kind that makes one
smile, rather than laugh aloud. Our countenance relaxes when we
discover that his rules for an eighteenth-century club prescribe a
fine for absence except in case of sickness or imprisonment. We are
quietly amused at such touches as this in the delineation of Sir
Roger:--

"As Sir Roger is landlord to the whole congregation, he keeps them
in very good order, and will suffer nobody to sleep in it besides
himself; for, if by chance he has been surprised into a short nap at
sermon, upon recovering out of it, he stands up and looks about him,
and, if he sees anybody else nodding, either wakes them himself, or
sends his servants to them."

Addison is remarkable among a satiric group of writers because he
intended his humor to be "remedial,"--not merely to inflict wounds,
but to exert a moral influence, to induce human beings to forsake the
wrong and to become more kindly. We may smile at Sir Roger; but we
have more respect for his kindliness, after reading in _Spectator_ No.
383, how he selected his boatmen to row him on the Thames:--

"We were no sooner come to the Temple Stairs, but we were surrounded
with a crowd of watermen, offering us their respective services.
Sir Roger, after having looked about him very attentively, spied one
with a wooden leg, and immediately gave him orders to get his boat
ready. As we were walking towards it, 'You must know,' says Sir
Roger, 'I never make use of anybody to row me, that has not either
lost a leg or an arm. I would rather bate him a few strokes of his
oar than not employ an honest man that had been wounded in the
Queen's service. If I was a lord or a bishop, and kept a barge, I
would not put a fellow in my livery that had not a wooden leg.'"

Such humor, which finds its chief point in a desire to make the world
kindlier, must have appealed to the eighteenth century, or _The
Spectator_ could not have reached a circulation of ten thousand copies
a day. Addison would not now have his legion of warm admirers if his
humor had been personal, like Pope's, or misanthropical, like Swift's.

Of his style, Dr. Samuel Johnson says, "Whoever wishes to attain an
English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not
ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the study of Addison."
Benjamin Franklin, as we know from his _Autobiography_, followed this
advice with admirable results. Addison's style seems as natural and
easy as the m