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language like yourself? The Americans are English," he added with ethnological generosity; "and America's the place where a handy man like you would make his fortune."

"Mr. Hamley," said James Garth suddenly, "you've made your offer, and you've had your answer. I'll not sell till the bailies take me, and I'll not cry caught till the game's lost. Now, wife, if you'll turn out the pot perhaps Mr. Hamley 'll take a bit of dinner with It would not be the first, I reckon, he's had at Long Field, by many."

"Thank you; no. I shall partake of lunch at home," said Mr. Hamley, with a sudden return to his finer manner, and an angry flash in his small dark eyes. "I think you're foolish, James, but we have good authority for not meddling with a man's folly; and so I leave you to yours. Good day. Good day, Mrs. Garth."

"Good day, sir," said Mrs. Garth, with a curtsey. "And how's Alice coming on ?"

“Oh, very fair, I fancy," answered Mr. Hamley condescendingly. "She's young yet, but she'll improve; and I don't hear Miss Drummond complain."

"I'm glad she suits," said the mother respectfully, as so much useful capital of which her daughter might have the interest. "My duty, sir, to your lady and Miss Drummond."

"Good day, Mr. Hamley," said James curtly. "Now, wife, the dinner."

"Curse the fellow's insolence!" muttered the rich man as he rode off.

James Garth repeated the very same words as he sat down to his dinner with a heavy heart and a hot head, and the most passionate desire to break Jabez Hamley's.

And yet what had Hamley done? Literally a kindness, according to his way of putting it. He had offered a thousand pounds clear gain over and above the market value of a piece of badly-farmed land —that is, he would have made a clean gift of the same to induce an insolvent landowner to sell what he could not keep. Garth, perversely perhaps, took it that his father's former charity-lad had traded on his necessities, and offered him a bribe to let go his cherished patrimony. It was common sense and feeling-the logic of wealth dealing with poverty according to material values and outside human emotions, and the passionate anguish of a luckless man rebelling against facts and logic, and asking only help and sympathy.

Addison.

A PERFECTLY virtuous man, orthodox, and entirely sincere in his religion; consistent in his politics, correct to a penny in his monetary affairs, filially pious, and charged with a never-failing supply of the most admirable moral sentiments, which he dispenses freely on most occasions; a perfect man of business, and an almost pedantic scholar; a man who can see no beauty in the Alps, and who considers the cathedral at Sienna, "barbarous building": such a man surely has all the elements of one of the greatest prigs which the world has ever seen-must be a man to make virtue detestable and vice agreeable to an ordinary mind, and compete with K———g A— -g -r for the sovereignty of boredom.

Addison was all that we have described above, but strangely enough he was neither a bore, nor a prig; on the contrary, he is in his writing what he was in his life (to those in his confidence), one of the gentlest, most genial, most kindly, and most witty men with whom we have ever met. After reading what is possible about Addison, and examining his works, what strikes one most is the intense overwhelming love which he had for his fellow creatures. He laughs at them and their follies, and in doing so uses a wit which is entirely his own; but even while he rebukes he never wounds. In an extremely corrupt and licentious age, his hands were always pure and his morals unimpeachable; yet he was one of the most popular and influential men of his day. Although he had a commanding person and perfect manners, he was reputed to be dull in mixed society, where flashy brilliance was everything, and where shallowbrained, half-educated women cackled the intolerable frivolity which we read in the plays of the time; he was not fitted to shine in the drawing-rooms of the day, and he did not. He could not make a pretence of speaking in Parliament, and so was absolutely useless as a debater, yet the firm faith which those in authority had in his ability and honesty entirely counterbalanced the want of social success and brilliancy of speech-two of the most important requirements in those days for a nearly penniless politician with no family connexions. Addison, by the mere power of his personal virtues, first, and his literary ability secondly, found himself in one of the highest offices of state, kindly assisting the meanest and least grateful of those whom he had known in the old times, when without fifty pounds in his pocket he bullied the great Duke of Somerset, and won the battle. He came to a singular end after all. He married Lady Warwick. Alas! for the vanity of human wishes!

Of his personal appearance we have at least two portraits by good hands. Before us are three carefully engraved portraits of him, but there is a great dissimilarity between the three, except in the wig. Sir Godfrey Kneller painted one of these portraits, which is entirely unlike the two others; let us however give Sir Godfrey the credit of the best picture, and judge Addison's appearance from that. The wig almost prevents our judging the shape of the head, yet it seems very high behind. The forehead is very lofty, the sort of forehead which is called "commanding " by those people who do not know that some of the least decided men in the world have had high foreheads. The eyebrows are delicately "pencilled," yet show a vast deal of vigour and expression; they are what his old Latin friends, who knew so well the power of expression in the eyebrow, would have called "supercilious"; and yet the nasal end of the supercilium is only slightly raised, and it droops pleasantly at the temporal end, so that there is nothing Satanic or ill-natured about it: the eyebrow of Addison, according to Kneller, seems to say, “You are a greater fool than you think yourself to be, but I would die sooner than tell you so." The eye, which is generally supposed to convey so much expression, but which very often does not, is very much like the eyes of other amiable and talented people. The nose is long, as becomes an orthodox Whig; quite as long, we should say, as the nose of any member of Peel's famous long-nosed ministry, and quite as delicately chiselled. The mouth is very tender and beautiful, firm, yet with a delicate curve upwards at each end of the upper lip, suggestive of a good joke, and of a calm waiting to hear if any man is going to beat it. Below the mouth there follows of course the nearly inevitable double chin of the eighteenth century, with a deep incision in the centre of the jaw bone, which shows through the flesh like a dimple. On the whole a singularly handsome and pleasant face; wanting the wonderful form which one sees in the faces of Shakespeare, Prior, Congreve, Castlereagh, Byron, or Napoleon, but still extremely fine of its kind. Decidedly that of an aăvaş àvôpôv.

To write his political life within the limits of a paper like this would be entirely impossible; we shall merely sketch it as we proceed to show, as well as we can, what Addison was and what he did. He was a Whig, and consequently Lord Macaulay has written his life and has demolished his enemies: not Addison's enemies particularly, because it may be almost said that he never had any, but the enemies of Lord Macaulay and of the Whigs; that is to say, those people who declare that you can not sit on two stools at the same time without coming to the ground. Lord Macaulay finished up those fellows for us here and elsewhere most handsomely. Still something is left to be said of Addison, even after Lord Macaulay.

Addison was born in the Anglican communion, almost at the foot of

the altar; it would be as easy to disconnect Bardolph from a tavern as Addison from a church. From almost the first thinking moment of his life, the magnificent solemnity of the reformed Anglican ritual, debased as it was in the latter end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, seems to have taken possession of his mind. Pure and high-minded as he was, he faltered when asked to take holy orders-considering himself unfit for them. No thinking man ever exalted the office of priest higher than he did; no man ever denounced the abuses of that office more freely and more honestly. With a bitter and never failing contempt of the Papacy on the one hand, and an equal, though less bitter contempt of Sectarianism on the other, he passed through his life with the belief that the Anglican compromise was the only one possible between Christianity and the advancement of human knowledge.

His father was Dr. Lancelot Addison, who, had he been a turncoat in politics, would certainly have been a bishop. His mother, Miss Gulston, was daughter of a doctor of divinity, and sister to the Bishop of Bristol. Lancelot Addison, after his residence in Barbary, well known to the readers of Pinkerton's Travels,' became Rector of Milston, and afterwards Archdeacon of Salisbury and Dean of Lichfield.

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With such an overwhelming mass of family tradition and influence, it is not difficult to understand why Addison, though a very bold Whig in politics, was a most orthodox man in point of religion. To a mind like his, only three courses were open as regards spiritual matters: to swear by the compromise in which he had been reared; to join the Church of Rome, and believe everything; or to pitch the whole question of religion to the winds, as a mere invention of statesmen and priests for the purpose of entrapping and enslaving cowardly women, and of bringing their influence to bear on men. He chose to adhere firmly to the traditions of his family, but by no means without thought or reason. No man was ever more true and firm in his friendships, but the highflying Churchman, Dr. Sacheverell, whose design at bottom was the singular one of an Erastian Papacy, the "dear Harry," of his youth, is by no means the "dear Harry," of his middle age. Addison had detected him for an ass, and what is more, went as near telling him so as ever he did with any man.

With such a bringing up as he had, it seems at first sight wonderful that he should not have been a Tory among Tories, yet, from some passages in his 'Italian Travels,' we see that he was more than a Whig, almost a Radical; he seems to breathe freely in the first real republic he ever saw, that of San Marino; he revels in the virtue and diligence of the free people of the mountains, as contrasted with the sloth and degradation of the inhabitants of the more fruitful plains, and declares that the most splendid court is always co

VOL. XLI.

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existent with the largest measure of popular misery. The first glimpse he ever had of the history of a free country was that which he got in reading the 'History of the Roman Republic,' the second, that which he had in reading the 'Histories of the Greek Republics.' The belief in republicanism never left him; it was crystallised in 'Cato.' So the upper classes send their sons to school to learn the classics; fortunately for the state of things, they are taught in an antique language, because a young nobleman construes more seditious republicanism in a week than Mr. Bradlaugh utters in a year. It sticks to some of them all their lives, as it did to Addison; with others it merely passes in at one ear and out at the other; land and beeves cure them of it rapidly. Addison had such an intense love for his kind, that he could no more help being a social Radical than the worst Conservative of this day: in spite of his Oxfordism he was a most hearty Whig; no Whig, either in politics or religion, made the great compromise, with Divine Right in the former or Erastianism in the latter, better or more logically than Addison. No man was ever more true to his religious or political faith: to speak of his trying to sit on two stools at once, like an ordinary Whig, is to talk nonsense: there was an almost invisible rope erected between the two stools, on which he walked with the ease, dexterity and calm courage of a Blondin.

He was born at Milston, near Amesbury (or as it was called, Ambrosebury), in 1672. It is situated on the river Avon, just three miles from Stonehenge, but on the other, or east side of the river. When you climb the height you are on Salisbury Plain, and Stonehenge, that ghastly, barbarous piece of heathenism, stands between you and the setting sun in the short winter evenings, as though to blot it out: "And straight the sun was flecked with barsHeaven's Mother, send us grace!—

As if through a dungeon grate he peered
With broad and burning face."

We must now follow him to the Charterhouse and to Oxford. Wild stories are told of his youth, such as his running away into a wood and living on berries and roots; whether blackberries or nightshade berries, whether turnip-roots or mandrakes, we are not informed; we do not happen to believe the story. At the Charterhouse he first made one of the great friendships of his life, if not the greatest, that of Richard Steele, who not only gained his confidence but that of his father, who was extremely anxious that the two noble youths should continue their friendship. That friendship was hardly ever interrupted, and Steele contributed enormously to the making of Addison's fortune. The Tatler' and 'Spectator' papers put Addison in a position such as he would scarcely have attained without them; how many lines of them should we ever have seen had it not been for the busy and audacious Steele ? Steele supplied to Addison exactly

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