doing himself violence, till by degrees, by the force of reason, and frequent reading of the Scriptures, and turning his thoughts upon the study of navigation, after the space of eighteen months, he grew thoroughly reconciled to his condition. When he had made this conquest, the vigour of his health, disengagement from the world, a constant, cheerful, serene sky, and a temperate air, made his life one continual feast and his being much more joyful than it had before been irksome. He now, taking delight in everything, made the hut in which he lay, by ornaments which he cut down from a spacious wood, on the side of which it was situated, the most delicious bower, fanned with continual breezes, and gentle aspirations of wind, that made his repose after the chase equal to the most sensual pleasures. I forgot to observe, that during the time of his dissatisfaction, monsters of the deep, which frequently lay on the shore, added to the terrors of his solitude; the dreadful howlings and voices seemed too terrible to be made for human ears; but upon the recovery of his temper, he could with pleasure not only hear their voices, but approach the monsters themselves with great intrepidity. He speaks of sea-lions, whose jaws and tails were capable of seizing and breaking the limbs of a man, if he approached them: but at that time his spirits and life were so high, and he could act so regularly and unconcerned, that merely from being unruffled in himself, he killed them with the greatest ease imaginable: for observing, that though their jaws and tails were so terrible, yet the animals being mighty slow in working themselves round, he had nothing to do but place himself exactly opposite to their middle, and as close to them as possible, he dispatched them with his hatchet at will.

The precautions which he took against want, in case of sickness, was to lame kids when very young, so as that they might recover their health, but never be capable of speed. These he had in great numbers about his hut; and when he was himself in full vigour, he could take at full speed the swiftest goat running up a promontory, and never failed of catching them but on a descent.

His habitation was extremely pestered with rats, which gnawed his clothes and feet when sleeping. To defend him against them he fed and tamed numbers of young kitlings, who lay about his bed, and preserved him from the enemy. When his clothes were quite worn out, he dried and tacked together

the skins of goats, with which he clothed himself, and was inured to pass through woods, bushes, and brambles with as much carelessness and precipitance as any other animal. It happened once to him, that running on the summit of a hill, he made a stretch to seize a goat, with which under him, he fell down a precipice, and lay helpless for the space of three days, the length of which time he measured by the moon's growth since his last observation. This manner of life grew so exquisitely pleasant, that he never had a moment heavy upon his hands; his nights were untroubled, and his days joyous, from the practice of temperance and exercise. It was his manner to use stated hours and places for exercises of devotion, which he performed aloud, in order to keep up the faculties of speech, and to utter himself with greater energy.

When I first saw him, I thought, if I had not been let into his character and story, I could have discerned that he had been much separated from company, from his aspect and gesture; there was a strong but cheerful seriousness in his look, and a certain disregard to the ordinary things about him, as if he had been sunk in thought. When the ships which brought him off the island came in, he received them with the greatest indifference with relation to the prospect of going off with them, but with great satisfaction in an opportunity to refresh and help them. The man frequently bewailed his return to the world, which could not, he said, with all its enjoyments, restore him to the tranquillity of his solitude. Though I had frequently conversed with him, after a few month's absence, he met me in the street, and though he spoke to me, I could not recollect that I had seen him; familiar converse in this town had taken off the loneliness of his aspect, and quite altered the air of his face.

This plain man's story is a memorable example that he is happiest who confines his wants to natural necessities; and he that goes further in his desires, increases his wants in proportion to his acquisitions; or to use his own expression, "I am now worth £800, but shall never be so happy, as when I was not worth a farthing. (From The Englishman.)

JOSEPH ADDISON

[Joseph Addison was born 1672, died 1719. His first published composition in prose was his Remarks on Italy, which appeared after his return from his travels in 1701. In the same year he wrote, but did not publish, his Dialogue on Medals. From 1709-1711 he co-operated with Steele in the Tatler; and in the latter year, with the aid of his friend, founded the Spectator, the last papers in which appeared in 1714. He wrote in the Guardian, which was started in 1713, in which year he also published The late Trial of Count Tariff-a jeu d'esprit directed against the financial clauses of the Treaty of Utrecht-and began a work, never completed, on the Evidences of Christianity, which was not published till after his death. The Freeholder, a series of papers written entirely by himself, appeared in 1715-16. His last work was the Old Whig, a controversial pamphlet, published in 1719, in opposition to Steele's Plebeian.]

It is easy to perceive that the prose style of Addison is an extension of that of Dryden, in so far as it embodies the thought of an author directly addressing an audience. But we see also, from the mode and method of Addison's writing, how vast a change in the composition of the audience has taken place since the closing years of the seventeenth century. Those turns of traditional courtliness, which so constantly, in Dryden's writings, indicate the personal influence of the sovereign, have disappeared from the style of his successor. A very large proportion of Dryden's prose consists of epistles dedicatory, addressed to great noblemen and courtiers, and full of adulation, but in the few dedications written by Addison the old exuberance of flattery is much subdued. On the other hand, the appeal to that great middle class, to which Dryden discoursed in his Prefaces, is in Addison, so conscious and direct, that even if all records of the Revolution had perished, we should be able to infer, from the Spectator alone, that the English nation, in the early years of the eighteenth century, was beginning to exercise a public opinion in matters relating to religion, politics, manners, and taste.

The spirit of this Revolution, as far as relates to taste and

manners, may best be divined by contrasting the English society of the period with the contemporary society of France. In France, authority had prevailed over liberty, and a welldefined standard of order had been for some time established in all the forms and ceremonies of life. French manners and conversation had been formed by the joint operation of two social forces, the court and the drawing-room. I have spoken in another preface of the uniformity of taste produced by monarchical centralisation, in the various departments of public culture over which the king's authority naturally extended. An influence more subtle, but still intimately connected with the progress of absolutism, moulded the art of conversation. The French nobility, though they had been deprived by the Crown of so many of the powers and privileges of feudalism, had strictly preserved the social customs of their order. Nor had they forgotten the literary tradition, embracing the whole casuistry of love and the deification of women, in which the troubadours had embodied the poetical elements of the feudal system. Condemned to idleness during their attendance at court, the nobility now converted this tradition into a code of manners, and, in numerous societies modelled on that of the Hotel Rambouillet, under the presidency of the most accomplished women in the capital, a constant war of raillery was carried on between the two sexes, almost as scientific in its extravagance as the old love poetry of Provence. The art of conversation, developed by feminine genius, was thus carried in France to the height of perfection, and French prose became a matchless instrument for the purposes of criticism, analysis of character, and letter-writing. On the other hand, as the masculine spirit nourished by political liberty decayed, the refinement of the French language and manners served as a veil to disguise the progress of social corruption. That exquisite irony of style, which could convey at one time thoughts full of feminine sentiment and delicacy, was used at another to recommend the morals of Petronius and Aretino. External order, however, was preserved in both spheres of art. The course of French conversational prose, flowing on in a broadening stream from Voiture to La Bruyère and Madame de Sévigné, descended to the amazing performances of M. de Crébillon fils, and never was its surface more smooth and limpid than on the brink of the cataract of Revolution.

In England this condition of things was exactly reversed.

Nearly two centuries of religious and political dissension, while they had taught Englishmen how to live in obedience to law, had proved a rough school for manners, and every centre of social authority, qualified to exercise a refining influence, had been weakened in the long struggle. The court, which had hitherto given a direction to all movements of taste, after being first demoralised by its rapid changes of fortune, was at the close of the seventeenth century in almost complete eclipse. The energies of the nobility, now the real rulers of the country, were absorbed in politics and warped by party: they had no longer a common rallying-place at court; so that, though many of them had a genuine love of art and literature, they could not make their corporate influence on them felt, as in the brilliant days that followed the Restoration. Whatever religious and moral control over the manners of society would naturally have been exercised by the Established Church was weakened by sectarian feeling. As regards the influence of women, the tragic history of England since the Reformation had developed what was heroic in female character: but such spirits as Lady Fairfax, Lady Russell, and Lady Clancarty were not formed in the drawing-room; and a comparison of the average English lady of the period, as her portrait is painted in the tenth number of the Spectator, with her French contemporary, as seen in the letters of Madame de Sévigné, gives us an accurate measure of the respective degrees of refinement in the two nations after the Revolution of 1688. If Englishmen were a hundred years in advance of their neighbours in the art of self-government, they were nearly as far behind them in the art of conversation.

It is the supreme distinction of Addison, as the chief founder of English essay-writing, to have created in England a school of literary taste which, without sacrificing any of the advantages derived from liberty, has raised our language almost to a level with the French in elegance and precision. The rule of order in the department of manners, imposed on French society at court by kingly authority, grew up, thanks to Addison and his fellow-workers, in the coffee-houses of England, by means of reason and free discussion. All that delicacy of thought and expression, which, in France, was inspired by women, and was so much the freemasonry of a few select drawing-rooms that it became a literary dialect, was circulated by Addison, wherever the English language was spoken in edu