“Does not the chamber look quite dark?” says Addison, surveying it, “after the glorious appearance and disappearance of that gracious messenger?  Why, he illuminated the whole room.  Your scarlet, Mr. Esmond, will bear any light; but this threadbare old coat of mine, how very worn it looked under the glare of that splendor!  I wonder whether they will do anything for me,” he continued.  “When I came out of Oxford into the world, my patrons promised me great things; and you see where their promises have landed me, in a lodging up two pair of stairs, with a sixpenny dinner from the cook’s shop.  Well, I suppose this promise will go after the others, and fortune will jilt me, as the jade has been doing any time these seven years.  ‘I puff the prostitute away,’” says he, smiling, and blowing a cloud out of his pipe.  “There is no hardship in poverty, Esmond, that is not bearable; no hardship even in honest dependence that an honest man may not put up with.  I came out of the lap of Alma Mater, puffed up with her praises of me, and thinking to make a figure in the world with the parts and learning which had got me no small name in our college.  The world is the ocean, and Isis and Charwell are but little drops, of which the sea takes no account.  My reputation ended a mile beyond Maudlin Tower; no one took note of me; and I learned this at least, to bear up against evil fortune with a cheerful heart.  Friend Dick hath made a figure in the world, and has passed me in the race long ago.  What matters a little name or a little fortune?  There is no fortune that a philosopher cannot endure.  I have been not unknown as a scholar, and yet forced to live by turning bear-leader, and teaching a boy to spell.  What then?  The life was not pleasant, but possible—­the bear was bearable.  Should this venture fail, I will go back to Oxford; and some day, when you are a general, you shall find me a curate in a cassock and bands, and I shall welcome your honor to my cottage in the country, and to a mug of penny ale.  ’Tis not poverty that’s the hardest to bear, or the least happy lot in life,” says Mr. Addison, shaking the ash out of his pipe.  “See, my pipe is smoked out.  Shall we have another bottle?  I have still a couple in the cupboard, and of the right sort.  No more?—­let us go abroad and take a turn on the Mall, or look in at the theatre and see Dick’s comedy.  ’Tis not a masterpiece of wit; but Dick is a good fellow, though he doth not set the Thames on fire.”

Within a month after this day, Mr. Addison’s ticket had come up a prodigious prize in the lottery of life.  All the town was in an uproar of admiration of his poem, the “Campaign,” which Dick Steele was spouting at every coffee-house in Whitehall and Covent Garden.  The wits on the other side of Temple Bar saluted him at once as the greatest poet the world had seen for ages; the people huzza’ed for Marlborough and for Addison, and, more than this, the party in power provided for the meritorious poet,