Of the famous wits of that age, who have rendered Queen Anne’s reign illustrious, and whose works will be in all Englishmen’s hands in ages yet to come, Mr. Esmond saw many, but at public places chiefly; never having a great intimacy with any of them, except with honest Dick Steele and Mr. Addison, who parted company with Esmond, however, when that gentleman became a declared Tory, and lived on close terms with the leading persons of that party.  Addison kept himself to a few friends, and very rarely opened himself except in their company.  A man more upright and conscientious than he it was not possible to find in public life, and one whose conversation was so various, easy, and delightful.  Writing now in my mature years, I own that I think Addison’s politics were the right, and were my time to come over again, I would be a Whig in England and not a Tory; but with people that take a side in politics, ’tis men rather than principles that commonly bind them.  A kindness or a slight puts a man under one flag or the other, and he marches with it to the end of the campaign.  Esmond’s master in war was injured by Marlborough, and hated him:  and the lieutenant fought the quarrels of his leader.  Webb coming to London was used as a weapon by Marlborough’s enemies (and true steel he was, that honest chief); nor was his aide-de-camp, Mr. Esmond, an unfaithful or unworthy partisan.  ’Tis strange here, and on a foreign soil, and in a land that is independent in all but the name, (for that the North American colonies shall remain dependants on yonder little island for twenty years more, I never can think,) to remember how the nation at home seemed to give itself up to the domination of one or other aristocratic party, and took a Hanoverian king, or a French one, according as either prevailed.  And while the Tories, the October club gentlemen, the High Church parsons that held by the Church of England, were for having a Papist king, for whom many of their Scottish and English leaders, firm churchmen all, laid down their lives with admirable loyalty and devotion; they were governed by men who had notoriously no religion at all, but used it as they would use any opinion for the purpose of forwarding their own ambition.  The Whigs, on the other hand, who professed attachment to religion and liberty too, were compelled to send to Holland or Hanover for a monarch around whom they could rally.  A strange series of compromises is that English History; compromise of principle, compromise of party, compromise of worship!  The lovers of English freedom and independence submitted their religious consciences to an Act of Parliament; could not consolidate their liberty without sending to Zell or the Hague for a king to live under; and could not find amongst the proudest people in the world a man speaking their own language, and understanding their laws, to govern them.  The Tory and High Church patriots were ready to die in defence of a Papist family that had sold us to France; the great Whig nobles, the sturdy republican