The eleven years extending from 1693, or his twenty-first year, to 1704, when he was in his thirty-second, may be set down as the first stage of his life as a man of letters. During this period, embracing no profession, and not as yet entangled in official business, he was a student, an observer, and an author; and though the literary works which he then produced are not those on which his permanent celebrity rests, they gained for him in his own day a high reputation. He had at first intended to become a clergyman; but his talents having attracted the attention of leading statesmen belonging to the Whig party, he was speedily diverted from his earlier views by the countenance which these men bestowed on him. His first patron (to whom he seems to have been introduced by Congreve) was Charles Montague, afterwards Earl of Halifax, who was himself a dabbler in literature, and a protector of literary men; and he became known afterwards to the accomplished and excellent Somers. While both of them were quite able to estimate justly his literary merits, they had regard mainly to the services which they believed him capable of rendering to the nation or the party; and accordingly they encouraged him to regulate his pursuits with a view to public and official employment. For a considerable time, however, he was left to his own resources, which cannot have been otherwise than scanty.

His first literary efforts were poetical. In 1693 a short poem of his, addressed to Dryden, was inserted in the third volume of that veteran writer’s Miscellanies. The next volume of this collection contained his translation, in tolerable heroic couplets, of “all Virgil’s Fourth Georgic, except the story of Aristaeus.” Two and a half books of Ovid were afterwards attempted; and to his years of early manhood belonged also his prose Essay on Virgil’s Georgics, a performance which hardly deserved, either for its style or for its critical excellence, the compliment paid it by Dryden, in prefixing it to his own translation of the poem. The most ambitious of those poetical assay-pieces is the Account of the Greatest English Poets, dated April 1694, and addressed affectionately to Sacheverell, the poet’s fellow-collegian, who afterwards became so notorious in the party-quarrels of the time. This piece, spirited both in language and in versification, is chiefly noticeable as showing that ignorance of old English poetry which was then universal. Addison next, in 1695, published one of those compositions, celebrating contemporary events, and lauding contemporary great men, on which, during the half-century that succeeded the Revolution, there was wasted so much of good writing and of fair poetical abihty. His piece, not very meritorious even in its own class, was addressed “To the King,” and commemorates the campaign which was distinguished by William’s taking of Namur. Much better than the poem itself are the introductory verses to Somers, then lord keeper. This production, perhaps intended as a remembrancer to the writer’s patrons, did not at once produce any obvious effect: and we are left in considerable uncertainty as to the manner in which about this time Addison contrived to support himself. He corresponded with Tonson the bookseller about projected works, one of these being a Translation of Herodotus. It was probably at some later time that he purposed compiling a Dictionary of the English Language. In 1699 a considerable collection of his Latin verses was published at Oxford, in the Musoe Anglicanae. These appear to have interested some foreign scholars; and several of them show curious symptoms of his characteristic humour.

In the same year, his patrons, either having still no office to spare for him, or desiring him to gain peculiarly high qualifications for diplomatic or other important business, provided for him temporarily by a grant, which, though bestowed on a man of great merit and promise, would not pass unquestioned in the present century. He obtained, on the recommendation of Lord Somers, a pension of £300 a year, designed (as Addison himself afterwards said in a memorial addressed to the crown) to enable him “to travel, and qualify himself to serve His Majesty.” In the summer of 1699 he crossed into France, where, chiefly for the purpose of learning the language, he remained till the end of 1700; and after this he spent a year in Italy. In Switzerland, on his way home, he was stopped by receiving notice that he was to be appointed envoy to Prince Eugene, then engaged in the war in Italy. But his Whig friends were already tottering in their places; and, in March 1702, the death of King William at once drove them from power and put an end to the pension. Indeed Addison asserted that he never received but one year’s payment of it, and that all the other expenses of his travels were defrayed by himself. He was able, however, to visit a great part of Germany, and did not reach Holland till the spring of 1703. His prospects were now sufficiently gloomy: he entered into treaty, oftener than once, for an engagement as a travelling tutor; and the correspondence in one of these negotiations has been preserved. Tonson had recommended him as the best person to attend in this character the son of the Duke of Somerset, commonly called “The Proud.” The duke, a profuse man in matters of pomp, was economical in questions of education. He wished Addison to name the salary he expected; this being declined, he announced, with great dignity, that he would give a hundred guineas a year; Addison accepted the munificent offer, saying, however, that he could not find his account in it otherwise than by relying on his Grace’s future patronage; and his Grace immediately intimated that he would look out for some one else. Towards the end of 1703 Addison returned to England.

Works which he composed during his residence on the Continent were the earliest that showed him to have attained maturity of skill and genius. There is good reason for believing that his tragedy of Cato, whatever changes it may afterwards have suffered, was in great part written while he lived in France, that is, when he was about twenty-eight years of age. In the winter of 1701, amidst the stoppages and discomforts of a journey across the Mount Cenis, he composed, wholly or partly, his Letter from, Italy, which is by far the best of his poems, if it is not rather the only one among them that at all justifies his claim to the poetical character. It contains some fine touches of description, and is animated by a noble tone of classical enthusiasm. While in Germany he wrote his Dialogues on Medals, which, however, were not published till after his death. These have much liveliness of style, and something of the gay humour which the author was afterwards to exhibit more strongly; but they show little either of antiquarian learning or of critical ingenuity. In tracing out parallels between passages of the Roman poets and figures or scenes which appear in ancient sculptures, Addison opened the easy course of inquiry which was afterwards prosecuted by Spence; and this, with the apparatus of spirited metrical translations from the classics, gave the work a likeness to his account of his travels. This account, entitled Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, &c., he sent home for publication before his own return. It wants altogether the interest of personal narrative: the author hardly ever appears. The task in which he chiefly busies himself is that of exhibiting the illustrations which the writings of the Latin poets, and the antiquities and scenery of Italy, mutually give and receive. Many of the landscapes are sketched with great liveliness, and there are not a few strokes of arch humour. The statistical information is very meagre; nor are there many observations on society; and politics are no further meddled with than to show the moderate liberality of the writer’s own opinions.

With the year 1704 begins a second era in Addison’s life, which extends to the summer of 1710, when his age was thirty-eight. This was the first term of his official career; and, though very barren of literary performance, it not only raised him from indigence, but settled definitively his position as a public man. His correspondence shows that, while on the Continent, he had been admitted to confidential intimacy by diplomatists and men of rank; immediately on his return he was enrolled in the Kitcat Club, and brought thus and otherwise into communication with the gentry of the Whig party. Although all accounts agree in representing him as a shy man, he was at least saved from all risk of making himself disagreeable in society, by his unassuming manners, his extreme caution, and that sedulous desire to oblige, which his satirist Pope exaggerated into a positive fault. His knowledge and ability were esteemed so highly, as to confirm the expectations formerly entertained of his usefulness in public business; and the literary fame he had already acquired soon furnished an occasion for recommending him to public employment. Though the Whigs were out of office, the administration which succeeded them was, in all its earlier changes, of a complexion so mixed and uncertain, that the influence of their leaders was not entirely lost. Not long after Marlborough’s great victory at Blenheim, it is said that Godolphin, the lord treasurer, expressed to Lord Halifax a desire to have the great duke’s fame extended by a poetical tribute. Halifax seized the opportunity of recommending Addison as the fittest man for the duty; stipulating, we are told, that the service should not be unrewarded, and doubtless satisfying the minister that his protegé possessed other qualifications for office besides dexterity in framing heroic verse. The Campaign, the poem thus written to order, was received with extraordinary applause; and it is probably as good as any that ever was prompted by no more worthy inspiration. It has, indeed, neither the fiery spirit which Dryden threw into occasional pieces of the sort, nor the exquisite polish that would have been given by Pope, if he had stooped to make such uses of his genius; but many of the details are pleasing; and in the famous passage of the Angel, as well as in several others, there is even something of force and imagination.

The consideration covenanted for by the poet’s friends was faithfully paid. A vacancy occurred by the death of another celebrated man, John Locke; and in November 1704, Addison was appointed one of the five commissioners of appeal in Excise. The duties of the place must have been as light for him as they had been for his predecessor; for he continued to hold it with all the appointments he subsequently received from the same ministry. But there is no reason for believing that he was more careless than other public servants in his time; and the charge of incompetency as a man of business, which has been brought so positively against him, cannot possibly be true as to this first period of his official career. Indeed, the specific allegations refer exclusively to the last years of his life; and, if he had not really shown practical ability in the period now in question, it is not easy to see how he, a man destitute alike of wealth, of social or fashionable liveliness, and of family interest, could have been promoted, for several years, from office to office, as he was, till the fall of the administration to which he was attached. In 1706 he became one of the undersecretaries of state, serving first under Hedges, who belonged to the Tory section of the Government, and afterwards under Lord Sunderland, Marlborough’s son-in-law, and a zealous follower of Addison’s early patron, Somers. The work of this office, however, like that of the commissionership, must often have admitted of performance by deputy. For in 1707, the Whigs having become stronger, Lord Halifax was sent on a mission to the Elector of Hanover; and, besides taking Vanbrugh the dramatist with him as king-at-arms, he selected Addison as his secretary. In 1708 he entered Parliament, sitting at first for Lostwithiel, but afterwards for Malmesbury, which, being six times elected, he represented from 1710 till his death. Here unquestionably he did fail. What part he may have taken in the details of business we are not informed; but he was always a silent member, unless it be true that he once attempted to speak and sat down in confusion. In 1709 Lord Wharton, the father of the notorious duke, having been named lord-lieutenant of Ireland, Addison became his secretary, receiving also an appointment as keeper of records. This event happened only about a year and a half before the dismissal of the ministry; and the Irish secretary would seem to have transacted the business of his office chiefly in London. But there are letters showing him to have made himself acceptable to some of the best and most distinguished persons in Dublin; and he escaped without having any quarrel with Swift, his acquaintance with whom had begun some time before. In the literary history of Addison those seven years of official service are almost a blank, till we approach their close. He defended the Government in an anonymous pamphlet on The Present State of the War; he united compliments to the all-powerful Marlborough with indifferent attempts at lyrical poetry in his opera of Rosamond; and, besides furnishing a prologue to Steele’s comedy of The Tender Husband, he perhaps gave some assistance in the composition of the play. Irish administration, however, allowed it would seem more leisure than might have been expected. During the last few months of his tenure of office Addison contributed largely to the Tatler. But his entrance on this new field does nearly coincide with the beginning of a new section in his history.

Even the coalition-ministry of Godolphin was too Whiggish for the taste of Queen Anne; and the Tories, the favourites of the court, gained, both in parliamentary power and in popularity out of doors, by a combination of lucky accidents, dexterous management, and divisions and doubledealing among their adversaries. The real failure of the prosecution of Addison’s old friend Sacheverell, completed the ruin of the Whigs; and in August 1710 an entire revolution in the ministry had been completed. The Tory administration which succeeded kept its place till the queen’s death in 1714, and Addison was thus left to devote four of the best years of his life, from his thirty-ninth year to his forty-third, to occupations less lucrative than those in which his time had recently been frittered away, but much more conducive to the extension of his own fame, and to the benefit of English literature. Although our information as to his pecuniary affairs is very scanty, we are entitled to believe that he was now independent of literary labour. He speaks, in an extant paper, of having had (but lost) property in the West Indies; and he is understood to have inherited several thousand pounds from a younger brother, who was governor of Madras. In 1711 he purchased, for £10,000, the estate of Bilton, near Rugby,—the place which afterwards became the residence of Mr Apperley, better known by his assumed name of “Nimrod.”

During those four years he produced a few political writings. Soon after the fall of the ministry, he contributed five numbers to the Whig Examiner, a paper set up in opposition to the Tory periodical of the same name, which was then conducted by the poet Prior, and afterwards became the vehicle of Swift’s most vehement invectives against the party he had once belonged to. These are certainly the most ill-natured of Addison’s writings, but they are neither lively nor vigorous. There is more spirit in his allegorical pamphlet, the Trial and Conviction of Count Tariff.

But from the autumn of 1710 till the end of 1714 his principal employment was the composition of his celebrated Periodical Essays. The honour of inventing the plan of such compositions, as well as that of first carrying the idea into execution, belongs to Richard Steele, who had been a school-fellow of Addison at the Charter-house, continued to be on intimate terms with him afterwards, and attached himself with his characteristic ardour to the same political party. When, in April 1709, Steele published the first number of the Tatler, Addison was in Dublin, and knew nothing of the design. He is said to have detected his friend’s authorship only by recognising, in one of the early papers, a critical remark which he remembered having himself communicated to Steele. He began to furnish essays in a few weeks, assisted occasionally while he held office, and afterwards wrote oftener than Steele himself. He thus contributed in all, if his literary executor selected his contributions correctly, more than GO of the 271 essays which the work contains. The Tatler exhibited, in more ways than one, symptoms of being an experiment. The projector, imitating the news-sheets in form, thought it prudent to give, in each number, news in addition to the essay; and there was a want, both of unity and of correct finishing, in tho putting together of the literary materials. Addison’s contributions, in particular, are in many places as lively as anything he ever wrote; and his style, in its more familiar moods at least, had been fully formed before he returned from the Continent. But, as compared with his later pieces, these are only what the painter’s loose studies and sketches are to the landscapes which he afterwards constructs out of them. In his invention of incidents and characters, one thought after another is hastily used and hastily dismissed, as if he were putting his own powers to the test, or trying the effect of various kinds of objects on his readers; his most ambitious flights, in the shape of allegories and the like, are stiff and inanimate; and his favourite field of literary criticism is touched so slightly, as to show that he still wanted confidence in the taste and knowledge of the public.

The Tatler was dropped at the beginning of 1711, but only to be followed by the Spectator, which was begun on the 1st day of March, and appeared every week-day till the 6th day of December 1712. It had then completed the 555 numbers usually collected in its first seven volumes. Addison, now in London and unemployed, co-operated with Steele constantly from the very opening of the series; and the two, contributing almost equally, seem together to have written not very much less than five hundred of the papers. Emboldened by the success of their former adventure, they devoted their whole space to the essays. They relied, with a confidence which the extraordinary popularity of the work fully justified, on their power of exciting the interest of a wide audience by pictures and reflections drawn from a field which embraced the whole compass of ordinary life and ordinary knowledge, no kind of practical themes being positively excluded except such as were political, and all literary topics being held admissible, for which it seemed possible to command attention from persons of average taste and information. A seeming unity was given to the undertaking, and curiosity and interest awakened on behalf of the conductors, by the happy invention of the Spectator’s Club, in which Steele is believed to have drawn all the characters. The figure of Sir Roger de Coverley, however, the best even in the opening group, is the only one that was afterwards elaborately depicted; and Addison was the author of all the papers in which his oddities and amiabilities are so admirably delineated. To him, also, the Spectator owed a very large share of its highest excellences. His were many, and these the most natural and elegant, if not the most original, of its humorous sketches of human character and social eccentricities, its good-humoured satires on ridiculous features in manners, and on corrupt symptoms in public taste; these topics, however, making up a department in which Steele was fairly on a level with his more famous coadjutor. But Steele had neither learning, nor taste, nor critical acuteness sufficient to qualify him for enriching the series with such literary disquisitions as those which Addison insinuated so often into the lighter matter of his essays, and of which he...