regarded as an ornament to ability as it had been in the case of Shaftesbury or the Marquis of Halifax, and a typical social figure of the time would be not Etherege, but Dr. Garth. Public opinion was becoming operative, set in its course by such men as Jeremy Collier, and of all the distinguished figures of that age, it is Addison who was the most markedly sensitive to it. It was indeed to this very sensitiveness that he owed his distinction.

I

V

How far Addison was before his time may be judged by the attitude towards him of the eighteenth century, on the whole one of admiration, yet shot with doubt,✓ tinged with a curious uneasiness amounting almost to dislike. It is as though in face of so astonishing a reputation no one quite dared tell the truth. Fielding, it is true, is frank enough in his poor opinion, but Horace Walpole's derogatory utterances appeared only in his private letters, and even Johnson seemed afraid to express his real view, though in the Life he did not overmuch mince certain incidents. In conversation the sturdy Doctor fought against the middle-class worship of a character he could not altogether like. One day when discussing Addison's behaviour to Steele in the matter of his debt, Boswell" mentioned to him that some people thought Mr. Addison's character was so pure that the fact, though true, ought to have been suppressed. He saw no reason for this. If nothing but the bright side of characters should be shewn, we should sit down in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in any thing.'" 3

2

The Victorians felt none of this despondency; they

A Journey from this World to the Next, viii.

e. g. To Mr. West, 2nd Oct. 1740.

To Sir H. Mann, 14th May 1759.

To Rev. W. Cole, 12th July 1778.

3 Boswell's Life, iv. 50, 1781.

were, so to speak, à la hauteur. For Miss Aikin, Addison was a hero who could do no wrong, make no mistake. She rejected the story about Steele; it was not true to nature. Macaulay went a step farther. With his schoolboy enthusiasm and lack of subtlety, with his black is black and Whig is probably white, he justified, even praised the action Dr. Johnson could not condone and Miss Aikin would not accept. For he worshipped Addison barely this side idolatry. Indeed, what else could he do? Addison's whole theory of life, his sense of the good, the beautiful, the true ', his air of condescending superiority towards women, insufferable to us, fitted so exactly into the Victorian's conception of what things should be. His very method was identical with theirs; like them he believed hypocrisy was "to be preferred to open impiety". Thackeray, to be sure, seems to have been a little uncomfortable, if we have read correctly between the lines of Esmond-but for him also the current philosophy proved too strong; he was forced to come to bless, even if he stayed to wriggle.

But to arrive at a clear view of Addison is no easy matter; there remains always something puzzling, even baffling about him. In his life there are such a number of little points, trifling events, each in themselves of small significance, that adding up to a body of unexplained material make it seem as though somewhere there had been deliberate and consistent distortion of facts, or at least burking of issues. He has always been a trial to biographers. Tyers, prefacing his essay, remarked sadly :

If Mr. Addison . . . had been the Plutarch of his own life (for Plutarch enters into a thousand interesting particulars, and brings his hero into the closet) it must

have made an entertaining volume; though the modesty and diffidence that accompanied him through every scene of life would have prevented him from enlarging on a multitude of things to his own glory and the disadvantage of others. For on many occasions he chose

rather to hide himself than to be seen." I

It is, indeed, his extraordinary gift for secrecy, almost amounting to a craze for mystification, that makes him so inviting a study. In truth he was no Rousseau-he never gave himself away. Montaigne, he shrewdly observed, would have passed for a much better man ' had he kept his own counsel'. He would profit by the example: there was no quality in the mind of man more useful than discretion, and his history, his reputation. after death, are triumphs of a life regulated on this precept, and on those others which typical Victorians did their best worthily to inherit.

1

P

I

EDUCATION

I

School and University

ONE day in or about the year 1682 a ten-year-old boy, his tear-stained face white and anxious, slipped into the woods about Amesbury. He had been naughty at school; and, in dread of punishment, his whole being shrinking in agony at the thought of degradation before his schoolfellows, he was running away to hide. He felt prepared to face anything rather than the mortification of mockery, of being publicly humbled, and for two or three days fed on nuts and berries, sleeping in a hollow tree. At last he was found and brought home to his father, the Reverend Lancelot Addison, rector of Milston near Salisbury.

A year or so later the school at Lichfield was about to break up, and the boys, in a state of ebullience proper to the occasion, conceived the idea of barring the master out of his own house-a school prank in those days not uncommon. And the very same boy who had been so timid at Amesbury was the leader of this bold sally, having been entered at the school when his father transferred to Lichfield as Dean of the Cathedral.

"If these stories be true," Macaulay wrote, "it would be curious to know by what moral discipline so mutinous and enterprising a lad was transformed into the gentlest and most modest of men." These stories are apocryphal,

and they seem to reveal an ambition far from modest, a desire indeed to lead, to count for something among his fellows, coupled with an almost morbid fear of failure and a horror of being made to look ridiculous. But rather than invoke the dubious effects of moral discipline, would it not be just as curious to know whether the child were not after all father to the man? We might even find his days bound to each other by the most natural unity.

After a short period at the Charterhouse he went at the age of fifteen to Queen's College, Oxford, a studious, timid boy, ignorant of the world but conversant with the classics. And the change from the quiet cloisters of his school to the Oxford of 1687 may well have been disturbing, for one college of the University was actually in dogged rebellion against its King, that divinely appointed monarch to whom only two years before the antient foundations had vowed enthusiastic, not to say abject, submission.

At this time James, riding ever more recklessly the prancing horse of Popery, flushed with his success in Ireland-where Tyrconnel was serving majesty's religious purposes with as much zeal as he had in earlier days ministered to its amours thought he could now stretch his converting hand towards the centres of learning. Baffled at Cambridge, where a trembling ViceChancellor, John Pechell, had from behind a Bardolphian nose, and in the face of the terrific Jeffreys himself, maintained it was more fitting to grant honours to Moslems than to Papish priests, he turned his eyes towards the sister University. Oxford, with its tradition of being "farther behind the age than any other portion of the British people ", seemed to offer a fair field. But

1 Grammont, ix.

2

Burnet, 1686; Macaulay, Hist. II. viii; Pepys, 5th April 1667.