a wife, Jane, daughter of Dr. Nathaniel Gulston, and sister of William Gulston, Bishop of Bristol, by whom he had six children, three sons and three daughters, all born at Milston. In 1675 he was made a prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral and Chaplain-in-Ordinary to the King; and in 1683 he was promoted to the Deanery of Lichfield, as a reward for his services at Tangier, and out of consideration of losses which he had sustained by a fire at Milston. His literary reputation stood high, and it is said that he would have been made a bishop, if his old zeal for legitimacy had not prompted him to manifest in the Convocation of 1689 his hostility to the Revolution. He died in 1703. Lancelot was a writer at once voluminous and lively. In the latter part of his life he produced several treatises on theological subjects, the most popular of which was called An Introduction to the Sacrament. This book passed through many editions. The doctrine it contains leans rather to the Low Church side. But much the most characteristic of his writings were his works on Mahommedanism and Judaism, the results of his studies during his residence in Barbary. These show not only considerable industry and research and powers of shrewd observation, but that genuine literary faculty which enables a writer to leave upon a subject of a general nature the impression of his own character. While there is nothing forced or exaggerated in his historical style, a vein of allegory runs through the narrative of the Revolutions of the Kingdoms of Fez and Morocco, which must have had a piquant flavour for the orthodox English reader of that day. Recollections of the Protectorate would have taken nothing of its vividness from the por trait of the Moorish priest who "began to grow into reputation with the people by reason of his high pretensions to piety and fervent zeal for their law, illustrated by a stubborn rigidity of conversation and outward sanctity of life." When the Zeriffe, with ambitious designs on the throne, sent his sons on a pilgrimage to Mecca, the religious buffooneries practised by the young men must have recalled to the reader circumstances more recent and personal than those which the author was apparently describing. "Much was the reverence and reputation of holiness which they thereby acquired among the superstitious people, who could hardly be kept from kissing their garments and adoring them as saints, while they failed not in their parts, but acted as much devotion as high contemplative looks, deep sighs, tragical gestures, and other passionate interjections of holiness could express. 'Allah, allah!' was their doleful note, their sustenance the people's alms." And when these impostors had inveigled the King of Fez into a religious war, the description of those who "mistrusted their own safety and began, but too late, to repent their approving of an armed hypocrisy" was not more applicable to the rulers of Barbary than to the people of England. "Puffed up with their successes, they forgot their obedience, and these saints denied the king the fifth part of their spoils . . . By which it appeared that they took up arms, not out of love for their country and zeal for their religion, but out of desire of rule." There is, indeed, nothing in these utterances which need have prevented the writer from consistently promoting the Revolution of 1688; yet his principles seem to have carried him far in the opposite direction; and it is inter esting to remember that the assertor in Convocation of the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right was the father of the author of the Whig Examiner and the Freeholder. However decidedly Joseph may have dissented from his father's political creed, we know that he entertained admiration and respect for his memory, and that death alone prevented him from completing the monument afterwards erected in Lancelot's honour in Lichfield Cathedral. Of Addison's mother nothing of importance is recorded. His second brother, Gulston, became Governor of Fort St. George, in the East Indies; and the third, Lancelot, followed in Joseph's footsteps so far as to obtain a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. His sisters, Jane and Anna, died young; but Dorothy was twice married, and Swift records in her honour that she was "a kind of wit, and very like her brother." We may readily believe that a writer so lively as Lancelot would have had clever children, but Steele was perhaps carried away by the zeal of friendship or the love of epigram when he said in his dedication to the Drummer: "Mr. Dean Addison left behind him four children, each of whom, for excellent talents and singular perfections, was as much above the ordinary world as their brother Joseph was above them." But that Steele had a sincere admiration for the whole family is sufficiently shown by his using them as an example in one of his early Tatlers: “I remember among all my acquaintance but one man whom I have thought to live with his children with equanimity and a good grace. He had three sons and one daughter, whom he bred with all the care imaginable in a liberal and ingenuous way. I have often heard him say he had the weakness to love one much better than the other, but that he took as much pains to correct that as any other criminal passion that could arise in his mind. His method was to make it the only pretension in his children to his favour to be kind to each other, and he would tell them that he who was the best brother he would reckon the best son. This turned their thoughts into an emulation for the superiority in kind and tender affection towards each other. The boys behaved themselves very early with a manly friendship; and their sister, instead of the gross familiarities and impertinent freedoms in behaviour usual in other houses, was always treated by them with as much complaisance as any other young lady of their acquaintance. It was an unspeakable pleasure to visit or sit at a meal in that family. I have often seen the old man's heart flow at his eyes with joy upon occasions which would appear indifferent to such as were strangers to the turn of his mind; but a very slight accident, wherein he saw his children's good-will to one another, created in him the god-like pleasure of loving them because they loved each other. This great command of himself in hiding his first impulse to partiality at last improved to a steady justice towards them, and that which at first was but an expedient to correct his weakness was afterwards the measure of his virtue." 1 This, no doubt, is the set description of a moralist, and to an age in which the liberty of manners has grown into something like license it may savour of formalism and priggishness; but when we remember that the writer was one of the most warm-hearted of men, and that the subject of his panegyric was himself full of vivacity and impulse, it must be admitted that the picture which it gives us of the Addison family in the rectory of Milston is a particularly amiable one. Though the eighteenth century had little of that feel 1 Tatler, No. 25. ing for natural beauty which distinguishes our own, a man of Addison's imagination could hardly fail to be impressed by the character of the scenery in which his childhood was passed. No one who has travelled on a summer's day across Salisbury Plain, with its vast canopy of sky and its open tracts of undulating downland, relieved by no shadows except such as are thrown by the passing cloud, the grazing sheep, and the great circle of Stonehenge, will forget the delightful sense of refreshment and repose produced by the descent into the valley of the Avon. The sounds of human life rising from the villages after the long solitude of the plain, the shade of the deep woods, the coolness of the river, like all streams rising in the chalk, clear and peaceful, are equally delicious to the sense and the imagination. It was, doubtless, the recollection of these scenes that inspired Addison in his paraphrase of the twenty-third Psalm : "The Lord my pasture shall prepare, And feed me with a shepherd's care. When in the sultry glebe I faint, At Amesbury he was first sent to school, his master being one Nash; and here, too, he probably met with the first recorded adventure of his life. It is said that, having committed some fault and being fearful of the consequences, he ran away from school, and, taking up his abode in a hollow tree, maintained himself as he could, |