for their exposition of Milton may be said to point the way to a new quality of literary judgment and a new order of literary comment.  These papers mark, finally, the beginnings of the English novel; for they contain a series of character-studies full of insight, delicacy of drawing, true feeling, and sureness of touch.  Addison was not content to satirize the follies, attack the vices, and picture the manners of his times:  he created a group of figures which stand out as distinctly as those which were drawn more than a century later by the hand of Thackeray, our greatest painter of manners.  De Foe had not yet published the first of the great modern novels of incident and adventure in ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ and Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett were unborn or unknown, when Addison was sketching Sir Roger de Coverley and Will Honeycomb, and filling in the background with charming studies of life in London and in the country.  The world has instinctively selected Sir Roger de Coverley as the truest of all the creations of Addison’s imagination; and it sheds clear light on the fineness of Addison’s nature that among the four characters in fiction whom English readers have agreed to accept as typical gentlemen,—­Don Quixote, Sir Roger de Coverley, Henry Esmond, and Colonel Newcombe,—­the old English baronet holds a secure place.

Finished in style, but genuinely human in feeling, betraying the nicest choice of words and the most studied care for elegant and effective arrangement, and yet penetrated by geniality, enlivened by humor, elevated by high moral aims, often using the dangerous weapons of irony and satire, and yet always well-mannered and kindly,—­these papers reveal the sensitive nature of Addison and the delicate but thoroughly tempered art which he had at his command.

Rarely has literature of so high an order had such instant success; for the popularity of the Spectator has been rivaled in English literature only by that of the Waverley novels or of the novels of Dickens.  Its influence was felt not only in the sentiment of the day, and in the crowd of imitators which followed in its wake, but also across the Channel.  In Germany, especially, the genius and methods of Addison made a deep and lasting impression.

No man could reach such eminence in the first quarter of the last century without being tempted to try his hand at play-writing; and the friendly fortune which seemed to serve Addison at every turn reached its climax in the applause which greeted the production of ‘Cato.’  The motive of this tragedy, constructed on what were then held to be classic lines, is found in the two lines of the Prologue:  it was an endeavor to portray

     “A brave man struggling in the storms of fate,
     And greatly falling with a falling State.”