underhand courtship of Edgar and Cordelia, foisted by Nahum Tate into 'King Lear' ?"* Nevertheless, if there be something rotten in the state of this tragedy, there is something vital too. Non omnis moriar, might the Addisonian Cato say, when he began the soliloquy "It must be so," on Plato's reasoning well; he might be warranted in indulging the pleasing hope, the fond desire, of living on in English literature, though, to reach our time of day Through what variety of untried being, Through what new scenes and changes must he pass, the Hayley fever, the Byron mania, the Lake Schooling, the Spasmodic complaint! I shall live piecemeal at least, he might promise himself, in quotation and excerpt. And so he does: witness the constant requisition in which moralists hold that line The woman who deliberates is lost and newspaper polemics the avowal My voice is still for war; and baffled strugglers the solatium "Tis not in mortals to command success, But we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it or that other balm for hurt minds, When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, But if "Cato" only just manages to keep alive, and has long been thought by many to be in a poor way, by some to be in the act of going, going,-by few to be gone,-how different the case (the difference between death and life, or at least between a slow decline and ruddy robust health) with the tattle of the Tatler, and the observations of the Spectator. Addison's graver papers in these and kindred periodicals are not heavy enough to sink by their own weight, far less to weigh down his lighter ones. Hazlitt, who prefers Steele to Addison as distinctly as Mr. Macaulay does not, says that the extremely moral and didactic tone of the "Spectator" makes him always think of Addison as (what Addison was described of old) "a parson in a tie-wig." He cannot deny that many of the moral Essays are "exquisitely beautiful and happy"-and singles out as the "perfection of elegant sermonising," the reflections of cheerfulness, those in Westminster Abbey, on the Royal Exchange, and in particular, as "very affecting," those on the death of a young lady. But Hazlitt, "like the lave," would more willingly see the Spectator pass from grave to gay, than from lively to severe. As the best way of describing Addison's peculiar pleasantry, Mr. Macaulay places it in comparison with the pleasantry of Voltaire and Swift; of Voltaire, as the prince of buffoons, whose merriment is without disguise or restraint, who gambols, grins, shakes his sides, points the Coleridge's "Northern Worthies," vol. ii. ↑ Hazlitt's "Comic Writers." (On the Periodical Essayists.) finger, turns up the nose, shoots out the tongue; of Swift, who, on the other hand, moves laughter, but never joins in it, preserving amid the convulsive peals of the company "an invincible gravity, and even sourness of aspect," and giving utterance to the "most eccentric and ludicrous fancies, with the air of a man reading the commination service." Whereas Addison, as the essayist pictures him, neither laughs out like Voltaire, nor, like Swift, looks extra saturnine when laughing inwardly, but "preserves a look peculiarly his own, a look of demure serenity, disturbed only by an arch sparkle of the eye, an almost imperceptible elevation of the brow, an almost imperceptible curl of the lip:" his tone being never that either of a Jack Pudding or of a cynic, but that of a gentleman, in whom the quickest sense of the ridiculous is constantly tempered by good nature and good breeding. Taking into account his capacity for the satirical, he stands almost alone in the mild and innocent use he made of his power. He might have drawn comparisons, in this regard, between himself and Swift, something in the words of Philinte to Alceste: Je prends tout doucement les hommes comme ils sont, Et je crois qu'à la cour, de même qu'à la ville Mon flegme est philosophe autant que votre bile.† There is about the Addisonian pleasantry a harmless, gracious charm, which Jeremy Taylor himself might have had in mind, had he lived in a later age, when he says, and from the pulpit, that "if a facete discourse, and an amicable friendly mirth, can refresh the spirit, and take it off from the vile temptations of peevish, despairing, uncomplying melancholy, it must needs be innocent and commendable. And we may as well," adds the good bishop, "be refreshed by a clear and brisk discourse, as by the air of Campanian wines; and our faces and heads may as well be anointed and look pleasant with wit and friendly intercourse as with the fat of the balsam-tree." Mirth of this order-utterly diverse from the foolish talking and jesting which are not convenient-is, in Jeremy Taylor's judgment, what no wise man ever did, or ought to reprove. It is when the jest, as he expresses it, hath teeth and nails, biting or scratching our brother-when it is loose and wanton, unseasonable, or unduly protracted, that "facete discourse" becomes obnoxious to episcopal rebuke.‡ Addison seems to set down nought in malice, even when most satirical; or in the French sense of malice only. Et amara lento Temperet risu.§ M. Philarète Chasles, who applauds Addison as having, for telle fut sa mission, checked debauchery among courtiers, and made them ashamed. of it, and taught the middle classes to be less forbidding and unamiable in their "rude piété"-goes on to say, to the credit of both the teacher and the taught: "Aussi cette douce sévérite d'Addison fut-elle accueillie d'un sourire universel et d'une reconnaissance générale. Grace à l'onction d'un style naturel sans faiblesse et grave sans emphase, cet heureux esprit * Macaulay's Essays: "Life and Writings of Addison.” † Molière: "Le Misanthrope." I. 1. See Jeremy Taylor's Sermons. Part II. "The Good and Evil Tongue." devint l'instituteur de son temps."* All were attracted, none repelled, by his adroit and wary employment of that kind of irony which, with Attic point, And kind well-tempered satire, smoothly keen, Steals through the soul, and without pain corrects.† He came, as Mr. Thackeray describes him, the gentle satirist, who hit no unfair blow; the kind judge who castigated only in smiling. "While Swift went about, hanging and ruthless-a literary Jefferies—in Addison's kind court only minor cases were tried: only peccadilloes and small sins against society: only a dangerous libertinism in tuckers and hoops; or a nuisance in the abuse of beaux' canes and snuff-boxes."‡ And Mr. Macaulay winds up his eulogium of Addison, as the unsullied statesman, the accomplished scholar, the master of pure English eloquence, and the consummate painter of life and manners, by claiming national homage to him, "above all," as "the great satirist, who alone knew how to use ridicule without abusing it, who, without inflicting a wound, effected a great social reform, and who reconciled wit and virtue, after a long and disastrous separation, during which wit had been led astray by profligacy, and virtue by fanaticism." Mr. Spectator himself tells us, in his three hundred and fifty-fifth number, that he looks upon it as a particular happiness that he has always hindered his resentments from finding expression in satirical invective. He had once, he confesses, gone through half a satire, but found so many motions of humanity rising in him towards the persons whom he had severely treated, that he threw it into the fire without ever finishing it. He had, too, been angry enough to make several little epigrams and lampoons; and these also, after admiring them a day or two, he committed to the flames. § The happier and better man he! Chasles: "De l'Angleterre au XIX Siècle." †Thomson: "The Seasons." "It may be a lady is tried for breaking the peace of our sovereign lady Queen Anne, and ogling too dangerously from the side-box: or a Templar for beating the watch, or breaking Priscian's head: or a citizen's wife for caring too much for the puppet-show, and too little for her husband and children: every one of the little sinners brought before him is amusing, and he dismisses each with the pleasantest penalties and the most charming words of admonition."THACKERAY'S Lectures on the English Humourists. § Spectator, No. CCCLV. A living poet has happily versified his experience, by an experto crede to the same effect: "LINES SUBSTITUTED FOR A SATIRE. "Once I was hurt by a hard word ;- From verse did borrow a sharp sword "But soon I found that my rash will But that I nourished a worse ill Than that which conscience pained not. "So I, with ruth, that caustic verse From out my page have riven, CHAUNCY HARE TownshEND. Who but a happy and good man could have given us so much genial humour with so little of the wormwood and the gall of satire? Who else could have conceived and so finished off the character of Sir Roger de Coverley? Stay-the conception is not Addison's, but Steele's, to whom also (and truly such "conception is a blessing") we owe in outline the other characters of the club. But Addison's is the filling up; and in such portraiture as that of Sir Roger the filling up is almost everything. Hazlitt was bent on giving Steele every chance against his more staid and sober friend, whom he describes as spending most of his time in his study (while Dick was picking up observations out of doors), and there spinning out and wire-drawing the hints which he borrowed from Steele, or took from nature, to the utmost. But Hazlitt warms to Sir Roger, to Addison's Sir Roger. Addison, he declares, has gained himself immortal honour by his manner of filling up this character. Who is there, he asks, that can forget, or be insensible to, the inimitable, nameless graces, and varied traits of nature and of old English character in it to the hearty knight's unpretending virtues and amiable weak. nesses-to his modesty, generosity, hospitality, and eccentric whims-to the respect of his neighbours, and the affection of his domestics-to his wayward, hopeless, secret passion for the fair enemy, the widow-to the havoc he makes among the game in his neighbourhood-to his speech from the bench, to show the Spectator what is thought of him in the country-to his doubts as to the existence of witchcraft, and protection of reputed witches-to his falling asleep at church, and his reproof of John Williams, as soon as he recovered from his nap, for talking in sermon-time.† Mr. Thackeray may well ask what would Sir Roger be without his follies and his charming little brain-cracks? "We love him for his vanities as much as his virtues. What is ridiculous is delightful in him we are so fond of him because we laugh at him so. And out of that laughter, and out of that sweet weakness, and out of those harmless eccentricities and follies, and out of that touched brain, and out of that honest manhood and simplicity-we get a result of happiness, goodness, tenderness, pity, piety; such as, if my audience will think their reading and hearing over, doctors and divines but seldom have the fortune to inspire." If we have assumed the right of the Addisonian Cato to say non omnis moriar, much more may we let the Addisonian Sir Roger use the same boast, only putting the omnis before the non, to assert his whole and entire freedom from mortality: if the one may assert, I shall not altogether die, the other may amend the phrase with a, No, not a bit of me. And if the allegation of the pseudo-Roman be met with derisive *"In which there is more of real romance and true delicacy than in a thousand tales of knight-errantry-(we perceive the hectic flush of his cheek, the faltering of his tongue in speaking of her bewitching airs and 'the whiteness of her hand")." -HAZLITT'S "Comic Writers." Lect. V. † Ibid., passim. "If the good knight did not call out to the people sleeping in church, and say 'Amen' with such a delightful pomposity: if he did not make a speech in the assize-court à propos de bottes, and merely to show his dignity to Mr. Spectator: if he did not mistake Madam Doll Tearsheet for a lady of quality in Temple Garden: if he were wiser than he is: if he had not his humour to salt his life, and were but a mere English gentleman and game-preserver-of what worth were he to us?"-THACKERAY'S Lecture on Congreve and Addison. cheers, and Oh, Ohs! loud and deep,-more surely will that of the true Briton be carried unanimously, with the rousing chorus of, Which nobody can deny! "I cannot help suspecting," said Dr. Warton, at a dinner-party, at which Madame d'Arblay "assisted"-Tom Warton also "assisting" (in the dining, not in the talking), and Sir Joshua, and Dr. Burney, and Mrs. Montague," I cannot help suspecting," said the loquacious Doctor, discussing the character of Sir Roger de Coverley, "that it is taken from the life, as there are certain traits in it too excellent to have been merely invented: particularly that singularity, that wherever he visited he always talked to the servants the whole way he went up-stairs." Whatever the company may have thought of a "suspicion" which set poor Fanny Burney on thorns-(for Mrs. Montague forthwith pesters her with a sotto voce, "pray, Miss Burney, how is this? must a character, to be excellent, be drawn from the life? I beg you would tell me?" &c.) -one thing is clear, on the Burney's evidence, that everybody present "agreed that Sir Roger de Coverley was, perhaps, the first character ever drawn, for perfection of delineation."* COUSIN CARL. FROM THE DANISH OF CARL BERNHARD. Br MRS. BUSHBY. WHEN I was a young man about twenty years of age, I was a sad hair-brained fellow. I lived entirely in the passing hour, the time gone by was quite forgotten, and about the future I never took the trouble to think a moment. Inclined to every possible species of foolish prank, I was always ready to rush headlong into any kind of frolic-anything that promised fun, even if that were a row; and never did I let slip the opportunity of amusing myself. I was a living proof that proverbs are not always infallible, for if "bought wit is best," that is to say, wisdom bought by experience, I must have become wise long ago; if "a burned child, or a scalded cat, dreads the fire," I was singed and scalded often enough to have felt some dread; and "to pay the piper" had frequently fallen upon me. But I was none the wiser or more prudent. This preface was necessary in order to introduce the following episode of my mirth-loving youthful days. My father thought that the best way of breaking off my intimacy with a somewhat riotous clique of young men, in whose jovial society I passed a good deal of my time, was to send me to Hamburg, where I was placed in the counting-house of a merchant, who was expected to keep a strict watch over me, on account of his well-known reputation * Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay, vol. ii. |