ck which bears now the relation to all recent wrecks which
"_the_ storm" of November 1703, as we shall see, bore to all inferior
tempests--the loss of the _Royal Charter_,--the stately and gold-laden
bark, which, on Wednesday the 26th October 1859, when on the verge of the
haven which the passengers so much desired to see, was lifted up by
the blast as by the hand of God, and dashed into ten thousand
pieces,--hundreds of men, women, and, alas! alas! children, drowned,
mutilated, crushed by falling machinery, and that, too, at a moment when
they had just been assured that there was no immediate danger, and
when hope was beginning to sparkle in the eyes that were sinking into
despair,--sovereigns, spray, and the mangled fragments of human bodies
massed together as if in the anarchy of hell, and hurled upon the rocks.
Addison, no more than one of the escaped from that saloon of horror and
sea of death, could forget the special Providence by which he was saved;
and the hymn above referred to, and that other still finer, commencing--

"When all Thy mercies, O my God!
My rising soul surveys,"

seem a pillar erected on the shore to Him that had protected and redeemed
him.

From Genoa he went to Milan, and thence to Venice, where he saw a play on
the subject of Cato enacted, and began himself to indite his celebrated
tragedy, of which he completed four acts ere he quitted Italy. On his way
to Rome, he visited the miniature mountain republic of San Marino, which
he contemplated and described with much the same feeling of interest and
amazement, as afterwards, in the _Guardian_, the little colony of ants
immortalised there. Like Swift, (whom Macaulay accuses of stealing from
Addison's Latin poem on the "Pigmies," some hints for his Lilliput,)
Addison had a finer eye for the little than for the vast. He enjoyed
Marino, therefore, and must have chuckled over the description of it in
the geography, as much as if it had been a stroke of his own inventive
pen. "Besides the mountain on which the town stands, the republic
possesses _two adjoining hills_." At Rome he did not stay long at this
time, but as if afraid of the attractions of the approaching Holy
Week--that blaze of brilliant but false light in which so many moths have
been consumed--he hurried to Naples and saw Vesuvius burning over its
beautiful bay with less admiration than has been felt since by many
inferior men. He returned to Rome and lived there unharmed duri