something like license it may savour of formalism and priggishness; but when we remember that the writer was one of the most warm-hearted of men, and that the subject of his panegyric was himself, full of vivacity and impulse, it must be admitted that the picture which it gives us of the Addison family in the rectory of Milston is a particularly amiable one.

Though the eighteenth century had little of that feeling for natural beauty which distinguishes our own, a man of Addison’s imagination could hardly fail to be impressed by the character of the scenery in which his childhood was passed. No one who has travelled on a summer’s day across Salisbury plain, with its vast canopy of sky and its open tracts of undulating downland, relieved by no shadows except such as are thrown by the passing cloud, the grazing sheep, and the great circle of Stonehenge, will forget the delightful sense of refreshment and repose produced by the descent into the valley of the Avon. The sounds of human life rising from the villages after the long solitude of the plain, the shade of the deep woods, the coolness of the river, like all streams rising in the chalk, clear and peaceful, are equally delicious to the sense and the imagination. It was, doubtless, the recollection of these scenes that inspired Addison in his paraphrase of the twenty-third Psalm:

“The Lord my pasture shall prepare,

And feed me with a shepherd’s care.

······ When in the sultry glebe I faint, Or on the thirsty mountain pant, To fertile vales and dewy meads My weary wandering steps he leads, Where peaceful rivers, soft and slow, Amid the verdant landscape flow.”

At Amesbury he was first sent to school, his master being one Nash; and here, too, he probably met with the first recorded adventure of his life. It is said that having committed some fault, and being fearful of the consequences, he ran away from school, and, taking up his abode in a hollow tree, maintained himself as he could till he was discovered and brought back to his parents. He was removed from Amesbury to Salisbury, and thence to the Grammar School at Lichfield, where he is said to have been the leader in a “barring out.” From Lichfield he passed to the Charter House, then under the charge of Dr. Ellis, a man of taste and scholarship. The Charter House at that period was, after Westminster, the best-known school in England, and here was laid the foundation of that sound classical taste which perfected the style of the essays in the Spectator.

Macaulay labours with much force and ingenuity to prove that Addison’s classical acquirements were only superficial, and, in his usual epigrammatic manner, hazards the opinion that “his knowledge of Greek, though doubtless such as was, in his time, thought respectable at Oxford, was evidently less than that which many lads now carry away every year from Eton and Rugby.” That Addison was not a scholar of the class of Bentley or Porson may be readily admitted. But many scattered allusions in his works prove that his acquaintance with the Greek poets of every period, if cursory, was wide and intelligent: he was sufficiently master of the language thoroughly to understand the spirit of what he read; he undertook while at Oxford a translation of Herodotus, and one of the papers in the Spectator is a direct imitation of a jeu d’esprit of Lucian’s. The Eton or Rugby boy who, in these days, with a normal appetite for cricket and football, acquired an equal knowledge of Greek literature, would certainly be somewhat of a prodigy.

No doubt, however, Addison’s knowledge of the Latin poets was, as Macaulay infers, far more extensive and profound. It would have been strange had it been otherwise. The influence of the classical side of the Italian Renaissance was now at its height, and wherever those ideas became paramount Latin composition was held in at least as much esteem as poetry in the vernacular. Especially was this the case in England, where certain affinities of character and temperament made it easy for writers to adopt Roman habits of thought. Latin verse composition soon took firm root in the public schools and universities, so that clever boys of the period were tolerably familiar with most of the minor Roman poets. Pope, in the Fourth Book of the Dunciad, vehemently attacked the tradition as confining the mind to the study of words rather than of things; but he had himself had no experience of a public school, and only those who fail to appreciate the influence of Latin verse composition on the style of our own greatest orators, and of poets like Milton and Gray, will be inclined to undervalue it as an instrument of social and literary training.

Proficiency in this art may at least be said to have laid the foundation of Addison’s fortunes. Leaving the Charter House in 1687, at the early age of fifteen, he was entered at Queen’s College, Oxford, and remained a member of that society for two years, when a copy of his Latin verses fell into the hands of Dr. Lancaster, then Fellow and afterwards Provost of the College. Struck with their excellence, Lancaster used his influence to obtain for him a demyship at Magdalen. The subject of this fortunate set of verses was “Inauguratio Regis Gulielmi,” from which fact we may reasonably infer that even in his boyhood his mind had acquired a Whig bias. Whatever inclination he may have had in this direction would have been confirmed by the associations of his new college. The fluctuations of opinion in Magdalen had been frequent and extraordinary. Towards the close of Elizabeth’s reign it was notorious for its Calvinism, but under the Chancellorship of Laud it appears to have adopted, with equal ardour, the cause of Arminianism, for it was among the colleges that offered the stoutest opposition to the Puritan visitors in 1647–48. The despotic tendencies of James II., however, again cooled its loyalty, and its spirited resistance to the king’s order for the election of a Roman Catholic President had given a mortal blow to the Stuart dynasty. Hough was now President, but in consequence of the dispute with the king there had been no election of demies in 1688, so that twice the usual number was chosen in the following year, and the occasion was distinguished by the name of the “golden election.” From Magdalen Addison proceeded to his master’s degree in 1693; the College elected him probationary Fellow in 1697, and actual Fellow the year after. He retained his Fellowship till 1711.

Of his tastes, habits, and friendships at Oxford there are few records. Among his acquaintance were Boulter, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin—whose memory is unenviably perpetuated, in company with Ambrose Phillips, in Pope’s Epistle to Arbuthnot,

“Does not one table Bavius still admit,

Still to one Bishop Phillips seem a wit?”—

and possibly the famous Sacheverell.[6] He is said to have shown in the society of Magdalen some of the shyness that afterwards distinguished him; he kept late hours, and read chiefly after dinner. The walk under the well-known elms by the Cherwell is still connected with his name. Though he probably acted as tutor in the college, the greater part of his quiet life at the University was doubtless occupied in study. A proof of his early maturity is seen in the fact that, in his nineteenth year, a young man of birth and fortune, Mr. Rushout, who was being educated at Magdalen, was placed under his charge.

His reputation as a scholar and a man of taste soon extended itself to the world of letters in London. In 1693, being then in his twenty-second year, he wrote his Account of the Greatest English Poets; and about the same time he addressed a short copy of verses to Dryden, complimenting him on the enduring vigour of his poetical faculty, as shown in his translations of Virgil and other Latin poets, some of which had recently appeared in Tonson’s Miscellany. The old poet appears to have been highly gratified, and to have welcomed the advances thus made to him, for he returned Addison’s compliment by bestowing high and not unmerited praise on the translation of the Fourth Book of the Georgics, which the latter soon after undertook, and by printing, as a preface to his own translation, a discourse written by Addison on the Georgics, as well as arguments to most of the books of the Æneid.

Through Dryden, no doubt, he became acquainted with Jacob Tonson. The father of English publishing had for some time been a well-known figure in the literary world. He had purchased the copyright of Paradise Lost; he had associated himself with Dryden in publishing before the Revolution two volumes of Miscellanies; encouraged by the success which these obtained, he put the poet, in 1693, on some translations of Juvenal and Persius, and two new volumes of Miscellanies; while in 1697 he urged him to undertake a translation of the whole of the works of Virgil. Observing how strongly the public taste set towards the great classical writers, he was anxious to employ men of ability in the work of turning them into English; and it appears from existing correspondence that he engaged Addison, while the latter was at Oxford, to superintend a translation of Herodotus. He also suggested a translation of Ovid. Addison undertook to procure coadjutors for the work of translating the Greek historian. He himself actually translated the books called Polymnia and Urania, but for some unexplained reason the work was never published. For Ovid he seems, on the whole, to have had less inclination. At Tonson’s instance he translated the Second Book of the Metamorphoses, which was first printed in the volume of Miscellanies that appeared in 1697; but he wrote to the publisher that “Ovid had so many silly stories with his good ones that he was more tedious to translate than a better poet would be.” His study of Ovid, however, was of the greatest use in developing his critical faculty; the excesses and want of judgment in that poet forced him to reflect, and his observations on the style of his author anticipate his excellent remarks on the difference between True and False Wit in the sixty-second number of the Spectator.

Whoever, indeed, compares these notes with the Essay on the Georgics, and with the opinions expressed in the Account of the English Poets, will be convinced that the foundations of his critical method were laid at this period (1697). In the Essay on the Georgics he seems to be timid in the presence of Virgil’s superiority; his Account of the English Poets, besides being impregnated with the principles of taste prevalent after the Restoration, shows deficient powers of perception and appreciation. The name of Shakespeare is not mentioned in it, Dryden and Congreve alone being selected to represent the drama. Chaucer is described as “a merry bard,” whose humour has become obsolete through time and change; while the rich pictorial fancy of the Faery Queen is thus described:

“Old Spenser next, warmed with poetic rage,

In ancient tales amused a barbarous age—

An age that yet uncultivate and rude,

Where’er the poet’s fancy led pursued,

Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods,

To dens of dragons and enchanted woods.

But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore,

Can charm an understanding age no more;

The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,

While the dull moral lies too plain below.”

According to Pope—always a suspicious witness where Addison is concerned—he had not read Spenser when he wrote this criticism on him.[7]

Milton, as a legitimate successor of the classics, is of course appreciated, but not at all after the elaborate fashion of the Spectator; to Dryden, the most distinguished poet of the day, deserved compliments are paid, but their value is lessened by the exaggerated opinion which the writer entertains of Cowley, who is described as a “mighty genius,” and is praised for the inexhaustible riches of his imagination. Throughout the poem, in fact, we observe a remarkable confusion of various veins of thought; an unjust depreciation of the Gothic grandeur of the older English poets; a just admiration for the Greek and Roman authors; a sense of the necessity of good sense and regularity in writings composed for an “understanding age;” and at the same time a lingering taste for the forced invention and far-fetched conceits that mark the decay of the spirit of mediæval chivalry.

With the judgments expressed in this performance it is instructive to compare such criticisms on Shakespeare as we find in No. 42 of the Spectator, the papers on “Chevy Chase” (73, 74), and particularly the following passage:

“As true wit consists in the resemblance of ideas, and false wit in the resemblance of words, according to the foregoing instances, there is another kind of wit which consists partly in the resemblance of ideas and partly in the resemblance of words, which, for distinction’s sake, I shall call mixed wit. This kind of wit is that which abounds in Cowley more than in any author that ever wrote. Mr. Waller has likewise a great deal of it. Mr. Dryden is very sparing in it. Milton has a genius much above it. Spenser is in the same class with Milton. The Italians even in their epic poetry are full of it. Monsieur Boileau, who formed himself upon the ancient poets, has everywhere rejected it with scorn. If we look after mixed wit among the Greeks, we shall find it nowhere but in the epigrammatists. There are, indeed, some strokes of it in the little poem ascribed to Musæus, which by that, as well as many other marks, betrays itself to be a modern composition. If we look into the Latin writers we find none of this mixed wit in Virgil, Lucretius, or Catullus; very little in Horace, but a great deal of it in Ovid, and scarce anything else in Martial.”

The stepping-stone from the immaturity of the early criticisms in the Account of the Greatest English Poets to the finished ease of the Spectator is to be found in the notes to the translation of Ovid.[8]

The time came when he was obliged to form a decision affecting the entire course of his life. Tonson, who had a wide acquaintance, no doubt introduced him to Congreve and the leading men of letters in London, and through them he was presented to Somers and Montague. Those ministers perhaps persuaded him, as a point of etiquette, to write, in 1695, his Address to King William, a poem composed in a vein of orthodox hyperbole, all of which must have been completely thrown away on that most unpoetical of monarchs. Yet in spite of those seductions Addison lingered at Oxford. To retain his Fellowship it was necessary for him to take orders. Had he done so, there can be no doubt that his literary skill and his value as a political partizan would have opened for him a road to the highest preferment. At that time the clergy were far from thinking it unbecoming to their cloth to fight in the political arena or to take part in journalism. Swift would have been advanced to a bishopric, as a reward for his political services, if it had not been for the prejudice entertained towards him by Queen Anne; Boulter, rector of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, having made himself conspicuous by editing a paper called the Freethinker, was raised to the Primacy of Ireland; Hoadley, the notorious Bishop of Bangor, edited the London Journal; the honours that were awarded to two men of such second-rate intellectual capacity would hardly have been denied to Addison. He was inclined in this direction by the example and advice of his father, who was now Dean of Lichfield, and who was urgent on his son to rid himself of the pecuniary embarrassments in which he was involved by embracing the Church as a profession. A few years before he had himself seemed to look upon the Church as his future sphere. In his Account of the Greatest English Poets he says: