“I soon after felt a breeze of whispers rushing by my ear; for those, being of a soft and gentle substance, immediately liquified in the warm wind that blew across our cabin.  These were soon followed by syllables and short words, and at length by entire sentences, that melted sooner or later, as they were more or less congealed; so that we now heard everything that had been spoken during the whole three weeks that we had been silent; if I may use that expression.

“It was now very early in the morning, and yet, to my surprise, I heard somebody say, ’Sir John, it is midnight, and time for the ship’s crew to go to bed.’  This I knew to be the pilot’s voice, and upon recollecting myself I concluded that he had spoken these words to me some days before, though I could not hear them before the present thaw.  My reader will easily imagine how the whole crew was amazed to hear every man talking, and seeing no man opening his mouth.”

When the confusion of voices was pretty well over Sir John proposed a visit to the Dutch cabin, and so they set out.  “At about half a mile’s distance from our cabin, we heard the groanings of a bear, which at first startled us.  But upon inquiry we were informed by some of our company, that he was dead, and now lay in salt, having been killed upon that very spot about a fortnight before, in the time of the frost.”

Having reached the Dutch cabin the company was almost stunned by the confusion of sounds, and could not make out a word for about half an hour.  This, Sir John thinks, was because the Dutch language being so much harsher than ours it “wanted more time than ours to melt and become audible.”

Next they visited the French cabin and here Sir John says, “I was convinced of an error into which I had before fallen.  For I had fancied, that for the freezing of the sound, it was necessary for it to be wrapped up, and, as it were, preserved in breath.  But I found my mistake, when I heard the sound of a kit playing a minuet over our heads.”

The kit was a small violin to the sound of which the Frenchmen had danced to amuse themselves while they were deaf or dumb.  How it was that the kit could be heard during the frost and yet still be heard in the thaw we are not told.  Sir John gave very good reasons, says Addison, but as they are somewhat long “I pass over them in silence."*

Tatler, 254.

Addison and Steele carried on the Tatler for two years, then it was stopped to make way for a far more famous paper called the Spectator.  But meanwhile the Whigs fell from power and Addison lost his Government post.  In twelve months, he said to a friend, he lost a place worth two thousand pounds a year, an estate in the Indies, and, worst of all, his lady-love.  Who the lady-love was is not known, but doubtless she was some great lady ready enough to marry a Secretary of State, but not a poor scribbler.

As Addison had now no Government post, it left him all the more time for writing, and his essays in the Spectator are what we chiefly remember him by.