It is proper, however, to remark that Miss Aikin has committed the error, very pardonable in a lady, of overrating Addison's classical attainments. In one department of learning, indeed, his proficiency was such as it is hardly possible to overrate. His knowledge of the Latin poets, from Lucretius and Catullus down to Claudian and Prudentius, was singularly exact and profound. He understood them thoroughly, en Dean of Magdalene College. The that he was distinguished among his young scholar's diction and versifica- fellow students by the delicacy of his tion were already such as veteran feelings, by the shyness of his manners, professors might envy. Dr. Lancas- and by the assiduity with which he ter was desirous to serve a boy of such often prolonged his studies far into the promise; nor was an opportunity long night. It is certain that his reputation wanting. The Revolution had just for ability and learning stood high. taken place; and nowhere had it been Many years later, the ancient doctors hailed with more delight than at Mag- of Magdalene continued to talk in their dalene College. That great and opu- common room of his boyish compolent corporation had been treated by sitions, and expressed their sorrow that James, and by his Chancellor, with an no copy of exercises so remarkable had insolence and injustice which, even in been preserved. such a Prince and in such a Minister, may justly excite amazement, and which had done more than even the prosecution of the Bishops to alienate the Church of England from the throne. A president, duly elected, had been violently expelled from his dwelling a Papist had been set over the society by a royal mandate: the Fellows who, in conformity with their oaths, had refused to submit to this usurper, had been driven forth from their quiet cloistered into their spirit, and had the ters and gardens, to die of want or to live on charity. But the day of redress and retribution speedily came. The intruders were ejected the venerable House was again inhabited by its old inmates learning flourished under the rule of the wise and virtuous Hough; and with learning was united a mild and liberal spirit too often wanting in the princely colleges of Oxford. In consequence of the troubles through which the society had passed, there had been no valid election of new members during the year 1688. In 1689, therefore, there was twice the ordinary number of vacancies; and thus Dr. Lancaster found it easy to procure for his young friend admittance to the advantages of a foundation then generally esteemed the wealthiest in Europe. : finest and most discriminating perception of all their peculiarities of style and melody; nay, he copied their manner with admirable skill, and surpassed, we think, all their British imitators who had preceded him, Buchanan and Milton alone excepted. This is high praise; and beyond this we cannot with justice go. It is clear that Addison's serious attention during his residence at the university, was almost entirely concentrated on Latin poetry, and that, if he did not wholly neglect other provinces of ancient literature, he vouchsafed to them only a cursory glance. He does not appear to have attained more than an ordinary acquaintance with the political and modern writers of Rome; nor was his own Latin prose by any means equal to his Latin verse. His knowledge of Greek, though doubtAt Magdalene Addison resided du-less such as was, in his time, thought ring ten years. He was, at first, one of those scholars who are called Demies, but was subsequently elected a Fellow. His college is still proud of his name: his portrait still hangs in the hall; and strangers are still told that his favourite walk was under the elms which fringe the meadow on the banks of the Cherwell. It is said, and is highly probable, respectable at Oxford, was evidently less than that which many lads now carry away every year from Eton and Rugby. A minute examination of his works, if we had time to make such an examination, would fully bear out these remarks. We will briefly advert to a few of the facts on which our judgment is grounded. Great praise is due to the Notes | dison saw them, however, without rewhich Addison appended to his version calling one single verse of Pindar, of of the second and third books of the Callimachus, or of the Attic dramatists; Metamorphoses. Yet those notes, while but they brought to his recollection inthey show him to have been, in his own numerable passages of Horace, Juvedomain, an accomplished scholar, show nal, Statius, and Ovid. also how confined that domain was. They are rich in apposite references to Virgil, Statius, and Claudian; but they contain not a single illustration drawn from the Greek poets. Now, if, in the whole compass of Latin literature, there be a passage which stands in need of illustration drawn from the Greek poets, it is the story of Pentheus in the third book of the Metamorphoses. Ovid was indebted for that story to Euripides and Theocritus, both of whom he has sometimes followed minutely. But neither to Euripides nor to Theocritus does Addison make the faintest allusion; and we, therefore, believe that we do not wrong him by supposing that he had little or no knowledge of their works. The same may be said of the Treatise on Medals. In that pleasing work we find about three hundred passages extracted with great judgment from the Roman poets; but we do not recollect a single passage taken from any Roman orator or historian; and we are confident that not a line is quoted from any Greek writer. No person, who had derived all his information on the subject of medals from Addison, would suspect that the Greek coins were in historical interest equal, and in beauty of execution far superior to those of Rome. If it were necessary to find any further proof that Addison's classical knowledge was confined within narrow limits, that proof would be furnished by his Essay on the Evidences of Christianity. The Roman poets throw little or no light on the literary and historical questions which he is under the necessity of examining in that Essay. He is, therefore, left completely in the dark; and it is melancholy to see how helplessly he gropes his way from blunder to blunder. He assigns, as grounds for his religious belief, stories as absurd as that of the Cock-Lane ghost, and forgeries as rank as Ireland's Vortigern, puts faith in the lie about the Thundering Legion, is convinced that Tiberius moved the senate to admit Jesus among the gods, and pronounces the letter of Agbarus King of Edessa to be a record of great authority. Nor were these errors the effects of superstition; for to superstition Addison was by no means prone. The truth is that he was writing about what he did not understand. His travels in Italy, again, abound with classical quotations happily introduced; but scarcely one of those quotations is in prose. He draws more illustrations from Ausonius and Manilius than from Cicero. Even his notions of the political and military affairs of the Romans seem to be derived from poets and poetasters. Spots made memorable by events which have changed the destinies of the world, and which have been worthily recorded by great historians, bring to his mind only scraps of some ancient versifier. In the gorge of the Apennines he naturally remembers the hardships which Hannibal's army endured, and proceeds to cite, not the authentic narrative of Polybius, not the picturesque narrative of Livy, but the languid hexameters of Silius Italicus. On the banks of the Rubicon he never thinks of Plutarch's lively description, or of the stern conciseness of the Commentaries, or of those letters Miss Aikin has discovered a letter, to Atticus which so forcibly express the from which it appears that, while Adalternations of hope and fear in a sen-dison resided at Oxford, he was one of sitive mind at a great crisis. His only authority for the events of the civil war is Lucan. several writers whom the booksellers engaged to make an English version of Herodotus; and she infers that he must All the best ancient works of art at have been a good Greek scholar. We Rome and Florence are Greek. Ad-can allow very little weight to this arVOL. II. Y gument, when we consider that his | happiest touches in his Voyage to Lilfellow-labourers were to have been liput from Addison's verses. Let our Boyle and Blackmore. Boyle is re-readers judge. membered chiefly as the nominal au- "The Emperor," says Gulliver, "is thor of the worst book on Greek history taller by about the breadth of my nail and philology that ever was printed; than any of his court, which alone is and this book, bad as it is, Boyle was enough to strike an awe into the beunable to produce without help. Of holders." Blackmore's attainments in the ancient tongues, it may be sufficient to say that, in his prose, he has confounded an aphorism with an apophthegm, and that when, in his verse, he treats of classical subjects, his habit is to regale his readers with four false quantities to a page. It is probable that the classical acquirements of Addison were of as much service to him as if they had been more extensive. The world generally gives its admiration, not to the man who does what nobody else even attempts to do, but to the man who does best what multitudes do well. Bentley was so immeasurably superior to all the other scholars of his time that few among them could discover his superiority. But the accomplishment in which Addison excelled his contemporaries was then, as it is now, highly valued and assiduously cultivated at all English seats of learning. Every body who had been at a public school had written Latin verses; many had written such verses with tolerable success, and were quite able to appreciate, though by no means able to rival, the skill with which Addison imitated Virgil. His lines on the Barometer and the Bowling Green were applauded by hundreds, to whom the Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris was as unintelligible as the hieroglyphics on an obelisk. About thirty years before Gulliver's Travels appeared, Addison wrote these lines: "Jamque acies inter medias sese arduus infert Pygmeadum ductor, qui, majestate verendus, Incessuque gravis, reliquos supereminet omnes Mole gigantea, mediamque exsurgit in ulnam." The Latin poems of Addison were greatly and justly admired both at Oxford and Cambridge, before his name had ever been heard by the wits who thronged the coffeehouses round Drury-Lane theatre. In his twentysecond year, he ventured to appear before the public as a writer of English verse. He addressed some complimentary lines to Dryden, who, after many triumphs and many reverses, had at length reached a secure and lonely eminence among the literary men of that age. Dryden appears to have been much gratified by the young scholar's praise; and an interchange of civilities and good offices followed. Addison was probably introduced by Dryden to Congreve, and was certainly presented by Congreve to Charles Montague, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and leader of the Whig party in the House of Commons. At this time Addison seemed inclined Purity of style, and an easy flow of to devote himself to poetry. He pubnumbers, are common to all Addison's lished a translation of part of the Latin poems. Our favourite piece is fourth Georgic, Lines to King William, the Battle of the Cranes and Pygmies; and other performances of equal value, for in that piece we discern a gleam of that is to say, of no value at all. But the fancy and humour which many in those days, the public was in the years later enlivened thousands of habit of receiving with applause pieces breakfast tables. Swift boasted that which would now have little chance of he was never known to steal a hint ; and he certainly owed as little to his predecessors as any modern writer. Yet we cannot help suspecting that he borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, one of the obtaining the Newdigate prize or the Seatonian prize. And the reason is obvious. The heroic couplet was then the favourite measure. The art of arranging words in that measure, so that the lines may flow smoothly, that the accents may fall correctly, that the rhymes may strike the ear strongly, and that there may be a pause at the end of every distich, is an art as mechanical as that of mending a kettle or shoeing a horse, and may be learned by any human being who has sense enough to learn any thing. But, like other mechanical arts, it was gradually improved by means of many experiments and many failures. It was reserved for Pope to discover the trick, to make himself complete master of it, and to teach it to every body else. From the time when his Pastorals appeared, heroic versification became matter of rule and compass; and, before long, all artists were on a level. Hundreds of dunces who never blundered on one happy thought or expression were able to write reams of couplets which, as far as euphony was concerned, could not be distinguished from those of Pope himself, and which very clever writers of the reign of Charles the Second, Rochester, for example, or Marvel, or Oldham, would have contemplated with admiring despair. Ben Jonson was a great man, Hoole a very small man. But Hoole, coming after Pope, had learned how to manufacture decasyllable verses, and poured them forth by thousands and tens of thousands, all as well turned, as smooth, and as like each other as the blocks which have passed through Mr. Brunel's mill in the dockyard at Portsmouth. Ben's heroic couplets resemble blocks rudely hewn out by an unpractised hand, with a blunt hatchet. Take as a specimen his translation of a celebrated passage in the Æneid: "This child our parent earth, stirr'd up with spite Of all the gods, brought forth, and, as some write, She was last sister of that giant race That sought to scale Jove's court, right swift of pace, And swifter far of wing, a monster vast rise By choice or fate, these lonely shores to tread, No greater wonders east or west can boast Than yon small island on the pleasing coast. If e'er thy sight would blissful scenes explore, The current pass, and seek the further shore." Ever since the time of Pope there has been a glut of lines of this sort; and we are now as little disposed to admire a for being able to write his name. man for being able to write them, as But in the days of William the Third such versification was rare; and a rhymer who had any skill in it passed for a great poet, just as in the dark ages a person who could write his name passed for a great clerk. Accordingly, Duke, Stepney, Granville, Walsh, and others whose only title to fame was that they said in tolerable metre what might have been as well said in prose, or what was not worth saying at all, were honoured with marks of distinction which ought to be reserved for genius. With these Addison must have ranked, if he had not earned true and lasting glory by performances which very little resembled his juvenile poems. Dryden was now busied with Virgil, and obtained from Addison a critical preface to the Georgics. In return for this service, and for other services of the same kind, the veteran poet, in the postscript to the translation of the Eneid, complimented his young friend with great liberality, and indeed with more liberality than sincerity. He affected to be afraid that his own performance would not sustain a comparison with the version of the fourth Georgic, by "the most ingenious Mr. Addison of Oxford." "After his bees," added Dryden, "my latter swarm is scarcely worth the hiving." The time had now arrived when it was necessary for Addison to choose a calling. Every thing seemed to point | statesmen had a sincere love of letters, his course towards the clerical profes- it was not solely from a love of letsion. His habits were regular, his opi- ters that they were desirous to enlist nions orthodox. His college had large youths of high intellectual qualificaecclesiastical preferment in its gift, and tions in the public service. The Revoboasts that it has given at least one lution had altered the whole system of bishop to almost every see in England. government. Before that event the press Dr. Lancelot Addison held an honour- had been controlled by censors, and the able place in the Church, and had set Parliament had sat only two months in his heart on seeing his son a clergyman. eight years. Now the press was free, It is clear, from some expressions in and had begun to exercise unprecethe young man's rhymes, that his in- dented influence on the public mind. tention was to take orders. But Charles Parliament met annually and sat long. Montague interfered. Montague had The chief power in the state had passed first brought himself into notice by to the House of Commons. At such a verses, well timed and not contemptibly conjuncture, it was natural that liwritten, but never, we think, rising terary and oratorical talents should above mediocrity. Fortunately for him- rise in value. There was danger that self and for his country, he early quitted a Government which neglected such poetry, in which he could never have talents might be subverted by them. It attained a rank as high as that of was, therefore, a profound and enlightDorset or Rochester, and turned his ened policy which led Montague and mind to official and parliamentary bu- Somers to attach such talents to the siness. It is written that the ingenious Whig party, by the strongest ties both person who undertook to instruct Ras- of interest and of gratitude. selas, prince of Abyssinia, in the art of flying, ascended an eminence, waved his wings, sprang into the air, and instantly dropped into the lake. But it is added that the wings, which were unable to support him through the sky, bore him up effectually as soon as he was in the water. This is no bad type of the fate of Charles Montague and of men like him. When he attempted to soar into the regions of poetical invention, he altogether failed; but, as soon as he had descended from that ethereal elevation into a lower and grosser element, his talents instantly raised him above the mass. He became a distinguished financier, debater, courtier, and party leader. He still retained his fondness for the pursuits of his early days; but he showed that fondness not by wearying the public with his own feeble performances, but by discovering and encouraging literary excellence in others. A crowd of wits and poets, who would It was in the year 1699, when Addieasily have vanquished him as a com- son had just completed his twentypetitor, revered him as a judge and a seventh year, that the course of his life patron. In his plans for the encourage- was finally determined. Both the ment of learning, he was cordially sup-great chiefs of the Ministry were kindly ported by the ablest and most virtuous of his colleagues, the Lord Chancellor Somers. Though both these great It is remarkable that in a neighbouring country, we have recently seen similar effects follow from similar causes. The revolution of July 1830 established representative government in France. The men of letters instantly rose to the highest importance in the state. At the present moment most of the persons whom we see at the head both of the Administration and of the Opposition have been Professors, Historians, Journalists, Poets. The influence of the literary class in England, during the generation which followed the Revolution, was great, but by no means so great as it has lately been in France. For, in England, the aris tocracy of intellect had to contend with a powerful and deeply rooted aristocracy of a very different kind. France had no Somersets and Shrewsburies to keep down her Addisons and Priors. disposed towards him. In political opinions he already was what he continued to be through life, a firm, though |
