secretary, receiving also an appointment as keeper of records. This event happened only about a year and a half before the dismissal of the ministry; and the Irish secretary would seem to have transacted the business of his office chiefly in London. But there are letters showing him to have made himself acceptable to some of the best and most distinguished persons in Dublin; and he escaped without having any quarrel with Swift, his acquaintance with whom had begun some time before. In the literary history of Addison those seven years of official service are almost a blank, till we approach their close. He defended the Government in an anonymous pamphlet on The Present State of the War; he united compliments to the all-powerful Marlborough with indifferent attempts at lyrical poetry in his opera of Rosamond; and, besides furnishing a prologue to Steele's comedy of The Tender Husband, he perhaps gave some assistance in the composition of the play. Irish administration, however, allowed it would seem more leisure than might have been expected. During the last few months of his tenure of office Addison contributed largely to the Tatler. But his entrance on this new field does nearly coincide with the beginning of a new section in his history.
Even the coalition-ministry of Godolphin was too Whiggish for the taste of Queen Anne; and the Tories, the favourites of the court, gained, both in parliamentary power and in popularity out of doors, by a combination of lucky accidents, dexterous management, and divisions and double-dealing among their adversaries. The real failure of the prosecution of Addison's old friend Sacheverell, completed the ruin of the Whigs; and in August 1710 an entire revolution in the ministry had been completed. The Tory administration which succeeded kept its place till the queen's death in 1714, and Addison was thus left to devote four of the best years of his life, from his thirty-ninth year to his forty-third, to occupations less lucrative than those in which his time had recently been frittered away, but much more conducive to the extension of his own fame, and to the benefit of English literature. Although our information as to his pecuniary affairs is very scanty, we are entitled to believe that he was now independent of literary labour. He speaks, in an extant paper, of having had (but lost) property in the West Indies; and he is understood to have inherited several thousand pounds from a younger brother, who was governor of Madras. In 1711 he purchased, for £10,000, the estate of Bilton, near Rugby,—the place which after wards became the residence of Mr Apperley, better known by his assumed name of "Nimrod."
During those four years he produced a few political writings. Soon after the fall of the ministry, he contributed five numbers to the Whig Examiner, a paper set up in opposition to the Tory periodical of the same name, which was then conducted by the poet Prior, and afterwards became the vehicle of Swift's most vehement invectives against the party he had once belonged to. These are certainly the most ill-natured of Addison's writings, but they are neither lively nor vigorous. There is more spirit in his allegorical pamphlet, the Trial and Conviction of Count Tariff.
But from the autumn of 1710 till the end of 1714 his principal employment was the composition of his celebrated Periodical Essays. The honour of inventing the plan of such compositions, as well as that of first carrying the idea into execution, belongs to Richard Steele, who had been a school-fellow of Addison at the Charter-house, continued to be on intimate terms with him afterwards, and attached himself with his characteristic ardour to the same political party. When, in April 1709, Steele published the first number of the Tatler, Addison was in Dublin, and knew nothing of the design. He is said to have detected his friend's authorship only by recognising, in one of the early papers, a critical remark which he remembered having himself communicated to Steele. He began to furnish essays in a few weeks, assisted occasionally while he held office, and afterwards wrote oftener than Steele himself. He thus contributed in all, if his literary executor selected his contributions correctly, more than 60 of the 271 essays which the work contains. The Tatler exhibited, in more ways than one, symptoms of being an experiment. The projector, imitating the news-sheets in form, thought it prudent to give, in each number, news in addition to the essay; and there was a want, both of unity and of correct finishing, in the putting together of the literary materials. Addison's contributions, in particular, are in many places as lively as anything he ever wrote; and his style, in its more familiar moods at least, had been fully formed before he returned from the Continent. But, as compared with his later pieces, these are only what the painter's loose studies and sketches are to the landscapes which he afterwards constructs out of them. In his invention of incidents and characters, one thought after another is hastily used and hastily dismissed, as if he were putting his own powers to the test, or trying the effect of various kinds of objects on his readers; his most ambitious flights, in the shape of allegories and the like, are stiff and inanimate; and his favourite field of literary criticism is touched so slightly, as to show that he still wanted confidence in the taste and knowledge of the public.
The Tatler was dropped at the beginning of 1711, but only to be followed by the Spectator, which was begun on the 1st day of March, and appeared every week-day till the 6th day of December 1712. It had then completed the 555 numbers usually collected in its first seven volumes. Addison, now in London and unemployed, co-operated with Steele constantly from the very opening of the series; and the two, contributing almost equally, seem together to have written not very much less than five hundred of the papers. Emboldened by the success of their former adventure, they devoted their whole space to the essays. They relied, with a confidence which the extraordinary popularity of the work fully justified, on their power of exciting the interest of a wide audience by pictures and reflections drawn from a field which embraced the whole compass of ordinary life and ordinary knowledge, no kind of practical themes being positively excluded except such as were political, and all literary topics being held admissible, for which it seemed possible to command attention from persons of average taste and information. A seeming unity was given to the undertaking, and curiosity and interest awakened on behalf of the conductors, by the happy invention of the Spectator's Club, in which Steele is believed to have drawn all the characters. The figure of Sir Roger de Coveiiey, however, the best even in the opening group, is the only one that was afterwards elaborately depicted; and Addison was the author of all the papers in which his oddities and amiabilities are so admirably delineated. To him, also, the Spectator owed a very large share of its highest excellences. His were many, and these the most natural and elegant, if not the most original, of its humorous sketches of human character and social eccentricities, its good-humoured satires on ridiculous features in manners, and on corrupt symptoms in public taste; these topics, however, making up a department in which Steele was fairly on a level with his more famous coadjutor. But Steele had neither learning, nor taste, nor critical acuteness sufficient to qualify him for enriching the series with such literary disquisitions as those which Addison insinuated so often into the lighter matter of his essays, and of which he gave an elaborate specimen in his celebrated and agreeable criticism on Paradise Lost, Still further beyond the powers of Steele were those speculations on the theory of literature and of the processes of
