a nominal office worth L300
a-year. His secretary's salary was L2000 per annum.

Previous to this he had resumed his intimacy with Steele, to whom he lent
money, and on one occasion is said to have recovered it by sending a
bailiff to his house. This has been called heartless conduct, but the
probability is that Addison was provoked by the extravagant use made of
the loan by his reckless friend. In Parliament it is well-known Addison
never spoke; but he surrounded himself in private life with a parliament
of his own, and, like Cato, gave his little senate laws. That senate
consisted of Steele, Ambrose, Phillips; the wretched Eustace Budgell,
who afterwards drowned himself; sometimes Swift and Pope; and ultimately
Tickell, who became his most confidential friend and the depositor of his
literary remains. In mixed societies he was silent; but with a few select
spirits around him, and especially after the "good wine did the good
office" of banishing his bashfulness and taciturnity, he became the most
delightful and fascinating of conversers. The staple of his conversation
was quiet, sly humour; but there was fine sentiment, touches of pathos,
and now and then imagination peeped over like an Alp above meaner hills.
Swift alone, we suspect, was his match; but his power lay rather in
severe and pungent sarcasm, in broad, coarse, though unsmiling wit, and
at times in the fierce and terrible sallies of misanthropic rage and
despair. Addison, on leaving England, had, by his modesty, geniality, and
amiable manners, become the most popular man in the country, so much so,
that, says Swift, "he might be king an' he had a mind."

In Ireland--although he sat as member for Cavan, and appears in
Parliament to have got beyond his famous "I conceive--I conceive--I
conceive"--(having, as the wag observed, "conceived three times and
brought forth nothing"), and spoken sometimes, if not often--he did not
feel himself at home. He must have loathed the licentious and corrupt
Wharton, and felt besides a longing for the society of London, the
_noctes coenoeque Deum_ he had left behind him. It was in Ireland,
however, that his real literary career began. Steele, in the spring of
1709, had commenced the _Tatler_, a thrice-a-week miscellany of foreign
news, town gossip, short sharp papers _de omnibus rebus et guibusdum
aliis_, with a sprinkling of moral and literary criticism. When Addison
heard of this scheme, he readily lent his aid to it, and th