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Many men there are than whom nothing is more commendable when they are singled; and yet, in society with others, none less fit to answer the duties which are looked for at their hands. HOOKER.

That every man should regulate his actions by his own conscience, without any regard to the opinions of the rest of the world, is one of the first precepts of moral prudence; justified not only by the suffrage of reason, which declares that none of the gifts of Heaven are to lie useless, but by the voice likewise of experience, which will soon inform us that, if we make the praise or blame of others the rule of our conduct, we shall be distracted by a boundless variety of irreconcilable judgments, be held in perpetual suspense between contrary impulses, and consult forever without determination.

DR. S. JOHNSON: Rambler, No. 23 Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action to all eternity.

LAVATER.

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If he acts piously, soberly, and temperately, he acts prudentially and safely. SOUTH. We are not only to look at the bare action, STILLINGFLeet. but at the reason of it.

Considering the usual motives of human actions, which are pleasure, profit, and ambition, I cannot yet comprehend how these persons find their account in any of the three. SWIFT.

In every action reflect upon the end; and in

The just season of doing things must be nicked, your undertaking it consider why you do it. and all accidents improved.

L'ESTRANGE.

No man sets himself about anything but upon some view or other which serves him for a LOCKE.

reason.

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Our voluntary actions are the precedent causes of good and evil which they draw after them and bring upon us. LOCKE.

We will not, in civility, allow too much sin cerity to the professions of most men, but think their actions to be interpreters of their thoughts. LOCKE.

Action is the highest perfection and drawing forth of the utmost power, vigour, and activity of man's nature. God is pleased to vouchsafe the best that he can give only to the best that we can do. The properest and most raised conception that we have of God is, that he is a pure act, a perpetual, incessant motion. SOUTH.

The schools dispute, whether in morals the external action superadds anything of good or evil to the internal elicit act of the will: but certainly the enmity of our judgments is wrought up to an high pitch before it rages in an open denial. SOUTH.

Since the event of an action usually follows the nature or quality of it, and the quality follows the rule directing it, it concerns a man in the framing of his actions not to be deceived in

the rule.

SOUTH.

We may deny God in all those acts that are capable of being morally good or evil: those are the proper scenes in which we act our confessions or denials of him. SOUTH.

JEREMY TAYLOR.

It is not much business that distracts any man; but the want of purity, constancy, and tendency JEREMY TAYLOR.

towards God.

is not the beginning of so long a chain of consequences, as that no human providence is high enough to give us a prospect to the end. THOMAS OF MALMESBURY.

There is no action of man in this life, which

In matters of human prudence, we shall find the greatest advantage by making wise observations on our conduct. DR. I. WATTS.

ADDISON, JOSEPH.

The mere choice and arrangement of his words would have sufficed to make his essays classical. For never, not even by Dryden, not even by Temple, had the English language been written with such sweetness, grace, and facility. But this was the smallest part of Addison's praise. Had he clothed his thoughts in the half-French style of Horace Walpole, or in the half-Latin style of Dr. Johnson, or in the halfGerman jargon of the present day, his genius would have triumphed over all faults of manner. As a moral satirist he stands unrivalled. If ever the best Tatlers and Spectators were equalled in their own kind, we should be inclined to guess that it must have been by the lost comedies of

Menander.

In wit, properly so called, Addison was not inferior to Cowley or Butler. No single ode of Cowley contains so many happy analogies as are crowded into the lines of Sir Godfrey Kneller; and we would undertake to collect from the Spectators as great a number of ingenious illustrations as can be found in Hudibras. The still higher faculty of invention Addison pos

sessed in still larger measure. The numerous fictions, generally original, often wild and grotesque, but always singularly graceful and happy, which are found in his essays, fully entitle him to the rank of a great poet, a rank to which his metrical compositions give him no claim. As an observer of life, of manners, of all the shades of human character, he stands in the first class. And what he observed he had the art of communicating in two widely different ways. He could describe virtues, vices, habits, whims, as well as Clarendon. But he could do something better. He could call human beings into exist ence, and make them exhibit themselves. If we wish to find anything more vivid than Addison's best portraits, we must go either to Shakspeare or to Cervantes.

But what shall we say of Addison's humour, of his sense of the ludicrous, of his power of awakening that sense in others, and of drawing mirth from incidents which occur every day, and from little peculiarities of temper and manner, such as may be found in every man? feel the charm, we give ourselves up to it; but we strive in vain to analyze it.

LORD MACAULAY:

We

Life and Writings of Addison, July, 1843. Perhaps the best way of describing Addison's peculiar pleasantry is to compare it with the pleasantry of some other great satirists. The three most eminent masters of the art of ridicule, during the eighteenth century, were, we conceive, Addison, Swift, and Voltaire. Which of the three had the greatest power of moving laughter may be questioned. But each of them, within his own domain, was supreme.

Voltaire is the prince of buffoons. His merriment is without disguise or restraint. He gambols; he grins; he shakes his sides; he points the finger; he turns up the nose; he shoots out the tongue. The manner of Swift is the very opposite to this. He moves laughter, but never joins in it. He appears in his works such as he appeared in society. All the company are convulsed with merriment, while the Dean, the author of all the mirth, preserves an invincible gravity, and even sourness, of aspect, and gives utterance to the most eccentric and ludicrous fancies with the air of a man reading the commination service.

The manner of Addison is as remote from that of Swift as from that of Voltaire. He neither laughs out like the French wit, nor, like the Irish wit, throws a double portion of severity into his countenance while laughing inwardly; but preserves a look peculiarly his own, a look of demure serenity, disturbed only by an arch sparkle of the eye, an almost imperceptible elevation of the brow, an almost imperceptible curl of the lip. His tone is never that either of a Jack Pudding or of a cynic; it is that of a gentleman, in whom the quickest sense of the ridiculous is constantly tempered by good nature and good breeding.

We own that the humour of Addison is, in our opinion, of a more delicious flavour than

the humour of either Swift or Voltaire. Thus much, at least, is certain, that both Swift and Voltaire have been successfully mimicked, and that no man has yet been abie to mimic Addison. The letter of the Abbé Coyer to Pansophe is Voltaire all over, and imposed, during a long time, on the Academicians of Paris. There are passages in Arbuthnot's satirical works which we, at least, cannot distinguish from Swift's best writing. But of the many eminent men who have made Addison their model, though several have copied his mere diction with happy effect, none has been able to catch the tone of his pleasantry. In the World, in the Connoisseur, in the Mirror, in the Lounger, there are numerous papers written in obvious imitation of his Tatlers and Spectators. Most of those papers have some merit; many are very lively and amusing; but there is not a single one which could be passed off as Addison's on a critic of the smallest perspicacity.

LORD MACAULAY: Addison.

But that which chiefly distinguishes Addison from Swift, from Voltaire, from almost all the other great masters of ridicule, is the grace, the nobleness, the moral purity, which we find even in his merriment. Severity, gradually hardening and darkening into misanthropy, character izes the works of Swift. The nature of Voltaire was, indeed, not inhuman; but he venerated nothing. Neither in the masterpieces of art nor in the purest examples of virtue, neither in the Great First Cause nor in the awful enigma of the grave, could he see anything but subjects for drollery. The more solemn and august the theme, the more monkeylike was his grimacing and chattering. The mirth of Swift is the mirth of Mephistopheles; the mirth of Voltaire is the mirth of Puck. If, as Soame Jenyns oddly im agined, a portion of the happiness of seraphim and just men made perfect be derived from an exquisite perception of the ludicrous, their mirth must surely be none other than the mirth of Addison; a mirth consistent with tender compassion for all that is frail, and with profound reverence for all that is sublime. Nothing great, nothing amiable, no moral duty, no doctrine of natural or revealed religion, has ever been associated by Addison with any degrading idea. His humanity is without a parallel in literary history. The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it. No kind of power is more formidable than the power of making men ridiculous; and that power Addison possessed in boundless measure. How grossly that power was abused by Swift and by Voltaire is well known. But of Addison it may be confidently affirmed that he has blackened no man's character, nay, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find in all the volumes which he has left us a single taunt which can be called ungenerous or unkind. Yet he had detractors whose malignity might have seemed to justify as terrible a revenge as that which men not superior to him in genius wreaked on Bettesworth and on Franc de Pompignan. He

was a politician; he was the best writer of his party; he lived in times of fierce excitement, in times when persons of high character and station stooped to scurrility such as is now practised only by the basest of mankind. Yet no provocation and no example could induce him to return railing for railing.

LORD MACAULAY: Addison.

Of the service which his Essays rendered to

morality it is difficult to speak too highly. It is true that, when the Tatler appeared, that age of outrageous profaneness and licentiousness which followed the Restoration had passed away. Jeremy Collier had shamed the theatres into something which, compared with the excesses of Etherege and Wycherley, might be cailed decency. Yet there still lingered in the public mind a pernicious notion that there was some connection between genius and profligacy, between the domestic virtues and the sullen formality of the Puritans. That error it is the glory of Addison to have dispelled. He taught the nation that the faith and the morality of Hale and Tillotson might be found in company with wit more sparkling than the wit of Congreve, and with humour richer than the humour of Vanbrugh. So effectually, indeed, did he retort on vice the mockery which had recently been directed against virtue, that, since his time, the open violation of decency has always been considered among us as the mark of a fool. And this revolution, the greatest and most salutary ever effected by any satirist, he accomplished, be it remembered, without writing one personal lampoon.

In the early contributions of Addison to the Tatler his peculiar powers were not fully exhibited. Yet, from the first, his superiority to all his coadjutors was evident. Some of his later Tatlers are fully equal to anything that he ever wrote. Among the portraits we most admire Tom Folio, Ned Softly, and the Political Up:

holsterer. The proceedings of the Court of Honour, the Thermometer of Zeal, the story of the Frozen Words, the Memoirs of the Shilling, are excellent specimens of that ingenious and lively species of fiction in which Addison excelled all men. There is one still better paper of the same class. But though that paper, a hundred and thirty-three years ago, was probably thought as edifying as one of Smalridge's sermons, we dare not indicate it to the squeamish readers of the nineteenth century.

LORD MACAULAY: Addison.

We say this of Addison alone; for Addison is the Spectator. About three-sevenths of the works are his; and it is no exaggeration to say that his worst essay is as good as the best essay of any of his coadjutors. His best essays ap. proach near to absolute perfection; nor is their excellence more wonderful than their variety. His invention never seems to flag; nor is he ever under the necessity of repeating himself, or of wearing out a subject. There are no dregs in his wine. He regales us after the fashion of that prodigal nabob who held that

As

there was only one good glass in a bottle. soon as we have tasted the first sparkling foam of a jest, it is withdrawn, and a fresh draught of nectar is at our lips. On the Monday we have an allegory as lively and ingenious as Lucian's Auction of Lives; on the Tuesday, an Eastern apologue as richly coloured as the Tales of Scherezade; on the Wednesday, a character described with the skill of La Bruyère; on the Thursday, a scene from common life equal to the best chapters in the Vicar of Wakefield; on the Friday, some sly Horatian pleasantry on shows; and on the Saturday, a religious medifashionable follies, on hoops, patches, or puppettation which will bear a comparison with the finest passages in Massillon.

It is dangerous to select where there is so much that deserves the highest praise. We will wishes to form a just notion of the extent and venture, however, to say that any person who variety of Addison's powers will do well to read at one sitting the following papers: the two Visits to the Abbey, the Visit to the ExVision of Mirza, the Transmigrations of Pug change, the Journal of the Retired Citizen, the the Monkey, and the Death of Sir Roger de Coverley.

The least valuable of Addison's contributions

The

to the Spectator are, in the judgment of our age, his critical papers. Yet his critical papers are always luminous, and often ingenious. very worst of them must be regarded as creditable to him, when the character of the school in which he had been trained is fairly considered. The best of them were much too good for his readers. In truth, he was not so far behind our generation as he was before his own. No essays in the Spectator were more censured and derided than those in which he raised his voice against the contempt with which our fine old ballads were regarded, and showed the scoffers that the same gold which, burnished

and polished, gives lustre to the Eneid and the

of Chevy Chace. Odes of Horace, is mingled with the rude dross

LORD MACAULAY: Addison.

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The last moments of Addison were perfectly serene. His interview with his son-in-law is universally known. See," he said, "how a Christian can die!" The piety of Addison was, in truth, of a singularly cheerful character. The feeling which predominates in all his devotional writings is gratitude. God was to him the allwise and all-powerful friend who had watched over his cradle with more than maternal tenderness; who had listened to his cries before they could form themselves in prayer; who had preserved his youth from the snares of vice; who had made his cup run over with worldly blessings; who had doubled the value of those blessings by bestowing a thankful heart to enjoy them and dear friends to partake them; who had rebuked the waves of the Ligurian gulf, had purified the autumnal air of the Campagna, and had restrained the avalanches of Mount Cenis. Of the Psalms, his favourite was that which

18

ADMIRATION.—ADVERSITY.—ADVERTISEMENTS.

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The passions always move, and therefore (consequently) please: for without motion there can be no delight; which cannot be considered but as an active passion. When we view those elevated ideas of nature, the result of that view is admiration, which is always the cause of pleasure. DRYDEN.

There is a pleasure in admiration; and this is that which properly causeth admiration: when we discover a great deal in an object which we understand to be excellent, and yet we see (we know not how much) more beyond that, which our understandings cannot fully reach and comprehend. TILLOTSON.

ADVERSITY.

A remembrance of the good use he had made of prosperity contributed to support his mind under the heavy weight of adversity which then lay upon him. ATTERBURY.

He that has never known adversity is but half acquainted with others, or with himself. Constant success shows us but one side of the world. For, as it surrounds us with friends, who will tell us only our merits, so it silences those enemies from whom alone we can learn our defects. COLTON: Lacon.

In the struggles of ambition, in violent competitions for power or for glory, how slender the partition between the widest extremes of fortune, and how few the steps and apparently slight the circumstances which sever the throne from the prison, the palace from the tomb! So Tibni died, says the sacred historian, with inimitable simplicity, and Omri reigned.

ROBERT HALL:

Sermon for the Princess Charlotte. Concerning deliverance itself from all adversity we use not to say, "Men are in adversity," whensoever they feel any small hindrance of their welfare in this world; but when some notable affliction or cross, some great calamity or trouble, befalleth them. HOOKER.

Adversity borrows its sharpest sting from our impatience. BISHOP HORNE.

As adversity leads us to think properly of our state, it is most beneficial to us. DR. S. JOHNSON.

All is well as long as the sun shines and the fair breath of heaven gently wafts us to our own purposes. But if you will try the excellency and feel the work of faith, place the man in a persecution; let him ride in a storm; let his bones be broken with sorrow, and his eyelids loosed with sickness; let his bread be dipped with tears, and all the daughters of music be brought low; let us come to sit upon the margin of our grave, and let a tyrant lean hard upon our fortunes and dwell upon our wrong; let the storm arise, and the keels toss till the cordage crack, or that all our hopes bulge under us, and descend into the hollowness of sad misfortunes. JEREMY TAYLOR.

Some kinds of adversity are chiefly of the character of TRIALS and others of DISCIPLINE. But Bacon does not advert to this difference, nor say anything at all about the distinction between discipline and trial; which are quite different in themselves, but often confounded together. By "discipline" is to be understood anything-whether of the character of adversity or not-that has a direct tendency to produce improvement, or to create some qualification that did not exist before; and by trial, anything that tends to ascertain what improvement has been made, or what qualities exist. Both effects may be produced at once; but what we speak of is, the proper character of trial, as such, and of discipline, as such.

WHATELY:
Annot. on Bacon's Essay, Of Adversity.

ADVERTISEMENTS.

But, to consider this subject in its most ridicu lous lights, advertisements are of great use to the vulgar. First of all, as they are instruments of ambition. A man that is by no means big enough for the Gazette may easily creep into the advertisements; by which means we often see an apothecary in the same paper of news with a plenipotentiary, or a running footman with an ambassador. An advertisement from Piccadilly goes down to posterity with an article from Madrid, and John Bartlett of Goodman'sfields is celebrated in the same paper with the Emperor of Germany. Thus the fable tells us that the wren mounted as high as the eagle, by getting upon his back.

ADDISON: Tatler, No. 224.

The advertisements which appear in a public journal take rank among the most significant indications of the state of society of that time and place. The wants, the wishes, the means, the employments, the books, the amusements, the medicines, the trade, the economy of do

mestic households, the organization of wealthy establishments, the relation between masters and servants, the wages paid to workmen, the rents paid for houses, the prices charged for commodities, the facilities afforded for travelling, the materials and fashions for dress, the furniture and adornments of houses, the varieties and systems of schools, the appearance and traffic of towns,-all receive illustration from such sources. It would be possible to write a very good social history of England during the last two centuries from the information furnished by advertisements alone.

Household Words.

ADVICE.

rosive; reading good books of morality is a little flat and dead; observing our faults in others is sometimes improper for our case; but the best receipt (best, I say, to work and best to take) is the admonition of a friend. It is a strange thing to behold what gross errors and extreme absurdities many (especially of the greater sort) do commit for want of a friend to tell them of them, to the great damage both of their fame and fortune.

LORD BACON :

Essay XXVIII.: Of Friendship.

To take advice of some few friends is ever honourable; for lookers-on many times see more than gamesters; and the vale best discovereth the hill. There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals, which was wont to be magnified. That that is, is between suThe truth of it is, a woman seldom asks ad-perior and inferior, whose fortunes may comvice before she has bought her wedding clothes. prehend the one the other. When she has made her own choice, for form's sake she sends a congé d'élire to her friends.

If we look into the secret springs and motives that set people at work on these occasions, and put them upon asking advice which they never intend to take, I look upon it to be none of the least, that they are incapable of keeping a secret which is so very pleasing to them. A girl longs to tell her confidante that she hopes to be married in a little time; and, in order to talk of the pretty fellow that dwells so much in her thoughts, asks her very gravely what she would advise her to do in a case of so much difficulty. ADDISON: Spectator, No. 475.

There is nothing which we receive with so much reluctance as advice. We look upon the man who gives it us as offering an affront to our understanding, and treating us like children or idiots. We consider the instruction as an implicit censure, and the zeal which any one shows for our good on such an occasion as a piece of presumption or impertinence. The truth of it is, the person who pretends to advise does, in that particular, exercise a superiority over us, and can have no other reason for it but that, in comparing us with himself, he thinks us defective either in our conduct or our understanding. For these reasons, there is nothing so difficult as the art of making advice agreeable; and indeed all the writers, both ancient and modern, have distinguished themselves among one another according to the perfection at which they have arrived in this art. How many devices have been made use of to render

this bitter potion palatable! Some convey their instructions to us in the best chosen words,

others in the most harmonious numbers; some in points of wit, and others in short proverbs.

ADDISON: Spectator, No. 512. Counsel is of two sorts; the one concerning manners, the other concerning business: for the first, the best preservative to keep the mind in health is the faithful admonition of a friend. The calling of a man's self to a strict account is a medicine sometimes too piercing and cor

LORD BACON: Essay L.: Of Suitors. Whoever is wise, is apt to suspect and be diffident of himself, and upon that account is willing to "hearken unto counsel;" whereas the foolish man, being in proportion to his folly full of himself, and swallowed up in conceit, will seldom take any counsel but his own, and for that very reason because it is his own.

J. BALGUY.

Advice, however earnestly sought, however ardently solicited, if it does not coincide with a man's own opinions, if it tends only to investigate the improprieties, to correct the criminal excesses of his conduct, to dissuade from a continuance and to recommend a reformation of his errors, seldom answers any other purpose than to put him out of humour with himself, and to alienate his affections from the adviser. RT. HON. GEORGE CANNING: Microcosm, No. 18.

We ask advice, but we mean approbation.
COLTON: Lacon.

mies-seldom safe to instruct, even our friends.
It is always safe to learn, even from our ene-

COLTON: Lacon.

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he who is offended at advice was ignorant of It is by no means necessary to imagine that the fault, and resents the admonition as a false

charge; for perhaps it is most natural to be enraged when there is the strongest conviction of our own guilt. While we can easily defend our character, we are no more disturbed by an accusation than we are alarmed by an enemy whom we are sure to conquer, and whose attack, therefore, will bring us honour without danger. But when a man feels the reprehension of a friend seconded by his own heart, he is easily heated into resentment and revenge, either because he hoped that the fault of which he was conscious had escaped the notice of others; or that his friend

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