five years younger than Addison, was already fighting a fatal consumption. For a while there was Harrison, Swift's friend, 66 a pretty little fellow, with a great deal of wit, good sense and good-nature", but who failed when he tried to carry on The Tatler: and we catch a glimpse of little Thomson', who was an excellent youth'. There was also Colonel Brett, whose inclusion. in the clique would seem to need some explanation, for he alone of them all had no literary pretensions. On the other hand he had " an uncommon share of social wit, and a handsome person, with a sanguine bloom in his complexion ".3 As successful in seducing the minds of men as he was in overcoming the hearts of women, his sprightly sallies of venial flattery were such that no man left his company without feeling cleverer than he had before, for none could escape the spell of his amicable adulation'. And lastly, more especially as Tickell's college friend, there was Edward Young, "very pleasant in conversation", who was to expiate twenty years of gaiety by writing his Night Thoughts in the dull seclusion of the rectory at Welwyn.

All these names save Steele's would be obscure were it not for the happy chance that caused Dr. Johnson to give some of them an immortality their poetry could not earn for them. He wrote their lives. Perhaps, however, Carey's name lives independently, through Sally in Our Alley'. But it must be admitted it was a second-rate gathering to form the social milieu of a man like Addison, when he might have seen more of Berkeley, or cultivated the acquaintance of Newton, Bentley, or Wren. One never hears of him with Vanbrugh, and Congreve he only met at strange dinner

1 Stella, 13th Oct. 1710. 3 Cibber, xi.

• Addison to Philips, 25th April 1710. 4 Boswell, iv. 58.

tables. We have seen what happened with Swift, but in any case Harley's pocket philosopher could not have frequented the Whig enclave at Button's. Addison, however, seems deliberately to have avoided the society of his semblables, and to have chosen this mediocre gathering of men nearly all younger than himself, where, owing to Steele's deference, he was far removed from intellectual competition.

""Tis amazing to me, I own, that with so much of the gentleman, such a general knowledge of books and men, such a skill in the learned as well as modern languages, he can take so much delight as he does in the company of such persons as I have described. . . I can think of but one reason for it. . . his vanity; which makes him. desirous of being considered as the head of the people he consorts with. A man to love praise; yet be content to draw it from such contaminated springs!"

So Miss Clarissa Harlowe to her friend Miss Howe, the subject Lovelace; but they are the thoughts that naturally arise when we muse upon Addison and his little senate. They must be followed out if we are to understand his character.

Addison was above all things sensitive to the opinions of his fellow men; this formed the basis of his social philosophy. The first words on the title page of this essay, though not his, typify his attitude. He could not be negligent of what any one thought of him.

"A man's first care ", he wrote, "should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart; his next, to escape the censures of the world: If the last interferes with the former, it ought to be entirely neglected; but otherwise there cannot be a greater satisfaction to an honest mind, than to see those approbations which it gives itself

I Letter LXVI.

seconded by the applauses of the public: a man is more sure of his conduct, when the verdict which he passes on his own behaviour is thus warranted and confirmed by the opinion of all that know him." 1

That is one part of the philosophy of the qu'en dira-ton?; it is sound worldly common sense, but it has its obvious limitations, and its dangers. It is rarely that a keen sensitiveness to the censures of the world does not in some measure affect the dictates of the heart.

But there was more than the desire to escape the censure of the world in Addison's choice of companions; there was the intense need to ensure its applause, to experience the 'secret pride' of being approved, and, as well, the wish to lead its opinions. For there can be no doubt that Pope's famous satire is bottomed on truth. Addison loved to give laws, to see the foolish face of praise, and although these are human attributes, he carried them so far as to be content to swim a sprat among minnows. In his case the social philosophy of the Victorians overreached itself: even his contemporaries saw through it. "I love good creditable acquaintance ; I love to be the worst of the company ", Swift wrote, and the allusion seems plain; "I am not of those that say, for want of company, welcome trumpery." 2

Pope recorded the facts, but facts are always susceptible of being wrongly stressed, and maybe there was something deeper than vanity in Addison's behaviour here, something even more fundamental. It occasionally happens with men in whom the desire to dominate has from one cause or another not been gratified-as was the case with Addison from reasons partly social, partly subjective— that their ambition is transformed into a craving to be loved. And at Button's Addison found that intimacy, Stella, 17th May 1711.

I

1 Spectator, 122.

that immediate, prejudiced sympathy, which usually seek in the society of one or two women, a society so impossible to him. There he was regarded as one to be treated tenderly, to be protected and compassionated as well as worshipped, to be cherished in his never-admitted weaknesses, so that all his energies might go to swell his genius. Such a view tallies with his writings; and if this attitude too is vanity, it is a form on which no one need be severe.

Apart from this it might be argued that after all Addison was free to choose the company in which he felt at ease; that he was at liberty to say with Gibbon, "I am too modest, or too proud, to rate my own value by that of my associates ", and that " after the morning has been occupied by the labours of the library, I wish to unbend rather than exercise my mind ". But it was not exactly to unbend that Addison frequented Button's. He went to experience that "kind of grandeur and respect, which the meanest and most insignificant part of mankind endeavour to procure in the little circle of friends and acquaintance". It was just there, far from the possibility of criticism, that he liked to exercise his mind nowhere else could he do it. Like Pythagoras, he felt wisdom was only to be spoken among the perfect.

He felt happy, safe from the dubious judgements of the world, in that coterie of charming, handsome, and on the whole intelligent young men, who paid him so much homage, and the flattery of imitation. He needed imitators. Under that influence he burgeoned, expanded, blossomed. His talk, spangled with quotations from the Latin poets, lively with gently sarcastic hits at the fair sex, rich with unexceptionable speculations' on the

6

soul, gushed forth under the stimulus of wine and adoration. Perhaps, as Tupper advised the Victorians, he made discretion guard his asking, and discretion. aid his answer', but sometimes surely he gave loose to every passion and every thought that was uppermost '.1 Certainly never, it is universally agreed, was there such a splendid conversationalist, such a stylist in spoken prose. If he needed to be a king before he could be a wizard, what matter so long as the wizardry was there? And so, plied with the cup by Steele, backed by Budgell, who 'rain'd sacrificial whisperings in his ear', encouraged by the devoted eyes of little Philips and the approving smile of Tickell, he would divagate for hours at a stretch, and the fewer and the more select the listeners, the better the talk would be. The stiff kind of silence' that enveloped him when a stranger was present seemed a myth. The clock of St. Paul's Church would strike two, three, or even four, and still the calm voice would go on, invoking Plato and Aristotle to prove the immortality of the soul, Boileau and Bouhours to witness the necessity for correctness, Socrates to ensample the nobility of man. And as the company walked out into the dim light of early morning there seemed a spell of beauty cast over the meanest of life's activities, an assurance of the goodness of existence, a warmth in the heart which even the chill of dawn could not immediately dispel.

Sometimes, no doubt, they read each other their work-some scraps of prose, perhaps, destined for a Tatler, Spectator, or Guardian; or some poems-Tickell's or Hughes's latest verses in praise of Addison, or Philips's latest pastoral. And when they came to read poetry the voice of the reader would change, soften, become un