The spacious firmament on high.

HIS PERSON AND CHARACTER.—­In closing this brief sketch of Addison, a few words are necessary as to his personality, and an estimate of his powers.  In 1716 he married the Countess-Dowager of Warwick, and parted with independence to live with a coronet.  His married life was not happy.  The lady was cold and exacting; and, it must be confessed, the poet loved a bottle at the club-room or tavern better than the luxuries of Holland House; and not infrequently this conviviality led him to excess.  He died in 1719, in his forty-eighth year, and made a truly pious end.  He wished, he said, to atone for any injuries he had done to others, and sent for his sceptical and dissolute step-son, Lord Warwick, to show him how a Christian could die.  A monument has been erected to his memory in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, and the closing words of the inscription upon it calls him “the honor and delight of the English nation.”

As a man, he was grave and retiring:  he had a high opinion of his own powers; in company he was extremely diffident; in the main, he was moral, just, and consistent.  His intemperance was in part the custom of the age and in part a physical failing, and it must have been excessive to be distinguished in that age.  In the Latin-English of Dr. Johnson, “It is not unlikely that Addison was first seduced to excess by the manumission which he obtained from the servile timidity of his sober hours.”  This failing must be regarded as a blot on his fame.

He was the most accomplished writer of his own age, and in elegance of style superior to all who had gone before him.

In the words of his epitaph, his prose papers “encouraged the good and reformed the improvident, tamed the wicked, and in some degree made them in love with virtue.”  His poetry is chiefly of historical value, in that it represents so distinctly the Artificial School; but it is now very little read.  His drama entitled Cato was modelled upon the French drama of the classical school, with its singular preservation of the unities.  But his contributions to The Spectator and other periodicals are historically of great value.  Here he abandons the artificial school; nothing in his delineations of character is simply statuesque or pictorial.  He has done for us what the historians have left undone.  They present processions of automata moving to the sound of trumpet and drum, ushered by Black Rod or Garter King-at-arms; but in Addison we find that Promethean heat which relumes their life; the galvanic motion becomes a living stride; the puppet eyes emit fire; the automata are men.  Thus it is, that, although The Spectator, once read as a model of taste and style, has become antiquated and has been superseded, it must still be resorted to for its life-like portraiture of men and women, manners and customs, and will be found truer and more valuable for these than history itself.