Of all those who celebrated in verse the advent of the Whig régime the one who attained the most genuinely classical manner was undoubtedly Addison. His contemporaries at Oxford ranked him with Edmund, commonly called "Rag" Smith, as the best Latin poet in the University. He valued himself on his skill in the art, and Smith, his rival, declared hyperbolically that his Pax Gulielmi Auspiciis Europae Reddita was "the best Latin poem since the Æneid." It is indeed a performance of which Vida would not have been ashamed, and in its graceful humour, its mastery of Virgilian diction, and the rhythmical flow of its hexameters, it recalls the Ludus Scacchia of that accomplished poet. Addison describes in it the public sense of relief and gladness after the Treaty of Ryswick; the rustic ploughing up the deserted trenches, and wondering at the rich harvests springing out of a soil fertilised with blood; the travellers straying over famous battlefields, and pointing out where Ormond received his wound or Cutts planted the British standard in the midst of a storm of bullets and cannon-balls. With a touch of real poetry, he likens this to mortals creeping forth from their shelter to gaze upon the landscape ruined in the legendary war between the Giants and the Gods, wondering to see how the rivers had changed their courses, and looking in vain for the familiar scenery of mountain and wood. He paints the soldier returning to his native village, and amazing it with tales, wondrous as those told by the Argonauts, "of moving accidents by flood and field." The story of the little Duke of Gloucester playing at soldiers before the King, properly belonging to the year 1695, is utilised for the description of the King landing at Margate; and the bonfires and fireworks of London are exalted in a mock-heroic style, which anticipates the delicate satire in The Spectator on the fans or patches of the "fair sex

En procul attonitam video clarescere noctem
Fulgore insolito! ruit undique lucidus imber,
Flagrantesque hyemes; crepitantia sidera passim
Scintillant, totoque pluunt incendia caelo.

Nec minus id terris Vulcanus mille figuras
Induit, ignivomasque feras, et fulgida monstra,
Terribiles visu formas! hic membra Leonis
Hispida mentitur, tortisque comantia flammis
Colla quatit, rutilasque jubas: hic lubricus Anguem
Ludit, subsiliens, et multo sibilat igne.

In a Latin address to Montague prefixed to this composition, Addison alludes Addison alludes to the English poems written in honour of the Peace, which, he says, are so bad as almost to make the reader regret the occasion that called them forth; and he pretends, with much dexterity, that he shrinks from offering his patron anything written in vernacular verse, because the latter is such a master in this art as to drive all rivals out of the field. Four years later, while still professing his awe for Montague's poetical genius, he overcame his own politic bashfulness. The Chancellor of the Exchequer (soon afterwards created Lord Halifax) had obtained for him in 1699 a pension of £300 from the King to enable him to travel on the Continent; and to Halifax in 1701 Addison accordingly addressed his admirable Letter from Italy. In this poem almost every verse shows the refining influence which study of the classics had exercised on his taste and judgment. Genuine feeling breathes through the lines in which he imparts to his correspondent his enthusiasm in the midst of scenes that everywhere awaken memory and imagination :—

For wheresoe'er I turn my ravished eyes,
Gay gilded scenes and shining prospects rise.
Poetic fields encompass me around,
And still I seem to tread on classic ground.
For here the muse so oft her harp has strung,
That not a mountain rears its head unsung :
Renowned in verse each shady thicket grows,
And every stream in heavenly numbers flows.

It is poetry, he says, that enables the Tiber to scorn the Danube and the Nile, physically so superior to it; and in this thought he finds an opportunity for one of those complimentary turns which he could always use with exquisite skill:

So high the deathless muse exalts her theme;
Such was the Boyne, a poor inglorious stream,
That in Hibernian vales obscurely strayed,
And unobserved in wild mæanders played,
Till by your lines and Nassau's sword renowned,
Its rising billows through the world resound,
Where'er the hero's god-like acts can pierce,
Or where the fame of an immortal verse.
O, could the muse my ravished breast inspire
With warmth like yours, and raise an equal fire,
Unnumbered beauties in my verse should shine,
And Virgil's Italy should yield to mine!

The gratitude felt by Addison to Montague may excuse the partiality of this criticism, particularly in view of the excellence of the flattery. But in his admiration for Italian art, on the one hand, and for English liberty, on the other, there is no fiction; and into the following very fine passage the spirit of the English Whig breathes a noble animation :—

How has kind heaven adorned the happy land,
And scattered blessings with a wakeful hand!
But what avail her unexhausted stores,
Her blooming mountains and her sunny shores,
With all the gifts that heaven and earth impart,
The smiles of nature, and the charms of art,
While proud oppression in her valley reigns,
And tyranny usurps her happy plains?
The poor inhabitant beholds in vain

The reddening orange and the swelling grain :
Joyless he sees the growing oils and wines,
And in the myrtle's fragrant shade repines,
Starves, in the midst of nature's bounty curst,
And in the loaden vineyard dies of thirst.

Oh Liberty, thou goddess heavenly bright,
Profuse of bliss, and pregnant with delight!
Eternal pleasures in thy presence reign,
And smiling plenty leads thy wanton train;
Eased of her load subjection grows more light,
And poverty looks cheerful in thy sight.
Thou mak'st the gloomy face of nature gay,

Giv'st beauty to the sun, and pleasure to the day.
Thee, goddess, thee Britannia's isle adores,
How has she oft exhausted all her stores,
How oft in fields of death thy presence sought,
Nor thinks the mighty prize too dearly bought.

VOL. V

D

On foreign mountains may the sun refine
The grape's soft juice, and mellow it to wine,
With citron groves adorn a distant soil,
And the fat olive swell with floods of oil:
We envy not the warmer clime that lies

In ten degrees of more indulgent skies,

Nor at the coarseness of our heaven repine,

Though o'er our heads the frozen planets shine.

'Tis Liberty that crowns Britannia's isle,

And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile. As the battle of Blenheim was the culminating point. in what may be fairly called the foreign policy of the Whigs, so is The Campaign (1704) the greatest achievement of Whig panegyrical poetry. This poem, viewed as a composition, is justly ranked below the Letter from Italy, but in estimating its merits it is fair to take into account the difficulties with which Addison had to contend. The Campaign was written to Godolphin's order: if it had not been in the first place a political panegyric it would have failed of its purpose. Joseph Warton styled it a "Gazette in rhyme," and then, being called to account for his phrase by Johnson, tried to attenuate his meaning.1 Yet Addison himself justifies Warton's criticism in his concluding lines:

Thus would I fain Britannia's wars rehearse
In the smooth records of a faithful verse,
That, if such numbers can o'er time prevail,
May tell posterity the wondrous tale.
When actions unadorned are faint and weak,
Cities and countries must be taught to speak;
Gods may descend in factions from the skies,
And rivers from their oozy beds arise;
Fiction may deck the truth with spurious rays,
And round the hero cast a borrowed blaze;
Marlborough's exploits appear divinely bright,
And proudly shine in their own borrowed light;
Raised of themselves, their genuine charms they boast,
And those who paint them truest praise them most.

Since “praise" was the order of the day, it followed that a “chronicle,” as Steele justly calls the poem,2 executed with as much decorative colour and ingenuity as the facts 1 Essay on Pope. See also his edition of Pope's Works (1797), iv. 181. 2 Tatler, No. 43.

themselves allowed, was the form of art called for by the occasion. Marlborough's march across Flanders and Germany to the Danube did not admit of any great variety of description, nor was it easy to distinguish the character of one battle from that of another. Still, these difficulties were met by the poet with great dexterity, and his narrative of events is so agreeably relieved by addresses to places and persons, as well as by simile and allusion, that a high level of flight is maintained throughout the poem. The fine apostrophe to Marshal Tallard may be taken as a good specimen of really "classical" English verse :—

Unfortunate Tallard! O, who can name

The pangs of rage, and sorrow, and of shame,
That with mixed tumult in thy bosom swelled,
When first thou saw'st thy bravest troops repelled,
Thine only son pierced with a deadly wound,
Choked in his blood, and gasping on the ground,
Thyself in bondage by the victor kept!
The chief, the father, and the captive wept.
An English muse is touched with generous woe,
And in the unhappy man forgets the foe!
Greatly distrest! thy loud complaints forbear;
Blame not the turns of fate and chance of war;
Give thy brave foes their due, nor blush to own
The fatal field by such brave leaders won,
The field, whence famed Eugenio bore away
Only the second honours of the day.

Addison communicated his gift of manly plainness in panegyrical expression to some of his Whig disciples among the minor poets, and especially to Thomas Tickell (1686-1740), whose eulogy of Rosamund, Verses on the Prospect of Peace and, above all, Elegy on Addison justly maintain his reputation as a poet. The first-named performance has perhaps not that uniform excellence which Johnson's praises seem to imply, who says that among the innumerable poems of the same kind, it will be hard to find one with which it needs to fear a comparison.' But its opening lines, at least, are admirable in their unadorned simplicity:

1 Lives of the Poets: Tickell.