against a
carefully wrought background of habit, manners, usage, and social
condition. The habit of observation and the wide acquaintance with
cultivated and elegant social life which was a necessary part of the
training for the work which was later to appear in the pages of the
Spectator, were perhaps the richest educational results of these years
of travel and study; for Addison the official is a comparatively obscure
figure, but Addison the writer is one of the most admirable and
attractive figures in English history.

Addison returned to England in 1703 with clouded prospects. The
accession of Queen Anne had been followed by the dismissal of the Whigs
from office; his pension was stopped, his opportunity of advancement
gone, and his father dead. The skies soon brightened, however: the
support of the Whigs became necessary to the Government; the brilliant
victory of Blenheim shed lustre not only on Marlborough, but on the men
with whom he was politically affiliated; and there was great dearth of
poetic ability in the Tory ranks at the very moment when a notable
achievement called for brave and splendid verse. Lord Godolphin, that
easy-going and eminently successful politician of whom Charles the
Second once shrewdly said that he was "never in the way and never out of
it," was directed to Addison in this emergency; and the story goes that
the Chancellor of the Exchequer, afterward Lord Carleton, who was sent
to express to the needy scholar the wishes of the Government, found him
lodged in a garret over a small shop. The result of this memorable
embassy from politics to literature was 'The Campaign': an eminently
successful poem of the formal, "occasional" order, which celebrated the
victor of Blenheim with tact and taste, pleased the ministry, delighted
the public, and brought reputation and fortune to its unknown writer.
Its excellence is in skillful avoidance of fulsome adulation, in the
exclusion of the well-worn classical allusions, and in a straightforward
celebration of those really great qualities in Marlborough which set his
military career in brilliant contrast with his private life. The poem
closed with a simile which took the world by storm:--

"So when an angel, by divine command,
With rising tempests shakes a guilty land,
(Such as of late o'er pale Britannia passed,)
Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;
And, pleased the Almighty's orders to perform,
Rides in the wh