Both Addison and Steele wrote verse at College.  From each of them we have a poem written at nearly the same age:  Addison’s in April, 1694, Steele’s early in 1695.  Addison drew from literature a metrical ’Account of the Greatest English Poets.’  Steele drew from life the grief of England at the death of William’s Queen, which happened on the 28th of December, 1694.

Addison, writing in that year, and at the age of about 23, for a College friend,

  A short account of all the Muse-possest,
  That, down from Chaucer’s days to Dryden’s times
  Have spent their noble rage in British rhymes,

was so far under the influence of French critical authority, as accepted by most cultivators of polite literature at Oxford and wherever authority was much respected, that from ’An Account of the Greatest English Poets’ he omitted Shakespeare.  Of Chaucer he then knew no better than to say, what might have been said in France, that

... age has rusted what the Poet writ, Worn out his language, and obscured his wit:  In vain he jests in his unpolish’d strain, And tries to make his readers laugh in vain.  Old Spenser next, warm’d with poetic rage, In ancient tales amused a barb’rous age; But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore, Can charm an understanding age no more.

It cost Addison some trouble to break loose from the critical cobweb of an age of periwigs and patches, that accounted itself ‘understanding,’ and the grand epoch of our Elizabethan literature, ‘barbarous.’  Rymer, one of his critics, had said, that

  ’in the neighing of an horse, or in the growling of a mastiff, there
  is a meaning, there is as lively expression, and, may I say, more
  humanity than many times in the tragical flights of Shakespeare.’

Addison, with a genius of his own helped to free movement by the sympathies of Steele, did break through the cobwebs of the critics; but he carried off a little of their web upon his wings.  We see it when in the ‘Spectator’ he meets the prejudices of an ‘understanding age,’ and partly satisfies his own, by finding reason for his admiration of ’Chevy Chase’ and the ‘Babes in the Wood’, in their great similarity to works of Virgil.  We see it also in some of the criticisms which accompany his admirable working out of the resolve to justify his true natural admiration of the poetry of Milton, by showing that ‘Paradise Lost’ was planned after the manner of the ancients, and supreme even in its obedience to the laws of Aristotle.  In his ‘Spectator’ papers on Imagination he but half escapes from the conventions of his time, which detested the wildness of a mountain pass, thought Salisbury Plain one of the finest prospects in England, planned parks with circles and straight lines of trees, despised our old cathedrals for their ‘Gothic’ art, and saw perfection in the Roman architecture, and the round dome of St. Paul’s.  Yet in these and all such papers of his we find that Addison had broken through the weaker prejudices of the day, opposing them with sound natural thought of his own.  Among cultivated readers, lesser moulders of opinion, there can be no doubt that his genius was only the more serviceable in amendment of the tastes of his own time, for friendly understanding and a partial sharing of ideas for which it gave itself no little credit.