n as
Atticus shows how he took his petty revenge on a great and good man who had
been his friend. The other quarrels with Swift, and especially with his old
friend Steele, were the unfortunate result of political differences, and
show how impossible it is to mingle literary ideals with party politics. He
died serenely in 1719. A brief description from Thackeray's _English
Humorists_ is his best epitaph:

A life prosperous and beautiful, a calm death; an immense fame and
affection afterwards for his happy and spotless name.

WORKS OF ADDISON. The most enduring of Addison's works are his famous
_Essays_, collected from the _Tatler_ and _Spectator._ We have spoken of
him as a master of the art of gentle living, and these essays are a
perpetual inducement to others to know and to practice the same fine art.
To an age of fundamental coarseness and artificiality he came with a
wholesome message of refinement and simplicity, much as Ruskin and Arnold
spoke to a later age of materialism; only Addison's success was greater
than theirs because of his greater knowledge of life and his greater faith
in men. He attacks all the little vanities and all the big vices of his
time, not in Swift's terrible way, which makes us feel hopeless of
humanity, but with a kindly ridicule and gentle humor which takes speedy
improvement for granted. To read Swift's brutal "Letters to a Young Lady,"
and then to read Addison's "Dissection of a Beau's Head" and his
"Dissection of a Coquette's Heart," is to know at once the secret of the
latter's more enduring influence.

Three other results of these delightful essays are worthy of attention:
first, they are the best picture we possess of the new social life of
England, with its many new interests; second, they advanced the art of
literary criticism to a much higher stage than it had ever before reached,
and however much we differ from their judgment and their interpretation of
such a man as Milton, they certainly led Englishmen to a better knowledge
and appreciation of their own literature; and finally, in Ned Softly the
literary dabbler, Will Wimble the poor relation, Sir Andrew Freeport the
merchant, Will Honeycomb the fop, and Sir Roger the country gentleman, they
give us characters that live forever as part of that goodly company which
extends from Chaucer's country parson to Kipling's Mulvaney. Addison and
Steele not only introduced the modern essay, but in such characters as
these they herald t