support while qualifying himself on the continent by study of modern languages, and otherwise, for diplomatic service.  It dropped at the King’s death, in the spring of 1702, and Addison was cast upon his own resources; but he throve, and lived to become an Under-Secretary of State in days that made Prior an Ambassador, and rewarded with official incomes Congreve, Rowe, Hughes, Philips, Stepney, and others.  Throughout his honourable career prudence dictated to Addison more or less of dependence on the friendship of the strong.  An honest friend of the popular cause, he was more ready to sell than give his pen to it; although the utmost reward would at no time have tempted him to throw his conscience into the bargain.  The good word of Halifax obtained him from Godolphin, in 1704, the Government order for a poem on the Battle of Blenheim, with immediate earnest of payment for it in the office of a Commissioner of Appeal in the Excise worth L200 a year.  For this substantial reason Addison wrote the ‘Campaign’; and upon its success, he obtained the further reward of an Irish Under-secretaryship.

The ‘Campaign’ is not a great poem.  Reams of ‘Campaigns’ would not have made Addison’s name, what it now is, a household word among his countrymen.  The ‘Remarks on several Parts of Italy, &c.,’ in which Addison followed up the success of his ‘Campaign’ with notes of foreign travel, represent him visiting Italy as ‘Virgil’s Italy,’ the land of the great writers in Latin, and finding scenery or customs of the people eloquent of them at every turn.  He crammed his pages with quotation from Virgil and Horace, Ovid and Tibullus, Propertius, Lucan, Juvenal and Martial, Lucretius, Statius, Claudian, Silius Italicus, Ausonius, Seneca, Phaedrus, and gave even to his ‘understanding age’ an overdose of its own physic for all ills of literature.  He could not see a pyramid of jugglers standing on each other’s shoulders, without observing how it explained a passage in Claudian which shows that the Venetians were not the inventors of this trick.  But Addison’s short original accounts of cities and states that he saw are pleasant as well as sensible, and here and there, as in the space he gives to a report of St. Anthony’s sermon to the fishes, or his short account of a visit to the opera at Venice, there are indications of the humour that was veiled, not crushed, under a sense of classical propriety.  In his account of the political state of Naples and in other passages, there is mild suggestion also of the love of liberty, a part of the fine nature of Addison which had been slightly warmed by contact with the generous enthusiasm of Steele.  In his poetical letter to Halifax written during his travels Addison gave the sum of his prose volume when he told how he felt himself

                         ... on classic ground. 
  For here the Muse so oft her harp hath strung,
  That not a mountain rears its head unsung;
  Renown’d in verse each shady thicket grows,
  And ev’ry stream in heav’nly numbers flows.