Addison. William John Courthope
the eighteenth century had little of that feeling for natural beauty which distinguishes our own, a man of Addison’s imagination could hardly fail to be impressed by the character of the scenery in which his childhood was passed. No one who has travelled on a summer’s day across Salisbury plain, with its vast canopy of sky and its open tracts of undulating downland, relieved by no shadows except such as are thrown by the passing cloud, the grazing sheep, and the great circle of Stonehenge, will forget the delightful sense of refreshment and repose produced by the descent into the valley of the Avon. The sounds of human life rising from the villages after the long solitude of the plain, the shade of the deep woods, the coolness of the river, like all streams rising in the chalk, clear and peaceful, are equally delicious to the sense and the imagination. It was, doubtless, the recollection of these scenes that inspired Addison in his paraphrase of the twenty-third Psalm:
“The Lord my pasture shall prepare,
And feed me with a shepherd’s care.
······ When in the sultry glebe I faint, Or on the thirsty mountain pant, To fertile vales and dewy meads My weary wandering steps he leads, Where peaceful rivers, soft and slow, Amid the verdant landscape flow.”
At Amesbury he was first sent to school, his master being one Nash; and here, too, he probably met with the first recorded adventure of his life. It is said that having committed some fault, and being fearful of the consequences, he ran away from school, and, taking up his abode in a hollow tree, maintained himself as he could till he was discovered and brought back to his parents. He was removed from Amesbury to Salisbury, and thence to the Grammar School at Lichfield, where he is said to have been the leader in a “barring out.” From Lichfield he passed to the Charter House, then under the charge of Dr. Ellis, a man of taste and scholarship. The Charter House at that period was, after Westminster, the best-known school in England, and here was laid the foundation of that sound classical taste which perfected the style of the essays in the Spectator.
Macaulay labours with much force and ingenuity to prove that Addison’s classical acquirements were only superficial, and, in his usual epigrammatic manner, hazards the opinion that “his knowledge of Greek, though doubtless such as was, in his time, thought respectable at Oxford, was evidently less than that which many lads now carry away every year from Eton and Rugby.” That Addison was not a scholar of the class of Bentley or Porson may be readily admitted. But many scattered allusions in his works prove that his acquaintance with the Greek poets of every period, if cursory, was wide and intelligent: he was sufficiently master of the language thoroughly to understand the spirit of what he read; he undertook while at Oxford a translation of Herodotus, and one of the papers in the Spectator is a direct imitation of a jeu d’esprit of Lucian’s. The Eton or Rugby boy who, in these days, with a normal appetite for cricket and football, acquired an equal knowledge of Greek literature, would certainly be somewhat of a prodigy.
No doubt, however, Addison’s knowledge of the Latin poets was, as Macaulay infers, far more extensive and profound. It would have been strange had it been otherwise. The influence of the classical side of the Italian Renaissance was now at its height, and wherever those ideas became paramount Latin composition was held in at least as much esteem as poetry in the vernacular. Especially was this the case in England, where certain affinities of character and temperament made it easy for writers to adopt Roman habits of thought. Latin verse composition soon took firm root in the public schools and universities, so that clever boys of the period were tolerably familiar with most of the minor Roman poets. Pope, in the Fourth Book of the Dunciad, vehemently attacked the tradition as confining the mind to the study of words rather than of things; but he had himself had no experience of a public school, and only those who fail to appreciate the influence of Latin verse composition on the style of our own greatest orators, and of poets like Milton and Gray, will be inclined to undervalue it as an instrument of social and literary training.
Proficiency in this art may at least be said to have laid the foundation of Addison’s fortunes. Leaving the Charter House in 1687, at the early age of fifteen, he was entered at Queen’s College, Oxford, and remained a member of that society for two years, when a copy of his Latin verses fell into the hands of Dr. Lancaster, then Fellow and afterwards Provost of the College. Struck with their excellence, Lancaster used his influence to obtain for him a demyship at Magdalen. The subject of this fortunate set of verses was “Inauguratio Regis Gulielmi,” from which fact we may reasonably infer that even in his boyhood his mind had acquired a Whig bias. Whatever inclination he may have had in this direction would have been confirmed by the associations of his new college. The fluctuations of opinion in Magdalen had been frequent and extraordinary. Towards the close of Elizabeth’s reign it was notorious for its Calvinism, but under the Chancellorship of Laud it appears to have adopted, with equal ardour, the cause of Arminianism, for it was among the colleges that offered the stoutest opposition to the Puritan visitors in 1647–48. The despotic tendencies of James II., however, again cooled its loyalty, and its spirited resistance to the king’s order for the election of a Roman Catholic President had given a mortal blow to the Stuart dynasty. Hough was now President, but in consequence of the dispute with the king there had been no election of demies in 1688, so that twice the usual number was chosen in the following year, and the occasion was distinguished by the name of the “golden election.” From Magdalen Addison proceeded to his master’s degree in 1693; the College elected him probationary Fellow in 1697, and actual Fellow the year after. He retained his Fellowship till 1711.
Of his tastes, habits, and friendships at Oxford there are few records. Among his acquaintance were Boulter, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin—whose memory is unenviably perpetuated, in company with Ambrose Phillips, in Pope’s Epistle to Arbuthnot,
“Does not one table Bavius still admit,
Still to one Bishop Phillips seem a wit?”—
and possibly the famous Sacheverell.[6] He is said to have shown in the society of Magdalen some of the shyness that afterwards distinguished him; he kept late hours, and read chiefly after dinner. The walk under the well-known elms by the Cherwell is still connected with his name. Though he probably acted as tutor in the college, the greater part of his quiet life at the University was doubtless occupied in study. A proof of his early maturity is seen in the fact that, in his nineteenth year, a young man of birth and fortune, Mr. Rushout, who was being educated at Magdalen, was placed under his charge.
His reputation as a scholar and a man of taste soon extended itself to the world of letters in London. In 1693, being then in his twenty-second year, he wrote his Account of the Greatest English Poets; and about the same time he addressed a short copy of verses to Dryden, complimenting him on the enduring vigour of his poetical faculty, as shown in his translations of Virgil and other Latin poets, some of which had recently appeared in Tonson’s Miscellany. The old poet appears to have been highly gratified, and to have welcomed the advances thus made to him, for he returned Addison’s compliment by bestowing high and not unmerited praise on the translation of the Fourth Book of the Georgics, which the latter soon after undertook, and by printing, as a preface to his own translation, a discourse written by Addison on the Georgics, as well as arguments to most of the books of the Æneid.
Through Dryden, no doubt, he became acquainted with Jacob Tonson. The father of English publishing had for some time been a well-known figure in the literary world. He had purchased the copyright of Paradise Lost; he had associated himself with Dryden in publishing before the Revolution two volumes of Miscellanies; encouraged by the success which these obtained, he put the poet, in 1693, on some translations of Juvenal and Persius, and two new volumes of Miscellanies; while in 1697 he urged him to undertake a translation of the whole of the works of Virgil. Observing how strongly the public taste set towards the great classical writers, he was anxious to employ men of ability in the work of turning them into English; and it appears from existing correspondence that he engaged Addison, while the latter was at Oxford, to superintend a translation of Herodotus. He also suggested a translation of Ovid. Addison undertook to procure coadjutors for the work of translating the Greek historian. He himself actually translated the books called Polymnia and Urania, but for some unexplained reason the work was never published. For Ovid he seems, on