William Somerville - The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase

Joseph Addison, the Spectator , the true founder of our periodical literature, the finest, if not the greatest writer in the English language, was born at Milston, Wiltshire, on the 1st of May 1672. A fanciful mind might trace a correspondence between the particular months when celebrated men have been born and the peculiar complexion of their genius. Milton, the austere and awful, was born in the silent and gloomy month of December. Shakspeare, the most versatile of all writers, was born in April, that month of changeful skies, of sudden sunshine, and sudden showers. Burns and Byron, those stormy spirits, both appeared in the fierce January; and of the former, he himself says,

Scott, the broad sunny being, visited us in August, and in the same month the warm genius of Shelley came, as Hunt used to tell him, "from the planet Mercury" to our earth. Coleridge and Keats, with whose song a deep bar of sorrow was to mingle, like the music of falling leaves, or of winds wailing for the departure of summer, arrived in October,—that month, the beauty of which is the child of blasting, and its glory the flush of decay. And it seems somehow fitting that Addison, the mild, the quietly-joyous, the sanguine and serene, should come, with the daisy and the sweet summer-tide, on the 1st of May, which Buchanan thus hails—

Dr Lancelot Addison, himself a man of no mean note, was the father of our poet. He was born in 1632, at Maltesmeaburn, in the parish of Corby Ravensworth , (what a name of ill-omen within ill-omen, or as Dr Johnson would say, "inspissated gloom"!) in the county of Westmoreland. His father was a minister of the gospel; but in such humble circumstances, that Lancelot was received from the Grammar-school of Appleby into Queen's College, Oxford, in the capacity of a "poor child." After passing his curriculum there, being chiefly distinguished for his violent High Church and Monarchical principles, for which he repeatedly smarted, he, at the Restoration, was appointed chaplain to the garrison of Dunkirk, and soon after he accepted a similar situation in Tangier, which had been ceded by Portugal to Britain. In this latter post he felt rather lonely and miserable, and was driven, in self-defence, to betake himself to the study of the manners and the literature of the Moors, Jews, and other Oriental nations. This led him afterwards to publish some works on Barbary, on Hebrew customs, and Mohammedanism, which shew a profound acquaintance with these subjects, and which, not without reason, are supposed to have coloured the imagination of his son Joseph, who is seldom more felicitous than when reproducing the gorgeous superstitions and phantasies of the East.

For eight years, old Addison lingered in loathed Tangier; nor, when he returned to England on a visit, had he any purpose of permanently residing in his own country. But his appointment was hastily bestowed on another; and it was fortunate for him that a private friend stepped in and presented him with the living of Milston, near Ambrosebury, Wilts, worth £120 a-year. This, which Miss Aiken calls a "pittance," was probably equivalent to £250 now. At all events, on the strength of it, he married Jane, daughter of Dr Gulstone, and sister to the Bishop of Bristol, who, in due time, became the mother of our poet. Lancelot was afterwards made Prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral, and King's Chaplain in ordinary; about the time (1675) when he took the degree of D.D. Subsequently he became Archdeacon of Salisbury, and at last, in 1683, obtained the Deanery of Lichfield. But for his suspected Jacobitism, he would probably have received the mitre. He died in 1703.

Joseph had two brothers and three sisters. His third sister, Dorothy, survived the rest, and was twice married. Swift met her once, and with some awe (for he, like all bullies, had a little of the coward about him), describes her as a kind of wit, and very like her brother. The Spectator seems to have been a wild and wayward boy. He is said to have once acted as ringleader in a "barring out," described by Johnson as a savage license by which the boys, when the periodical vacation drew near, used to take possession of the school, of which they barred the doors, and bade the master defiance from the windows. On another occasion, having committed some petty offence at a country school, terrified at the master's apprehended displeasure, he made his escape into the fields and woods, where for some days he fed on fruits and slept in a hollow tree till discovered and brought back to his parents. This last may seem the act of a timid boy, and inconsistent with the former, and yet is somehow congenial to our ideal of the character of our poet. It required perhaps more daring to front the perils of the woods than the frown of the master, and augured, besides, a certain romance in his disposition which found afterwards a vent in literature. After receiving instruction, first at Salisbury, and then at Lichfield, (his connexion with which place forms a link, uniting him in a manner to the great lexicographer, who was born there,) he was removed to the Charterhouse, and there profited so much in Greek and Latin, that at fifteen he was not only, says Macaulay, "fit for the university, but carried thither a classical taste and a stock of learning which would have done honour to a master of arts." He had at the Charter-house formed a friendship, destined to have important bearings on his after history, with Richard Steele, whose character may be summed up in a few sentences. Who has not heard of Sir Richard Steele? Wordsworth says of one of his characters—

Poor Dick was known to every sponging-house, and to every bailiff that, blowing in pursuit, walked the London streets. A fine-hearted, warm-blooded character, without an atom of prudence, self-control, reticence, or forethought; quite as destitute of malice or envy; perpetually sinning and perpetually repenting; never positively irreligious, even when drunk; and often excessively pious when recovering sobriety,—Steele reeled his way through life, and died with the reputation of being an orthodox Christian and a (nearly) habitual drunkard; the most affectionate and most faithless of husbands; a brave soldier, and in many points an arrant fool; a violent politician, and the best natured of men; a writer extremely lively, for this, among other reasons, that he wrote generally on his legs, flying or meditating flight from his creditors; and who embodied in himself the titles of his three principal works—"The Christian Hero," "The Tender Husband," and the Tatler ;—being a "Christian Hero" in intention, one of those intentions with which a certain place is paved; a "Tender Husband," if not a true one, to his two ladies; and a Tatler to all persons, in all circumstances, and at all times. When Addison first knew this original, he was probably uncontaminated, and must have been, as he continued to the end to be, an irascible but joyous and genial being; and they became intimate at once, although circumstances severed them from each other for a long period.

In 1687 Addison entered Queen's College, Oxford; but sometime after, (Macaulay says "not many months," Johnson "a year," and Miss Aiken "two years,") Dr Lancaster, of Magdalene College, having accidentally seen some Latin verses from his pen, exerted himself to procure their author admission to the benefits of a foundation, then the wealthiest in Europe. Our poet was first elected Demy, then Probationary Fellow in 1697, and in the year following, Actual Fellow. During the ten years he resided at Oxford, he was a general favourite, remarkable for his diligence in study, for the purity and tenderness of his feelings, for his bashful and retiring manners, for the excellence of his Latin compositions, and for his solitary walks, pursued in a path they still point out below the elms which skirt a meadow on the banks of the Cherwell,—a river, we need scarcely say, which there weds the Isis. It was in such lonely evening or Saturday strolls that he probably acquired the habit of pensive reverie to which we owe many of the finest of his speculations in after days, such as that in