ADDISON AND THE MODERN ESSAY.1 I. If, lifted on the wings of imagination, we should transport ourselves in space some 3,000 miles and in time some 200 years, and go back to the London of the days of Good Queen Anne, we should find it, not perhaps in essentials, but certainly in many outward aspects, very different from the London of to-day. Accustomed as we are to the bignesses of the twentieth century, we should doubtless consider it, from the point of view both of area and of population, somewhat insignificant in comparison with the immense city with which we are now acquainted, and which is by no means flattered when it is called the Modern Babylon. At the same time, however, we should find the London of the early eighteenth century seething with activity, busy and bustling with varied forms of life, full of its own importance, and, with its three-quarters of a million of inhabitants, well on its way to be the metropolis of the greatest empire that the world has ever seen. We should, indeed, be made painfully aware of many drawbacks. The streets were narrow, ill-paved, and ill-lighted, and were infested by gangs of desperadoes and bullies, who made personal violence a practice and not infrequently plied highway robbery as a trade. Sanitation, in the modern sense, was not understood, and great heaps of filth lay about in exposed situations. To avoid surroundings so noisome the citizens did their travelling as much as possible on the River Thames, which, with its fleet of tilt-boats and barges, still remained the great thoroughfare for transportation of passengers and This article and its continuation, which will appear in the next number of the Bulletin, consist, in substance, of a lecture delivered October 19, 1911, in the series of public lectures organized by the administration of the Catholic University of America. 2 goods. Smarting from the recent application of Jeremy Collier's lash, the stage wore a semblance of decency; but in society an aftermath of the scandalously profligate period of the Restoration and of the license of the court of Charles II. was clearly discernible in manners that were decidedly coarse and in morals that were somewhat lax. Superstition was widespread. Drunkenness, boxing, and duelling were common. Cock-fighting and the baiting of badger, bull, and bear were pursued with zest. Card-playing and lotteries and rash speculation had votaries in every walk of life. Relying on the neverfailing asset of human credulity, the beauty-doctor and the quack vendor of nostrums and cure-alls flourished in the land. Not much fault on the score of aesthetics could be found with the dress in vogue among gentlemen: whether the same could be said of the attire of the ladies is at least open to question. In those distant days Englishmen of position wore among other things-knee-breeches and full-bottomed wigs, and Englishwomen of quality went about arrayed in monstrously hooped petticoats and tricked out with party patches dotted here and there on their foreheads and on their painted and powdered cheeks. A busy, fussy, and, especially among the upper classes, a somewhat frivolous life was led. There were, naturally, many topics of interest to engage the attention of those dwellers in London town; but the one outstanding subject that never seemed to pall was the war. In the spring of the year of grace 1709—the date to which our attention is to be first particularly directed—the War of the Spanish Succession had for seven years been waged with varying fortune on sea and land—in Spain, in Portugal, in France, in the Netherlands, in Bavaria, in Sardinia, in Minorca, in Italy, in Savoy. The student of the various phases of that memorable struggle has his attention held at every turn by famous historical characters-Prince Eugene and the Earl of Peterborough; Sir George Rooke, Sir Cloudesley Shovel, and 2 Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage was published in 1698, and his Dissuasive from the Play-house, in a Letter to a Person of Quality, in 1703. the Count de Toulouse; Marshal Berwick and Marshal Boufflers; Villars and Jean Cavalier; Stanhope and Staremberg; Tallard and Vauban and Vendôme. The great captain, who never fought a battle that he did not win and never laid siege to a walled city that he did not take, who paralyzed the marshals and set at nought the engineers of the grand monarque, was in 1709 still lord of the ascendant. Handsome, courteous, debonair, diplomatic, ambitious of power, greedy of pelf, sordid indeed, if not corrupt, in money matters, John Churchill, first. Duke of Marlborough, Prince of Mindelheim in the Holy Roman Empire, captain-general of the English troops at home and abroad, and master-general of the ordnance, was still actively engaged in that series of military manoeuvres which made all Europe thrill, which saved Vienna, which impoverished France, which forced Louis XIV. to sue in vain for peace, and caused French mothers to hush their wailing infants to sleep by invoking the dread name of Malbrook. This nonpareil commander had already won undying fame by his great victories of Blenheim,3 Ramillies, and Oudenarde, and in the September of this year his glory was still further to be increased, although at a terrible cost of lives, on the murderous field of Maplaquet. A Tory politician, who from many mixed motives, dominant among which was Self, had adopted a Whig policy, Marlborough was maintained in the proud and profitable position of commander-in-chief of the armies of the Grand Alliance by the intrigues of his clever, scheming, beautiful, shrewish wife, and by the Whig faction which then ruled, and for a year or so longer was to continue to rule, the roast in England. 6 4 5 With this war and with this commander, and with the Whig party which supported both, are inextricably intertwined the names of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Addison had obtained his first start in life from the Whigs, and he got his second chance by celebrating the victory of Blenheim in a poem, made to order, called The Campaign (December, 1704), 'August 13, 1704. *July 11, 1708. 6 *May 23, 1706. in which, in a simile that has been famous for two centuries, he likened Marlborough to an angel that rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm. As soon as he had penned that image his fortune was made, for in England this was the age of gold for literary men. He was in turn appointed a Commissioner of Appeal in Excise (1704), Under-Secretary of State (1706), Secretary to Lord Halifax on a mission to the Elector of Hanover (1707), member of Parliament (1708), Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and keeper of the records in Dublin Castle (1709), Secretary to the lords justices (1714), Chief Secretary for Ireland a second time (1714), a Commissioner of Trade and Plantations (1716), and finally a principal Secretary of State (1717), retiring from the last-mentioned office with a pension of £1,500 a year (1718). Some of his prose writings, too, are directly concerned with the war and with the policy that dictated its continuance. Such are his pamphlet, The Present State of the War, and the Necessity of an Augmentation (1707), his paper the Whig Examiner (1710), and his pamphlet The Trial and Conviction of Count Tariff (1713). In his opera of Rosamond (1707) he paid compliments to Marlborough in some rather indifferent lyrical verse. Nor must it be forgotten that his first contribution to the Tatler is linked up with the war in that quietly and quaintly humorous style which was to be the distinctive feature of so many of his future essays. Steele was almost a life-long friend of Addison's. They were of the same age, they were boys together at the Charterhouse School, they were at Oxford together, and their names are indissolubly and forever associated together with the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian. A more pronounced and ardent and belligerent Whig even than Addison, Steele owed practically all the success that he attained in public life to his Whig connection. He disappeared from the University in 1694 without taking a degree, and entered the army as a private soldier in the Life Guards. Luckily he dedicated his poem, The Procession, written on the death of Queen Mary, to Lord Cutts, Colonel of the Coldstream Guards, and through the influence of that intrepid soldier he rose from the ranks to a commission, and was finally gazetted captain in Lord Lucas's regiment of fusiliers. It is doubtful if he saw any active service: somehow, despite the duel in which he participated as principal, we do not seem naturally to associate Steele with the idea of a fighting man. Recommended by Addison to the patronage of Lords Halifax and Sunderland, leaders of the Whigs, Steele was appointed in 1706 Gentleman Waiter to his royal highness, Prince George of Denmark, consort of Queen Anne; in the following year he received the then important post of Gazetteer or editor of the London Gazette; and in 1710 he was made commissioner of stamps. In common with Addison he suffered for his principles during the ascendency of the Tories from 1710 to 1714; but when George I. came to the throne Steele was made a justice of the peace, deputylieutenant of Middlesex, and surveyor of the royal stables; he received the lucrative post of patentee of Drury Lane theatre and Governor of the Royal Company of Comedians; he was made a knight; and, on the suppression of the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, he was appointed a commissioner of forfeited Scotch estates. Many of his writings are fiercely partisan. When Marlborough was dismissed on December 31, 1711, Steele wrote An Englishman's Thanks to the Duke of Marlborough; even in the pages of the professedly non-political Guardian he could not entirely refrain from political controversy; and two of his publications, The Englishman and The Crisis, were, in the heyday of his political opponents, officially declared to be "scandalous and seditious libels highly reflecting upon her Majesty, upon the nobility, clergy, gentry, and universities of this kingdom," and by formal vote of 245 to 152 their author was, on March 12, 1714, expelled from membership of the House of Commons. From active politicians and busy men of affairs of the type of Addison and Steele one would not ordinarily be inclined to expect any startling new departure in literature; and yet it was precisely with these two men that there originated a class of publication-the Periodical Essay-which both had in itself |