He was not only fitting himself for public service, but for that delicate portraiture of manners which was later to become his distinctive work.  Clarendon had already drawn a series of lifelike portraits of men of action in the stormy period of the Revolution:  Addison was to sketch the society of his time with a touch at once delicate and firm; to exhibit its life in those aspects which emphasize individual humor and personal quality, against a carefully wrought background of habit, manners, usage, and social condition.  The habit of observation and the wide acquaintance with cultivated and elegant social life which was a necessary part of the training for the work which was later to appear in the pages of the Spectator, were perhaps the richest educational results of these years of travel and study; for Addison the official is a comparatively obscure figure, but Addison the writer is one of the most admirable and attractive figures in English history.

Addison returned to England in 1703 with clouded prospects.  The accession of Queen Anne had been followed by the dismissal of the Whigs from office; his pension was stopped, his opportunity of advancement gone, and his father dead.  The skies soon brightened, however:  the support of the Whigs became necessary to the Government; the brilliant victory of Blenheim shed lustre not only on Marlborough, but on the men with whom he was politically affiliated; and there was great dearth of poetic ability in the Tory ranks at the very moment when a notable achievement called for brave and splendid verse.  Lord Godolphin, that easy-going and eminently successful politician of whom Charles the Second once shrewdly said that he was “never in the way and never out of it,” was directed to Addison in this emergency; and the story goes that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, afterward Lord Carleton, who was sent to express to the needy scholar the wishes of the Government, found him lodged in a garret over a small shop.  The result of this memorable embassy from politics to literature was ‘The Campaign’:  an eminently successful poem of the formal, “occasional” order, which celebrated the victor of Blenheim with tact and taste, pleased the ministry, delighted the public, and brought reputation and fortune to its unknown writer.  Its excellence is in skillful avoidance of fulsome adulation, in the exclusion of the well-worn classical allusions, and in a straightforward celebration of those really great qualities in Marlborough which set his military career in brilliant contrast with his private life.  The poem closed with a simile which took the world by storm:—­

     “So when an angel, by divine command,
     With rising tempests shakes a guilty land,
     (Such as of late o’er pale Britannia passed,)
     Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;
     And, pleased the Almighty’s orders to perform,
     Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.”