lived from earliest manhood in a polite world; the tone of the drawing-room and the coffee-house came naturally to him; it suited his gifts, and they, in their turn, raised and adorned it. Everything that Addison wished to say, grave or lively, could be said in this tone. As Johnson finely says of him, Addison "taught a succession of writers to bring elegance and gaiety to the aid of goodness." But Johnson had grown up to middle-life, a poor and recluse student struggling with adversity; "toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol"—he had known all of them except the last; and during the long years before the dweller in Grub Street became the oracle of society, his brooding mind had communed deeply with a scholar's natural friends, the great prose-writers of the preceding century. He used to say that Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy was the only book which ever got him out of bed two hours earlier than usual; another of his favourites was Sir Thomas Browne. These studies could not but affect his style; they furnished to it an element which tempers the tradition of Addison and Pope; we see it in the lofty diction, the ampler periods, and, generally, in that tone which suggests the study rather than the drawing-room. To make this clearer, let us place side by side a short passage from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and a like specimen of Addison. Here is Burton:—"Every man knows his own but not others' defects and miseries; and 'tis the nature of all men still to reflect upon themselves and their own misfortunes,
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