Deadly serious too were Addison's references to the fair sex, for though the paper was ostensibly political, he could not resist devoting about one-sixth part of it to his favourite theme. And now his irritation against the most beautiful part of the creation', ' entirely amiable', seems to have swelled to uncontrollable proportions, to have cried for outlet. He even abandoned his old measured method, his gentility of expression seems the right term. But if his anger made him sometimes descend to mere rough scolding, his indignation bore him up to a height of prose he had never before reached; his paragraphs really have a backbone. For example:

"It is indeed a melancholy thing to see the disorders of a household that is under the conduct of an angry stateswoman, who lays out all her thoughts upon the public, and is only attentive to find out miscarriages in the ministry. Several women of this town are so earnest in contending for hereditary right, that they wholly neglect the education of their own sons and heirs; and are so taken up with their zeal for the Church, that they cannot find time to teach their children the catechism." 1

To meet prose of that fiery quality one has to go back half a century to Dryden and the Epistle to the Whigs, or forward fifty odd years to Burke, and his splendid, irresistible diatribes in Thoughts on the Present Discontents.

This journal continued until June, when its occasion ignominiously faded away; and Addison plunged headlong into the most irretrievable action of his life, in a channel where safety cannot by any possible method be assured.

1 Freeholder, 26.

2

Victory

Ir must have surprised a world accustomed to regard Addison as a man who required too much perfection in the fair sex ever to love it, when, on the 3rd August 1716, he married the Countess of Warwick. It certainly does seem a little strange that a man so suspicious of the minds and the activities of women, regarding them as essentially childish, given to tiresome social errors, should have taken this leap. It smacks of indiscretion, even though Lady Warwick, mother of a grown-up son, would be unlikely to commit any superannuated folly.

Yet the strangeness does not end there; how, one cannot but ask, had Addison overcome not only his aversion, but his diffidence? "Les âmes tendres",

Stendhal has told us, 66 ' ont besoin de la facilité chez une femme pour encourager la cristallisation", and it does not appear that Lady Warwick had been at all easily persuaded. It is usually supposed that she was the 'mistress' he complained of having lost in 1711. Some have gone so far as to see in Sir Roger's remarks on widows Addison's own soft reproof to this feminine demurrer in love', and Tonson used to say that from the moment Addison entered the family he had determined upon that conquest. Nor is it easy to understand why she on her side yielded now, why now she overcame her reluctance to an iteration of nuptials', to use Lady Wishfort's phrase. For Addison was not growing more

The word in those days had not, of course, its modern specialized meaning.

attractive as the years went by; from placidity his features were passing to woodenness, the brightness of his eye was being dimmed, an awful austerity dwelt in the folds gathered about his mouth; and, to appeal once more to Stendhal, "Je doute fort que l'air Caton ait jamais occasionné de coup de foudre ". Perhaps at first she had thought the marriage beneath her, but that the wisdom, the disappointments, of advancing years, had shown her that after all that consideration was not of the first importance. In any case Addison's prospects were incomparably brighter than they had been five years earlier.

And he, on his part, perhaps wanted a relation more constant, more day by day, than his friendships: a woman might be less independent than a man; a wife would always be at hand. After all, the fair sex had been expressly designed for man's comfort, and now that Addison was, at forty-four, past the probable meridian of life, he felt, no doubt, that it was time to experience that conjugal state The Spectator had so often and so warmly advocated.

For his friends were scattering, and there were no new ones, except 'young Craggs', and he was everybody's friend, even Pope's. Budgell was in Ireland; Tickell, Addison's last under-secretary in that country, was forming new ties there; Swift at this period never stirred from Dublin. Philips, now a rather pompous J. P., was no longer a faithful shadow, and even talked of starting a paper himself. Steele, finally, was every day getting more difficult. He was often in Scotland on business, or ruining himself in madcap schemes for bringing Irish salmon alive to London: and although he was aided in this by Vanbrugh's old enemy Benson, the enterprise was no more likely to succeed than his old