" of some mark
and likelihood, nearly ready for the press. Besides, the Whigs, low as
they were now in political influence, were still true to their party,
and they welcomed Addison, as one of their rising hopes, into the famous
"Kit-Cat Club," an _omniumgaiherum_ of all whose talents, learning,
accomplishments, wit, or wealth were thought useful to the Whig cause.

Addison's arrival in England seems to have synchronised or preceded the
great tempest of November 1703, to which we have already referred, and
to which he afterwards alludes in his simile of the Angel in "The
Campaign"--

"Such as of late o'er pale Britannia past."

Our readers will find a sketch of this terrific tempest in the
commencement of Ainsworth's "Jack Shepherd." Macaulay says of it, "It
was the only tempest which, in our latitude, has equalled the rage of
a tropical hurricane. No other tempest was ever in this country the
occasion of a Parliamentary address, or of a national fast. Whole fleets
had been cast away. Large mansions had been blown down; one prelate had
been buried beneath the ruins of his palace. London and Bristol had
presented the appearance of cities just sacked. Hundreds of families were
thrown into mourning. The prostrate trunks of large trees, and the ruins
of houses attested, in all the southern counties, the fury of the blast."
How Addison felt or fared during this storm, we have no means of knowing.
Perhaps his timid nature shrank from it in spite of its appeal to
imagination, or perhaps the poetry that was in him triumphed over his
fears, and as he felt what _Zanga_ was afterwards to say--

"I love this rocking of the battlements,"

the image of the Angel, afterwards to be dilated into the vast form of
Wrath, described in the "Campaign," rose on his vision, and remained
there indelibly fixed till the time arrived when, used with artistic
skill, it floated him into fame.

Meanwhile, he spent this winter and spring of 1703-4 in a rather
precarious manner, and like a true poet. He was lodging in an obscure
garret in the Haymarket, up three stairs, when one day the Right
Honourable Henry Boyle, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, called on him
and communicated a project that had been concocted between Godolphin and
Halifax. The Whigs were now again in the ascendant, and the battle of
Blenheim, fought on the 13th August 1704, had brought their triumph to
a climax. Halifax and Godolphin were mortified at the bad poems in
com