Addison Addison in the way of patronage. their way into the world were widely separate. thought it best to provide for his own future advancement by securing influential patrons. He therefore, after the campaign of 1695, offered to the King the homage of a paper of verses on the capture of Namur, and presented them through Sir John Somers, then Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. To Lord Somers he sent with them a flattering dedicatory address. Discernment of talent was at this time a merit for which more than one political Mecenas gladly earned credit to himself. Preferments, lesser public trusts, and sinecures were readily bestowed on men of letters friendly to the party of the giver, until the accession of George I., happily for literature, removed the Court from all contact with the wit or wisdom of the country. Somers, who was esteemed a man of taste, was not unwilling to "receive the present of a Muse unknown." He asked Addison to call upon him, and became his patron. Charles Montagu, afterwards Earl of Halifax, critic and wit himself, shone also among the statesmen who were known patrons of letters. Also to him, who was a prince of patrons, "fed with dedication all day long," Addison introduced himself. Montagu had not long before risen to the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer ; he had just then been busy over recoinage and the project of the Sinking Fund; he was a wit and patron of wits seated in the national Tom Tidler's ground. To him, as it was part of his public fame to be a Latin scholar, Addison, also a skilful Latinist, addressed, in Latin, a paper of verses on the Peace of Ryswick. With Somers and Montagu for patrons, the young man of genius who wished to thrive might fairly commit himself to the service of the Church, but Addison's tact and refinement promised to be serviceable to the State; and so it was that, as Steele tells us, Montagu made Addison a layman. "His arguments were founded upon the general pravity and corruption of men of soft business, who wanted liberal education. And I remember, as if I had read the letter yesterday, that my Lord ended with a compliment, that, however he might be represented as no friend to the Church, he never would do it any other injury than keeping Mr. Addison out of it." To the good offices of Montagu and Somers Addison was indebted, therefore, for a travelling allowance of three hundred a year. The grant was for his support while qualifying himself on the Continent by study of modern languages, and otherwise, for diplomatic service. It dropped in a year or two, at the King's death, and Addison was cast upon his own resources; but he throve, and lived to become an UnderSecretary of State in days that made Prior an ambassador, and rewarded with official incomes Congreve, Rowe, Hughes, Philips, Stepney, and others. Throughout his honourable career prudence dictated to Addison more or less of dependence on the friendship of the strong. An honest friend of the popular cause, he was more ready to sell than give his pen to it; although the utmost reward would at no time have tempted him to throw his conscience into the bargain. The good word of Halifax obtained him from Godolphin the Government order for a poem on the Battle of Blenheim, with immediate earnest of payment for it in the office of a Commissioner of Appeal in the Excise, worth £200 a year. Addison wrote "The Campaign;" and upon its success, he obtained the further reward of an Irish UnderSecretaryship. In his later years, when, after the Rebellion in the North, Addison fought the battle of his party as "The Freeholder," it was again not on his own free impulse that he wrote, but as the popular and discreet man of genius appointed to write by the Government, who, as it seemed to Steele, “made choice of a flute when they ought to have taken a trumpet." Steele, on the contrary, fastened upon the duties of life with no immediate regard to patronage. He never joined a calculation of reward to the discovering or doing of what he took to be his duty to the country. Steele His mind belonged entirely to the English represents the people. people. At Oxford his wit had shown its bent, for he had written a comedy. But he burnt this upon being told that it had little merit. Not knowing what his words were worth, he gave himself up bodily to the service of his country, and, in days of change perilous to England at home and abroad, resolved to bear arms in her service. As a soldier he would, according to his own phrase, “plant himself behind King William against Louis XIV." True Englishman, he chose the way of life in which it seemed to him that he could best use. his powers for the common good; and this he did at the cost of a good Welsh estate, whereof he was disinherited for his patriotism by an offended relative. The same unselfish determination to give himself up to the service of his country caused him, when, fatherless as he was, he could not get a commission, to enlist as a private in the Horse Guards. Accomplished, genial, and zealous, with the soul of a gentleman, such a private as Richard Steele was soon the brother of his regiment. Its colonel made him his private secretary, gave him a cornetcy, and got him afterwards, as Captain Steele, a company of Fusileers. Among his brother soldiers, and fresh from the Oxford worship of old classical models, the religious feeling that accompanies all true refinement, and that was indeed part of the English nature in him as in Addison, prompted Steele to write, for his own private occupation, a little book upon "The Christian Hero." In it he opposed to the fashionable classicism of his day a sound reflection that the heroism of Cato or Brutus had far less in it of true strength, and far less adaptation to the needs of life, than the unfashionable Christian heroism set forth by the Sermon on the Mount. The old bent of the English mind was strong in Richard Steele, and he gave unostentatiously a lively wit to the true service of religion, without having spoken or written to the last day of his life one word of mere religious cant. But his comrades felt, and he himself saw, that "The Christian Hero," published in 1701, was too didactic. It was indeed plain truth out of Steele's heart; but an air of superiority, freely allowed only to the professional man teaching rules of his own art, belongs to a too didactic manner. Nothing was more repugnant to Steele's nature than the sense of this. He had defined the Christian as "one who is always a benefactor, with the mien of a receiver." And that was his own character, of which the one fault was, that he was more ready to give than to receive, more prompt to ascribe honour to others than to claim it for himself. To right himself, Steele wrote a lighthearted comedy, "The Funeral, or Grief à la Mode;" but at the core even of that lay the great earnestness of his censure against the mockery and mummery of griefs that should be sacred; and he blended with this, in the character of lawyer Puzzle, a protest against mockery of truth and justice by the intricacies of the law. Of these he wrote, in his preface to the published play, "the daily villainies we see committed will also be esteemed things proper to be prosecuted by satire; nor could our ensuing legislatives do their country a more seasonable office than to look into the distresses of an unhappy people, who groan perhaps in as much misery under entangled as they could do under broken laws." The liveliness of this comedy made Steele popular with the wits; and the inevitable touches of the author's patriotism brought on him also the notice of the Whigs. Party men might, perhaps, already feel something of the unbending independence that was in Steele himself, as in this play he made old Lord Brumpton teach it to his son:— "But be thou honest, firm, impartial ; Let neither love, nor hate, nor faction move thee; King William perhaps, had he lived, could fairly have recognised in Steele the social form of that sound mind which, in Defoe, was solitary. In a later day it was to Steele a proud recollection that his name, to be provided for, was in the last table-book ever worn by the glorious and immortal William III.” 66 Players of Elizabeth's day carried Decreased influence of the people on the stage. The stage yet represented, although less completely than it had done, the place of direct appeal by a writer to the body of the public. Shakespeare had written for the people; Congreve now wrote for the town. their pieces out of London, even into Germany; and in London itself addressed the common heart of those who formed before their stage a natural audience, distinguished largely by some of its elements from the polite body of the arbiters of artificial taste. At the Restoration the Court patronage brought to the theatre that small circle of conventional wits who held themselves to be especially the town; and soon the lives and manners of the new order of patrons were more commonly reflected from the stage than the old large types of human character and passion. Popular interest in the stage, partly diverted from it at the same time by the growth of other influences, chiefly for this reason abated; and many who would have been good playgoers a century earlier, in Queen Anne's days, out of the same mind that would have made them so, stayed at home and read, not without approbation, Jeremy Collier's sharp attack upon stage immorality. Steele's wit took naturally the old popular course, and disported itself for a short time upon the stage; but his comedies, with all their gaiety and humour, wanted the taint of immorality that was the game flavour then accounted necessary to the perfect relish of a play. Each comedy of Steele's was based on seriousness, as all sound English wit has been since there have been writers in England. The gay manner did not conceal all |