he subsequently received from the same ministry. But there is no reason for believing that he was more careless than other public servants in his time; and the charge of incompetency as a man of business, which has been brought so positively against him, cannot easily be true as to this first period of his official career. Indeed, the specific allegations refer exclusively to the last years of his life; and, if he had not really shown practical ability in the period now in question, it is not easy to see how he, a man destitute alike of wealth, of social or fashionable liveliness and of family interest, could have been 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 £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
