morist, a sly
observer of manners, and above all, a delightful talker, that Addison
is best known to posterity. In the personal sketches of the members of
the Spectator Club, of Will Honeycomb, Captain Sentry, Sir Andrew
Freeport, and, above all, Sir Roger de Coverley, the quaint and honest
country gentleman, may be found the nucleus of the modern prose fiction
of character. Addison's humor is always a trifle grave. There is no
whimsy, no frolic in it, as in Sterne or Lamb. "He thinks justly,"
said Dr. Johnson, "but he thinks faintly." The _Spectator_ had a host
of followers, from the somewhat heavy _Rambler_ and _Idler_ of Johnson,
down to the _Salmagundi_ papers of our own Irving, who was, perhaps,
Addison's latest and {189} best literary descendant. In his own age
Addison made some figure as a poet and dramatist. His _Campaign_,
celebrating the victory of Blenheim, had one much-admired couplet, in
which Marlborough was likened to the angel of tempest, who

"Pleased the Almighty's orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm."

His stately, classical tragedy, _Cato_, which was acted at Drury Lane
Theater in 1712, with immense applause, was pronounced by Dr. Johnson
"unquestionably the noblest production of Addison's genius." It is,
notwithstanding, cold and tedious, as a whole, though it has some fine
declamatory passages--in particular the soliloquy of Cato in the fifth
act--

"It must be so: Plato, thou reasonest well," etc.

The greatest of the Queen Anne wits, and one of the most savage and
powerful satirists that ever lived, was Jonathan Swift. As secretary
in the family of Sir William Temple, and domestic chaplain to the Earl
of Berkeley, he had known in youth the bitterness of poverty and
dependence. Afterward he wrote himself into influence with the Tory
ministry, and was promised a bishopric, but was put off with the
deanery of St. Patrick's, and retired to Ireland to "die like a
poisoned rat in a hole." His life was made tragical by the forecast of
the madness which finally overtook him. "The stage darkened," said
Scott, "ere the curtain fell." Insanity {190} deepened into idiocy and
a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly
ever a word. He had directed that his tombstone should bear the
inscription, _Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit_. "So
great a man he seems to me," wrote Thackeray, "that thinking of him is
like t