ADDISON
So, where our wide Numidian wastes extend,
Sudden, th’ impetuous hurricanes descend,
Wheel through the air, in circling eddies play,
Tear up the sands, and sweep whole plains away,
The helpless traveller, with wild surprise,
Sees the dry desert all around him rise,
And smother’d in the dusty whirlwind dies,
we cannot help imagining the thrill in the crowded theatre, the feathers nodding emphatically on the ladies’ heads, the gentlemen leaning forward to tap their canes, and every one exclaiming to his neighbour how vastly fine it is and crying “Bravo!” But how can we be excited? And so with Bishop Hurd and his notes—his “finely observed”, his “wonderfully exact, both in the sentiment and expression”, his serene confidence that when “the present humour of idolising Shakespeare is over”, the time will come when Cato is “supremely admired by all candid and judicious critics”. This is all very amusing and productive of pleasant fancies, both as to the faded frippery of our ancestors’ minds and the bold opulence of our own. But it is not the intercourse of equals, let alone that other kind of intercourse, which as it makes us contemporary with the author, persuades us that his object is our own. Occasionally in Cato one may pick up a few lines that are not obsolete; but for the most part the tragedy which Dr. Johnson thought “unquestionably the noblest production of Addison’s genius” has become collector’s literature.
Perhaps most readers approach the essays also with
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