"Mr. Addison is generally allowed to be the most correct and elegant of all our writers; yet some inaccuracies of style have escaped him, which it is the chief design of the following notes to point out. A work of this sort, well executed, would be of use to foreigners who study our language; and even to such of our countrymen as wish to write it in perfect purity."-R. Worcester [Bp. Hurd]. "I set out many years ago with a warm admiration of this amiable writer [Addison]. I then took a surfeit of his natural, easy manner; and was taken, like my betters, with the raptures and high rights of Shakspeare. My maturer judgment, or lenient age, (call it which you will,) has now led me back to the favourite of my youth. And here, I think, I shall stick; for such useful sense, in so charming words, I find not elsewhere. His taste is so pure, and his Virgilian prose (as Dr. Young styles it) so exquisite, that I have but now found out, at the close of a critical life, the full value of his writings."-Ibid. "Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison."-Dr. Johnson. "It was not till three generations had laughed and wept over the pages of Addison that the omission [of a monument to his memory] was supplied by public veneration.__ At length, in our own time, his image, skilfully graven, appeared in Poets' Corner.-Such a mark of national respect was due to the unsullied statesman, to the accomplished scholar, to the master of pure English eloquence, to the consummate painter of life and manners. It was due, above all, to the great satirist, who alone knew how to use ridicule without abusing it, who, without inflicting a wound, effected a great social reform, and who reconciled wit and virtue, after a long and disastrous separation, during which wit had been led astray by profligacy, and virtue by fanaticism.”—Macaulay. THE WORKS OF THE RIGHT HONOURABLE JOSEPH ADDISON. WITH NOTES BY RICHARD HURD, D.D. LORD BISHOP OF WORCESTER. A New Edition, WITH LARGE ADDITIONS, CHIEFLY UNPUBLISHED, IN SIX VOLUMES. VOL. V. LONDON: HENRY G. BOHN, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN. MDCCCLVI. PREFACE. BISHOP Hurd's edition of Addison, which has always ranked as the best, having become a scarce and expensive book, the publisher considered he should render an acceptable service to his subscribers in reproducing it in a popular form. He accordingly undertook a verbatim reprint of it in four volumes. But, after having made considerable progress, he found accidentally that so large a number of Addison's letters remained unpublished, that it seemed desirable to extend his original plan, for the purpose of including them. Bishop Hurd had not given any of Addison's letters, evidently not aware that any of an authentic character existed; neither had his precursor, Tickell, upon whom the duty, as Addison's literary executor, devolved, and who appears to have been in possession of original drafts, which could have been placed in his hands for no other purpose. Miss Aikin, in her Memoir, had so far remedied this omission, from materials which had come into the possession of a descendant of Mr. Tickell, and from other sources, that any further publication or research had at first seemed supererogatory; but the discovery of some unpublished papers which, though they lay in her path, had escaped her, followed up by inquiry and research, led to a very different conclusion. The publisher therefore set himself energetically to work, and, by the help of literary friends and his own appliances, has succeeded in obtaining such an amount of unpublished letters (including the originals of some of those hitherto printed from drafts) as must surprise the literary public; especially when it is borne in mind that most of them have been lying dormant, in accessible places, for considerably more than a century. pert Earl d arting th His success in bringing to light so many letters led him to examine whether all the known works of Addison had been included in the collected editions, and he then found that many interesting and well-authenticated pieces had uniformly been omitted. The necessity of including these led to a still further extension of his plan; and instead of four, as was first intended, then five, his edition of the Works now forms six volumes. the official ble app eports on graph The dat rod, are the cit March (th resent ves nd conven All that has been published heretofore as Addison's in Hurd's edition of his Works, which is the most complete, is comprised in the first four volumes of the present and the early pages of the fifth. The remainder, nearly one-third of the whole, is additional, for the most part transcribed from manuscripts in public depositories and private collections, or gleaned from rare or ephemeral volumes. Of the numerous manuscripts now first published nearly all are either holograph or autograph; and nothing has been admitted without sufficient evidence of its authenticity. March 24, resent, on mitten wit appened t e second Ended: 1:80 might mean There are in all nearly 250 letters, of which only those marked in the List of Contents with an asterisk have been published by Miss Aikin. Besides these the publisher has since met with many more, all however so drily official, like those enumerated at p. 527-8, that he has not thought them worth printing; but, as the dates may be convenient, an analysis of them is given on a starred page, to follow 528. Among so many remarkable letters and papers, it is diffi cult to point out the most interesting, but the following seem this was mu between the days. Thus by some mis Bad 1704, Historians, & Catholic co |