promoted, for several years, from office to office, as he
was, till the fall of the administration to which he was
attached. In 1706 he became one of the under-secretaries of
state, serving first under Sir Charles Hedges, who belonged to
the Tory section of the government, and afterwards under Lord
Sunderland, Marlborough's son-in-law, and a zealous follower
of Addison's early patron, Somers. The work of this office,
however, like that of the commissionership, must often have
admitted of performance by deputy; for in 1707, the Whigs
having become stronger, Lord Halifax was sent on a mission
to the elector of Hanover; and, besides taking Vanbrugh the
dramatist with him as king-at-arms, he selected Addison as his
secretary. In 1708 Addison entered parliament, sitting at
first for Lostwithiel, but afterwards for Malmesbury, which
he represented from 1710 till his death. Here unquestionably
he did fail. What part he may have taken in the details
of business we are not informed; but he was always a silent
member, unless it be true that he once attempted to speak
and sat down in confusion. In 1708 Lord Wharton, the father
of the notorious duke, having been named lord-lieutenant of
Ireland, Addison became his secretary, receiving also an
appointment as keeper of records. This event happened only
about a year and a half before the dismissal of the ministry.
But there are letters showing that Addison made himself
acceptable to some of the best and most distinguished persons
in Dublin; and he escaped without having any quarrel with
Swift, his acquaintance with whom had begun some time before.
In his literary history those years of official service are
almost a blank, till we approach their close. Besides furnishing
a prologue to Steele's comedy of The Tender Husband (1705),
he admittedly gave him some assistance in its composition;
he defended the government in an anonymous pamphlet on The
Present State of the War (1707); he united compliments
to the all-powerful Marlborough with indifferent attempts
at lyrical poetry in his opera of Rosamond; and during
the last few months of his tenure of office he contributed
largely to the Tatler. His entrance on this new field
nearly coincides with the beginning of a new period in his
life. Even the coalition-ministry of Godolphin was too
Whiggish for the taste of Queen Anne; and the Tories, the
favourites of the court, gained, both in parliamentary power
and in popularity out of doors, by a combination of lucky
accidents, dexterous management and divisions and double-dealing
among their adversaries. The real failure of the prosecution
of Addison's old friend Sacheverell completed the ruin of
the Whigs; and in August 1710 an entire revolution in the
ministry had been completed. The Tory administration which
succeeded kept its place till the queen's death in 1714,
and Addison was thus left to devote four of the best years
of his life, from his thirty-ninth year to his forty-third,
to occupations less lucrative than those in which his time
had recently been frittered away, but much more conducive to
the extension of his own fame and to the benefit of English
literature. Although our information as to his pecuniary
affairs is very scanty, we are entitled to believe that he
was now independent of literary labour. He speaks, in an
extant paper, of having had (but lost) property in the West
Indies; and he is understood to have inherited something
from a younger brother, who had been governor of Madras. In
1711 he purchased, for L. 10,000, the estate of Bilton, near
Rugby--the place which afterwards became the residence of Mr
Apperley, better known by his assumed name of ``Nimrod.''
During those four years he produced a few political
writings. Soon after the fall of the ministry, he started
the Whig Examiner in opposition to the Tory Examiner, then
conducted by Prior, and afterwards the vehicle of Swift's most
vehement invectives against the party he had once belonged
to. These are certainly the most ill-natured of Addison's
writings, but they are neither lively nor vigorous, and
the paper died after five numbers (14th September to 12th
October 1710). There is more spirit in his allegorical
pamphlet, The Trial and Conviction of Count Tariff.
But from the autumn of 1710 till the end of 1714 his principal
employment was the composition of his celebrated periodical
essays. The honour of inventing the plan of such compositions,
as well as that of first carrying the idea into execution,
belongs to Richard Steele, who had been a schoolfellow of
Addison at the Charterhouse, continued to be on intimate
terms with him afterwards and attached himself with his
characteristic ardour to the same political party. When,
in April 1709, Steele published the first number of the
Tatler, Addison was in Dublin, and knew nothing of the
design. He is said to have detected his friend's authorship
only by recognizing, in the sixth number, a critical remark
which he remembered having himself communicated to Steele.
Shortly afterwards he began to furnish hints and suggestions,
assisted occasionally and finally wrote regularly. According
to Mr Aitken (Life of Steele, i. 248), he contributed 42
out of the total of 271 numbers, and was part-author of 36
more. The Tatler exhibited, in more ways than one, symptoms
of being an experiment. For some time the projector, imitating
the news-sheets in form, thought it prudent to give, in
each number, news in addition to the essay; and there was a
want, both of unity and of correct finishing, in the putting
together of the literary materials. Addison's contributions,
in particular, are in many places as lively as anything he
ever wrote; and his style, in its more familiar moods at
least, had been fully formed before he returned from the
continent. But, as compared with his later pieces, these
are only what the painter's loose studies and sketches are
to the landscapes which he afterwards constructs out of
them. In his invention of incidents and characters, one
thought after another is hastily used and hastily dismissed,
as if he were putting his own powers to the test or trying the
effect of various kinds of objects on his readers; his most
ambitious flights, in the shape of allegories and the like,
are stiff and inanimate; and his favourite field of literary
criticism is touched so slightly, as to show that he still
wanted confidence in the taste and knowledge of the Public.
The Tatler was dropped in January 1711, but only to be
followed by the Spectator, which was begun on the 1st day of
March, and appeared every week-day till the 6th day of December
1712. It had then completed the 555 numbers usually collected
in its first seven volumes, and of these Addison wrote 274
to Steele's 236. He co-operated with Steele constantly from
the very opening of the series; and they devoted their whole
space to the essays. They relied, with a confidence which
the extraordinary popularity of the work fully justified,
on their power of exciting the interest of a wide audience
by pictures and reflexions drawn from a field which embraced
the whole compass of ordinary life and ordinary knowledge,
no kind of practical themes being positively excluded except
such as were political, and all literary topics being held
admissible, for which it seemed possible to command attention
from persons of average taste and information. A seeming
unity was given to the undertaking, and curiosity and interest
awakened on behalf of the conductors, by the happy invention
of the Spectator's Club, for which Steele made the first
sketch. The figure of Sir Roger de Coverley, however, the best
even in the opening group, is the only one that was afterwards
elaborately depicted; and Addison was the author of most of the
papers in which his oddities and amiabilities are so admirably
delineated. Six essays are by Steele, who gives Sir Roger's
love-story, and one paper by Budgell describes a hunting party.
To Addison the Spectator owed the most natural and elegant,
if not the most original, of its humorous sketches of human
character and social eccentricities, its good-humoured satires
on ridiculous features in manners and on corrupt symptoms in
public taste; these topics, however, making up a department
in which Steele was fairly on a level with his more famous
co-adjutor. But Steele had neither learning, nor taste, nor
critical acuteness sufficient to qualify him for enriching
the series with such literary disquisitions as those which
Addison insinuated so often into the lighter matter of his
essays, and of which he gave an elaborate specimen in his
criticism on Paradise Lost. Still farther beyond the powers
of Steele were those speculations on the theory of literature
and of the processes of thought analogous to it, which, in
the essays ``On the Pleasures of the Imagination,'' Addison
prosecuted, not, indeed, with much of philosophical depth,
but with a sagacity and comprehensiveness which we shall
undervalue much unless we remember how little of philosophy
was to be found in any critical views previously propounded in
England. To Addison, further, belong those essays which (most
frequently introduced in regular alternation in the papers
of Saturday) rise into the region of moral and religious
meditation, and tread the elevated ground with a step so graceful
as to allure the reader irresistibly to follow; sometimes, as
in the ``Walk through Westminster Abbey,', enlivening solemn
thought by gentle sportiveness; sometimes flowing on with an
uninterrupted sedateness of didactic eloquence, and sometimes
shrouding sacred truths in the veil of ingenious allegory, as
in the ``Vision of Mirza.'' While, in short, the Spectator,
if Addison had not taken part in it, would probably have
been as lively and humorous as it was, and not less popular
in its own day, it would have wanted some of its strongest
claims on the respect of posterity, by being at once lower
in its moral tone, far less abundant in literary knowledge
and much less vigorous and expanded in thinking. In point of
style, again, the two friends resemble each other so closely
as to be hardly distinguishable, when both are dealing with
familiar objects, and writing in a key not rising above that
of conversation. But in the higher tones of thought and
composition Addison showed a mastery of language raising him
very decisively, not above Steele only, but above all his
contemporaries. Indeed, it may safely be said, that no one,
in any age of English literature, has united, so strikingly
as he did, the colloquial grace and ease which mark the
style of an accomplished gentleman, with the power of soaring
into a strain of expression nobly and eloquently dignified.
On the cessation of the Spectator, Steele set on foot the
Guardian, which, started in March 1713, came to an end in
October, with its 175th number. To this series Addison gave 53
papers, being a very frequent writer during the latter half
of its progress. None of his essays here aim so high as the
best of those in the Spectator; but he often exhibits both
his cheerful and well-balanced humour and his earnest desire
to inculcate sound principles of literary judgment. In the
last six months of the year 1714, the Spectator received its
eighth and last volume; for which Steele appears not to have
written at all, and Addison to have contributed 24 of the 80
papers. Most of these form, in the unbroken seriousness both
of their topics and of their manner, a contrast to the majority
of his essays in the earlier volumes; but several of them, both
