because they were respectively written from four different localities, viz. Chelsea, London, Islington, and the Office.

1

The sale of the Spectator was doubtless very large relatively to the number of readers in Queen Anne's reign. Johnson, indeed, computes the number sold daily to have been only sixteen hundred and eighty, but he seems to have overlooked what Addison himself says on the subject very shortly after the paper had been started: "My publisher tells me that there are already three thousand of them distributed every day." This number must have gone on increasing with the growing reputation of the Spectator. When the Preface of the Four Sermons of Dr. Fleetwood, Bishop of Llandaff, was suppressed by order of the House of Commons, the Spectator printed it in its 384th number, thus conveying, as the Bishop said in a letter to Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury. "fourteen thousand copies of the condemned preface into people's hands that would otherwise have never seen or heard of it." Making allowance for the extraordinary character of the number, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the usual daily issue of the Spectator to readers in all parts of the kingdom would, towards the close of its career, have reached ten thousand copies. The separate papers were afterwards collected into octavo volumes, which were sold, like the volumes of the Tatler, for a guinea a-piece. Steele tells us that more than nine thousand copies of each volume were sold off.2

Nothing could have been better timed than the appearance of the Spectator; it may indeed be doubted whether it could have been produced with success at any other period. Had it been projected earlier, while 1 Spectator, No. 10. 2 Ibid., No. 555.

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Addison was still in office, his thoughts would have been diverted to other subjects, and he would have been unlikely to survey the world with quite impartial eyes; had the publication been delayed it would have come before the public when the balance of all minds was disturbed by the dangers of the political situation. The difficulty of preserving neutrality under such circumstances was soon shown by the fate of the Guardian. Shortly after the Spectator was discontinued this new paper was designed by the fertile invention of Steele, with every intention of keeping it, like its predecessor, free from the entanglements of party. But it had not proceeded beyond the forty-first number when the vehement partizanship of Steele was excited by the Tory Examiner; in the 128th number appeared a letter, signed "An English Tory," calling for the demolition of Dunkirk, while soon afterwards, finding that his political feelings were hampered by the design on which the Guardian was conducted, he dropped it and replaced it with a paper called the Englishman. Addison himself, who had been a frequent contributor to the Guardian, did not aid in the Englishman, of the violent party tone of which he strongly disapproved. A few years afterwards the old friends and coadjutors in the Tatler and Spectator found themselves maintaining an angry controversy in the opposing pages of the Old Whig and the Plebeian.

CHAPTER VI.

CATO.

It is a peculiarity in Addison's life that Fortune, as if conspiring with the happiness of his genius, constantly furnished him with favourable opportunities for the exercise of his powers. The pension granted him by Halifax enabled him, while he was yet a young man, to add to his knowledge of classical literature an intimate acquaintance with the languages and governments of the chief European states. When his fortunes were at the lowest ebb on his return from his travels his introduction to Godolphin by Halifax, the consequence of which was The Campaign, procured him at once celebrity and advancement. The appearance of the Tatler, though due entirely to the invention of Steele, prepared the way for development of the genius that prevailed in the Spectator. But the climax of Addison's good fortune was certainly the successful production of Cato, a play which, on its own merits, might have been read with interest by the scholars of the time, but which could scarcely have succeeded on the stage if it had not been appropriated and made part of our national life by the violence of political passion.

Addison had not the genius of a dramatist. The grace, the irony, the fastidious refinement which give

him such an unrivalled capacity in describing and criticising the humours of men as a spectator did not qualify him for imaginative sympathy with their actions and passions. But, like most men of ability in that period, his thoughts were drawn towards the stage, and even in Dryden's lifetime he had sent him a play in manuscript asking him to use his interest to obtain its performance. The old poet returned it, we are told, "with many commendations, but with an expression of his opinion that on the stage it would not meet with its deserved success." Addison nevertheless persevered in his attempts, and during his travels he wrote four acts of the tragedy of Cato, the design of which, according to Tickell, he had formed while he was at Oxford, though he certainly borrowed many incidents in the play from a tragedy on the same subject which he saw performed at Venice.1 It is char acteristic, however, of the undramatic mood in which he executed his task that the last act was not written till shortly before the performance of the play, many years later. As early as 1703 the drama was shown to Cibber by Steele, who said that "whatever spirit Mr. Addison had shown in his writing it, he doubted that he would never have courage enough to let his Cato stand the censure of an English audience; that it had only been the amusement of his leisure hours in Italy, and was never intended for the stage." He seems to have remained of the same opinion on the very eve of the performance of the play. "When Mr. Addison," says Pope, as reported by Spence, "had finished his Cato he brought it to me, desired to have my sincere opinion of it, and left it with me for three or four days. I gave

1 See Addison's Works (Tickell's edition), vol. v., p. 187.

him my opinion of it sincerely, which was 'that I thought he had better not act it, and that he would get reputation enough by only printing it.' This I said as thinking the lines well written, but the piece not theatrical enough. Sometime after Mr. Addison said 'that his own opinion was the same with mine, but that some particular friends of his whom he could not disoblige insisted on its being acted.'" 1

Undoubtedly Pope was right in principle, and anybody who reads the thirty-ninth paper in the Spectator may see, not only that Addison was out of sympathy with the traditions of the English stage, but that his whole turn of thought disqualified him from comprehending the motives of dramatic composition. "The modern drama," says he, "excels that of Greece and Rome in the intricacy and disposition of the fable; but, what a Christian writer would be ashamed to own, falls infinitely short of it in the moral part of the performance." And the entire drift of the criticism that follows relates to the thought, the sentiment, and the expression of the modern drama, rather than to the really essential question, the nature of the action. It is false criticism to say that the greatest dramas of Shakespeare fail in morality as compared with those of the Greek tragedians. That the manner in which the moral is conveyed is different in each case is of course true, since the subjects of Greek tragedy were selected from Greek mythology, and were treated by Eschylus and Sophocles, at all events, in a religious spirit, whereas the plays of Shakespeare are only indirectly Christian, and produce their effect by an appeal to the individual conscience. None the less is it the case that

1 Spence's Anecdotes, p. 196.