of the purest Latin authors as the types of a good style or proper method in the treatment of a subject.  Young Addison found nothing new to him in the temper of his University, and was influenced, as in his youth every one must and should be, by the prevalent tone of opinion in cultivated men.  But he had, and felt that he had, wit and genius of his own.  His sensitive mind was simply and thoroughly religious, generous in its instincts, and strengthened in its nobler part by close communion with the mind of his friend Steele.

May we not think of the two friends together in a College chamber, Addison of slender frame, with features wanting neither in dignity nor in refinement, Steele of robust make, with the radiant ‘short face’ of the ‘Spectator’, by right of which he claimed for that worthy his admission to the Ugly Club.  Addison reads Dryden, in praise of whom he wrote his earliest known verse; or reads endeavours of his own, which his friend Steele warmly applauds.  They dream together of the future; Addison sage, but speculative, and Steele practical, if rash.  Each is disposed to find God in the ways of life, and both avoid that outward show of irreligion, which, after the recent Civil Wars, remains yet common in the country, as reaction from an ostentatious piety which laid on burdens of restraint; a natural reaction which had been intensified by the base influence of a profligate King.  Addison, bred among the preachers, has a little of the preacher’s abstract tone, when talk between the friends draws them at times into direct expression of the sacred sense of life which made them one.

Apart also from the mere accidents of his childhood, a speculative turn in Addison is naturally stronger than in Steele.  He relishes analysis of thought.  Steele came as a boy from the rough world of shame and sorrow; his great, kindly heart is most open to the realities of life, the state and prospects of his country, direct personal sympathies; actual wrongs, actual remedies.  Addison is sensitive, and has among strangers the reserve of speech and aspect which will pass often for coldness and pride, but is, indeed, the shape taken by modesty in thoughtful men whose instinct it is to speculate and analyze, and who become self-conscious, not through conceit, but because they cannot help turning their speculations also on themselves.  Steele wholly comes out of himself as his heart hastens to meet his friend.  He lives in his surroundings, and, in friendly intercourse, fixes his whole thought on the worth of his companion.  Never abating a jot of his ideal of a true and perfect life, or ceasing to uphold the good because he cannot live to the full height of his own argument, he is too frank to conceal the least or greatest of his own shortcomings.  Delight and strength of a friendship like that between Steele and Addison are to be found, as many find them, in the charm and use of a compact where characters differ so much that one lays open as it were a fresh world to the other, and each draws from the other aid of forces which the friendship makes his own.  But the deep foundations of this friendship were laid in the religious earnestness that was alike in both; and in religious earnestness are laid also the foundations of this book, its Monument.