sion. Addison's friends and neighbours found him a modest, honourable, sweet-tempered gentleman; and Steele, whom he had affronted, wrote these generous words: "You can seldom get him to the tavern; but when once he is arrived to his pint, and begins to look about him, you admire a thousand things in him which before lay buried."
This seems to me a singularly pleasant thing to say about anybody. Were I coveting praise, this is the form I'd like the praise to take.
The pressure of disparagement, which is one result of the cooling of our blood after the fever-heat of war, is lowering our enthusiasms, thinning our sympathies, and giving us nothing very dazzling in the way of enlightenment. Americans are less critical than Englishmen, who so value their birthright of free speech that censure of public men has become a habit, a game of hazard (pulling planks out of the ship of state),
