The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers. Joseph Addison
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not bright. He had written some good Latin verses, and some English verses that were not so good. On his return from his travels he printed a rather dull account of them, which few people read then and which nobody reads now. He was known to a little circle of great men, but he was dangerously near poverty.
Yet good fortune never deserted Mr. Addison for long. In 1704 the Duke of Marlborough won the famous victory of Blenheim, and forthwith the little Whig poets began to sing it. But much of their fustian was so sublimely bad that even the Lord Treasurer, Godolphin, to whom all poetry was very much alike, began to see that the triumph was suffering for lack of a worthy poet. In this emergency he applied to Montague, whom he supposed to know most about such matters, and Montague recommended his old protégé, Addison. Thus it happened—if Pope's story be correct—that one day there climbed to Mr. Addison's lodgings, up three flights in the Haymarket, no less a person than the Honorable Henry Boyle, Chancellor of the Exchequer, with the request that Mr. Addison write a poem. The Campaign, which Addison produced in response to this august invitation, will be voted by most readers to-day a dull poem; but it was much admired then, and one simile in particular, comparing Marlborough to an avenging angel, is said to have captivated the imagination of Godolphin. At all events, The Campaign served to introduce Addison to public life. He was shortly after made Under-Secretary of State, and was never out of office again so long as he lived. In 1707 he was elected to Parliament; next year was appointed Under-Secretary of State for Ireland—where he was residing when Steele started The Tatler,—and although he lost that office when the Whigs went into a minority in 1710, yet he was one of the few Whigs elected to Parliament that year; after the death of Anne he went to Ireland again as Chief Secretary, and for a little time before his death reached his highest office as Secretary of State for England. It was a career of easy and uninterrupted prosperity. "I believe Mr. Addison could be elected king if he chose," said Swift with a twinge of envy. Yet Addison would never have been remembered for his public services. His title to lasting fame, like that of Steele, rests upon the work done for The Tatler and The Spectator.
The later writings of the two men are of less importance. The Spectator was discontinued at the end of 1712, and through the following year Steele conducted a similar periodical, The Guardian, from which political discussion was not to be so rigidly excluded as it had been from The Spectator. In the next five years he attempted three or four other papers, but they were all short-lived, and of little interest. Addison revived The Spectator in 1714, issuing it thrice a week for a year, and in 1715-16 he conducted for some months a periodical called The Freeholder in the interest of party measures he was then advocating. But neither Steele nor Addison ever had much success in managing an enterprise of this sort alone.
In 1713 Addison produced his once famous play of Cato. The reader of to-day will vote the Cato cold and declamatory; but it was vastly admired then, as the first correct and dignified tragedy upon the English stage. The critics and the crowd united to praise, and all the town went to see it. By this time Addison was regarded as the foremost man of letters in England. He set up a servant of his, one Buttons, as proprietor of a coffee-house in Great Russell Street, almost opposite "Will's," where Dryden had reigned as critic twenty years before, and here he presided over his circle of friends and admirers, and
"Gave his little senate laws."
Perhaps in his later years his happiest hours were passed here. In 1716 he had married the Countess Dowager of Warwick, to whom he had long paid patient and dignified court; but if rumour is to be trusted, his domestic life was not a happy one.
"Marrying discord in a noble wife"
was Pope's last thrust at him. He did not long survive his fortune, good or ill, but died at Holland House, the residence of his Countess, June 17, 1719, at the early age of forty-seven.
Steele survived his friend more than ten years; but they were years of inactivity. The great blow of his life fell when his wife died in 1718. That year was also further embittered by an unfortunate controversy with Addison, which for the first time in their lives estranged the two friends. After 1720 Steele retired from London and passed his remaining years, partly in Hereford and partly in the Welsh town of Carmarthen. He had succeeded in paying all his debts; he kept the love and esteem of all his old friends that were left; and his temper was sweet and gentle to the last. He died at Carmarthen, in September, 1729.
II. The Tatler and The Spectator
The date of the founding of The Tatler is important as marking the beginning of popular literature in England. From this humble origin sprang the great army of magazines and reviews which, for the last two hundred years, have contained so much of the best English writing. Before The Tatler, it may be said that there was no good reading in popular form. The English novel was not yet born. The newspapers, about as large as a lady's pocket handkerchief, contained nothing but news, and very little of that. The political pamphlet was purely partisan, was usually written by penny-a-liners, and could rarely pretend to any permanent interest or literary quality. In 1704 Daniel Defoe had founded his Review, which deserves to be called the earliest of political journals; but the Review, though it contains much vigorous writing, was strictly a party organ. Steele's purpose in The Tatler was quite different. He is a humorist and moralist. He writes to entertain, and incidentally, to correct or improve; he aims to depict all the charms and the humours of society, and to turn a playful satire upon its follies. To do this is always to make literature; to do it as Steele and Addison could, is to "show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."
The immediate success of The Tatler and The Spectator is easily understood. In the first place, there was now coming to be, for the first time, a large reading public in England. Before 1700 no English author had made a fortune or even a competence by the sale of his books. But the most important social fact in England at the beginning of the eighteenth century is the rapid growth of a great middle class. Shrewd, energetic, these men were getting the trade and commerce of England mostly into their hands, filling up the great towns, and exerting an influence in public affairs which neither political party could afford to overlook. It was for them that the political pamphlet was written. How large a reading public a popular pamphleteer might command at this time, may be inferred from the fact that sixty thousand copies of one of Defoe's pamphlets are said to have been sold on the streets of London, and Swift's famous tract, The Conduct of the Allies, ran through four editions in a week. But these people demanded something better than the party pamphlet. Intelligent, ambitious, they had social aspirations, and were interested in the life of the hour, in the club, in the drawing-room, at the theatre. They had some relish, too, of the best things in poetry and art. When Pope translated the Iliad his publisher issued an elegant subscription edition of six hundred and fifty copies for more aristocratic purchasers; but he issued also a cheap duodecimo edition for the general public, and of this he seems to have sold about seven thousand copies almost immediately after publication. Indeed, if we except Addison, all the prominent men of letters of the Queen Anne time—Steele, Swift, Pope, Prior, Gay—themselves belonged to this middle class; they were all the sons of tradesmen.
The readers for whom Steele and Addison wrote nearly all lived in London—and loved it. They were interested in the passing life of the town, in the street, the stage, the coffee-house. Doubtless that old London was an ugly, unkempt town. Its population was only about half a million—less than one-tenth what it is to-day. Its streets were narrow, ill-paved, and dirty, separated from the strip of sidewalk on either hand by reeking gutters. After nightfall, lighted only by flickering oil lamps, they were the haunt of footpads who terrorized the watchmen, and of bands of roistering young blades who headed up women in barrels and rolled them down hill for diversion, or chased the unwary stranger into a corner and made him dance by pricking him with their sword points. Public morals were very low. Drunkenness and license confronted the decent citizen on every hand, and, in public gardens like Vauxhall, often held high carnival. Taste and manners, even in what called itself polite society, were often coarse. Profanity, loud and open, might have been heard on the lips of fine ladies in places of public resort; while Swift's Polite Conversation affords convincing proof of how vapid and how gross the talk might