regarded merely as a collection of stately and eloquent orations, threaded on a narrative, a Thucydides in verse. That the popularity of the Cato should have sensibly declined is far from strange, and many reasons might be assigned to account for it. We must content ourselves with barely stating two. The first may be found in the complete revolution which has taken place in the character of the English drama and in the public taste which governs it. That Addison's tragedy, whatever may be its faults, is immeasurably superior as a work of art to the overwrought passion and vapid sentiment which night after night crowd Burton's and Wallack's, no one can well deny; but even if its heavy declamation were lightened and its long discourses abridged, if its pathos were intensified and Booth himself upon the boards, yet we hazard little in the assertion that no shrewd manager could be induced to bring it out. It would still be a drug in the book-seller's stalls. For even then Addison would be but an imperfect servant of the greatest of masters, and here the master himself has failed. It is a reproach on the times, and yet it is true, that Shakespeare himself can not run against Bourcicault, that Hamlet is empty whilst the Octoroon is packed, that the Merchant of Venice must be withdrawn to make room for the American Cousin. Indeed we may sum up the experience of our day, in the single sentence, "the success of your play is in inverse ratio to its excellence;" so that if the Cato were a masterpiece, which it certainly is not, the case would be more hopeless still. In the second place, it is more than probable that the Cato was overestimated at the time when it first appeared. It was with great reluctance, as every reader knows, that its author was induced to hazard a representation, against the very earnest advice of not a few of his friends, and among them of Pope. The success of its first presentation is well known-how an obscure and farfetched analogy, never thought of till after the play had been written, was instantly seized; how the Whigs applauded because it hit the Tories and the Tories because it hit Marlborough, till its triumph was assured and complete. This incident appears laughably absurd to us now, yet it is beyond question that the Cato owed very much of its popularity to this incident alone. But it is not upon the Cato, nor in fact upon any of his poetical writings, that even the most ardent admirers of Addison have in any considerable degree sought to rest his fame. He is scarcely better known to us as a poet than as a statesman, and as a statesman he is scarcely known to us at all. And yet it is doubtful if even the name of Boswell is more intimately associated with the memoirs of Johnson, than the name of Addison with that series of periodical essays, of which, though not the originator, he was always the soul, which Johnson himself did not scruple to imitate a few years later in the Rambler and the Idler, and which continued for nearly two years, to charm with their mingled humor and wit, with the kindly keenness of their satire and the classic beauty of their style, every literary coterie from the Thames to the Tweed. Nor is the character of Boswell more perfectly preserved to us in his life of his master than the character of Addison in the same memorable papers. As we bend over them the walls of the club-room, like the magician's tent in the Arabian tale, seem to push out on every side, across a thousand leagues of ocean, across a hundred and fifty years. We seem to be sitting in the fortunate circle at the Kit-Cat, round that slight and graceful form which we know so well and love so dearly, to see the placid features lighted up with their own peculiar smile and to hear the gentle voice whose tones enchant us like a spell. A mind so original and so natively genial must of necessity leave its impress on his writings, and even if in his introductory sketch of the Spectator he had not unconsciously painted himself, some at least of the qualities which he there acknowledges might have been discovered with little difficulty in the subsequent papers. We do not need to be reminded in the taciturn philosopher who, during a residence of eight years at the University, "scarce uttered the quantity of a hundred words, and who could not remember that he ever spoke three sentences together in his whole life," of the retiring modesty of the illustrious author to whom the philosopher himself owes all his immortality. For there is not a page in his writings which does not borrow from this beautiful trait something of its peculiar charm. Nor did it less pervade and beautify his conversation, when he shrank from dinner parties and crowded companies, to sit down apart with some congenial acquaintance and, as he himself expressed it, "think aloud." It rendered him not less cautious in the advancement of his opinions than timid in the publication of his works. We look in vain in his most elaborate articles, in the criticisms of Milton and the celebrated papers on the Pleasures of the Imagination, for anything of the determined dogmatism and the confident assurance, which mark the writings as well as the life of Johnson In graceful and delicate humor and wit, Addison was inferior to. none of his contemporaries. Indeed Macaulay has pronounced him superior to them all. And surely in nothing else does the Spectator evince more clearly its distinguished pre-eminence over the Tatler, to which he contributed but rarely, and the Englishman, to which he did not contribute at all, on the one hand, and over the Rambler and the Idler on the other. His humor is not the reckless merriment of the mountebank, but the occasional playfulness of the serious man—as genial round the Yule log on a Christmas eve, as on the pages where it sparkles and foams for all time. His satire is not the snarl of the misanthropist, but the affectionate reproof of the lover of mankind; it is sharp but not barbed. The delicate irony with which he ridicules the popular fancies and follies of the day-making the small wit ashamed of his pun and the fine lady of her party patch-making merry to-day over a commode eighteen inches in height and to-morrow over a hoop almost large enough to fill a pew-reminds us of nothing so vividly as of those elegant satires in which Horace raised his voice in vain against the vices and corruptions of the last days of the Roman Republic. But not in wit nor in humor, in satire nor criticism, lies that which is to us the one inestimable charm of the Spectator. The critical papers, far they were in advance of their own times, are almost commonplace in ours. The satirical papers have done their work. There may be times, rare indeed, but possible to all of us, when the gayer society of the club-room becomes dull. Even Sir Andrew Freeport may sometimes grow tedious and Will Honeycomb may talk too long. But no such dimness is on those bright pages which introduce us to the old Worcestershire baronet, with his cheerful temper and his large heart, with his delicious self-complacency and his rare humanity; to the landlord who "stands up at church when everybody else is upon his knees to count the congregation and see if any of his tenants are missing," and to the Justice who settles the disputes that are referred to him by gravely announcing that "much might be said upon both sides." In his portrait of Sir Roger de Coverley and his friends-the venerable chaplain who was better acquainted with backgammon than with Greek, and the entertaining game keeper who "made a Mayfly to a miracle and furnished the whole country with angle rods"Addison discloses some of the finest qualities of his mind and some of the purest instincts of his character. The scenes in which they are severally introduced to us—the visit of the Spectator to Coverley Hall, the parish church and the assizes, of Sir Roger to Spring Gardens, the abbey and the theater-are not singular nor striking. They are such as doubtless occurred every day to some two actual Englishmen, at the beginning of the last century. For it is on these pages as on no others that the England of Queen Anne lives again. And yet our minds instinctively attest the truth of the judgment which Macaulay has pronounced, that "while such events can hardly be said to form a plot, yet they are related with such truth, such grace, such wit, such humor, such pathos, such knowledge of the human heart, such knowledge of the ways of the world, that they charm us on the hundredth perusal." Nor are we prepared to quarrel with Horace Walpole for saying that since Falstaff, there is nothing in literature to rival Sir Roger de Coverley. We have spoken of the Spectator as Addison; nor could we do otherwise without reversing the verdict of five generations. We have somewhere seen a wise remark of Dr. Johnson, that "while Addison wrote half the Spectator and there was all England to write the other half, yet not half of this other half is good." Of Steele, in particular, it is undoubtedly true that he was a writer of eminent ability, purer than Dryden, wittier than Congreve; nay, the distance is probably not greater between Addison and Steele, than between Steele and every other essayist of his time. But from the public voice to private judgment there is no appeal, and the public voice, in unmistakable tones, has assigned to Addison all the glory of their common work. It is probable that this glory is heightened by the novelty of the enterprise, and by the skill with which it met the wants and rebuked the vices of the times. The Tatler was an experiment. It only discovered or at most it only partially explored the broad field of which the Spectator took immediate and full possession. The task which confronted the new periodical was indeed disheartening. It found society rotten in its corruption, and it undertook with the principles of a more than human morality to lift and restore it. It found literature loathsome with the trail of Wycherly and Swift, and it sought to purify that literature itself and the corrupt taste of the community that clamored for and applauded it. And it is not too much to say that it accomplished both. For underneath the learning of Addison, underneath his refinement and his literary culture, there lay an earnest christian purpose. If he brought again to light the beauties which age had covered up in the old English ballads, he brought to light also the strong love of virtue, which licentiousness had covered up in English hearts. He taught the sneering courtier that it was possible to be a christian without ceasing to be a gentleman, and the frowning Puritan that it was possible to be a gentleman without ceasing to be a christian. Though among the first wits and not the last satirists of his day, he never employed his wit to ridicule morality or his satire to caricature the Church. But that deep religious fervor which made his death so memorable, is equally manifest in all his writings; not less in his wittiest rebukes of the foibles and vices of court and people, than in the religious meditations of Saturday morning, which Macaulay assures us will bear a comparison with the finest passages in Massillon. It is now a hundred and fifty years since, in that venerable mansion, still standing in the midst of London, whose ancient turrets and carved and gilded chambers carry us back to the days of William and the Revolution, of Cromwell and the Long Parliament, the "gentle pen" of the brilliant essayist was laid aside and the loving heart of the christian philanthropist grew still. Within this period many new names have arisen and many revolutions have occurred in the world of letters. The Times has taken the place of the Spectator beside the coffee on the breakfast table of Milord, and Pickwick has almost driven Sir Roger from the stage. But when we look back over the long line of illustrious authors who, since the reign of Elizabeth, have carried the literature of England to a more than Roman, a more than Grecian fame, we may find greater orators and scholars, greater poets and satirists, many whose works are more widely read, a few whose memories are more widely cherished, than his, whose literary career we have been reviewing; but in all that splendid company we shall look in vain for one in whom the candid critic has found so much to praise and the malignant critic so little to condemn, who has affected a more complete and permanent reform in literature and in morals, and who has left to posterity a more faultless example, a more enduring memory, or a more stainless name. E. B. C. Dream-Doomed. A maid upon the lonely beach, All in the silent, summer day, With wide blue eyes fixed far away, All day she wanders by the sea; What are the ways of men to her, |