s.
In 1716 he married the Countess-Dowager of Warwick, and parted with
independence to live with a coronet. His married life was not happy. The
lady was cold and exacting; and, it must be confessed, the poet loved a
bottle at the club-room or tavern better than the luxuries of Holland
House; and not infrequently this conviviality led him to excess. He died
in 1719, in his forty-eighth year, and made a truly pious end. He wished,
he said, to atone for any injuries he had done to others, and sent for his
sceptical and dissolute step-son, Lord Warwick, to show him how a
Christian could die. A monument has been erected to his memory in the
Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, and the closing words of the
inscription upon it calls him "the honor and delight of the English
nation."

As a man, he was grave and retiring: he had a high opinion of his own
powers; in company he was extremely diffident; in the main, he was moral,
just, and consistent. His intemperance was in part the custom of the age
and in part a physical failing, and it must have been excessive to be
distinguished in that age. In the Latin-English of Dr. Johnson, "It is not
unlikely that Addison was first seduced to excess by the manumission which
he obtained from the servile timidity of his sober hours." This failing
must be regarded as a blot on his fame.

He was the most accomplished writer of his own age, and in elegance of
style superior to all who had gone before him.

In the words of his epitaph, his prose papers "encouraged the good and
reformed the improvident, tamed the wicked, and in some degree made them
in love with virtue." His poetry is chiefly of historical value, in that
it represents so distinctly the Artificial School; but it is now very
little read. His drama entitled _Cato_ was modelled upon the French drama
of the classical school, with its singular preservation of the unities.
But his contributions to _The Spectator_ and other periodicals are
historically of great value. Here he abandons the artificial school;
nothing in his delineations of character is simply statuesque or
pictorial. He has done for us what the historians have left undone. They
present processions of automata moving to the sound of trumpet and drum,
ushered by Black Rod or Garter King-at-arms; but in Addison we find that
Promethean heat which relumes their life; the galvanic motion becomes a
living stride; the puppet eyes emit fire; the automata are men. Thus it
is, tha