the dramatic situation.'[37]

After the _Freeholder_ Addison wrote nothing of importance, unless we
except the essay published after his death _On the Evidences of
Christianity_. Of this essay it will suffice to quote the judgment of
his most distinguished eulogist. After observing that the treatise shows
the narrow limits of Addison's classical knowledge, Lord Macaulay adds:
'It is melancholy to see how helplessly he gropes his way from blunder
to blunder. He assigns as grounds for his religious belief stories as
absurd as that of the Cock Lane Ghost, and forgeries as rank as
Ireland's Vortigern; puts faith in the lie about the Thundering Legion;
is convinced that Tiberius moved the senate to admit Jesus among the
gods, and pronounces the letter of Agbarus, King of Edessa, to be a
record of great authority. Nor were these errors the effects of
superstition, for to superstition Addison was by no means prone. The
truth is, that he was writing about what he did not understand.'

In 1716, after having been made one of the Commissioners for Trades and
Colonies, he married the Countess Dowager of Warwick, with whom he had
been acquainted for some years. The marriage, according to the doubtful
authority of Pope, was not a happy one, and is said to have driven
Addison to the consolations of the tavern. He did not need them long. In
1717 Sunderland became Prime Minister, and made Addison a Secretary of
State, an appointment which he resigned eleven months afterwards; and in
1719 he died at Holland House at the age of forty-seven, leaving one
daughter as the memorial of the union. He lies, as is fitting, in the
great Abbey of which he has written so beautifully.

Tickell's noble tribute to his friend's memory belongs to the undying
poetry which neither age nor fresher forms of verse can render obsolete.
It must suffice to quote here a few lines from a poem which, despite
some conventional expressions common to the time, is worthy of its theme
throughout:

'If pensive to the rural shades I rove,
His shape o'ertakes me in the lonely grove;
'Twas there of Just and Good he reasoned strong,
Cleared some great truth, or raised some serious song;
There patient showed us the wise course to steer,
A candid censor, and a friend severe;
There taught us how to live; and (oh! too high
The price for knowledge) taught us how to die.'

There are few men of literary eminence in the eighteenth century of whom