arer to us in time than the men and women who figured on the stage in
the reign of James I. But their nature is farther from our nature. They
sparkle but never warm. They are witty but leave no impression. I might
almost go further, and say that they are wicked but never allure. "When
Voltaire came to visit the Great Congreve," says Thackeray, "the latter
rather affected to despise his literary reputation; and in this,
perhaps, the great Congreve was not far wrong. A touch of Steele's
tenderness is worth all his finery; a flash of Swift's lightning, a beam
of Addison's pure sunshine, and his tawdry playhouse taper is invisible.
But the ladies loved him, and he was undoubtedly a pretty fellow."

There is no doubt as to the true humour of Addison, who next comes up
before us, but I think that he makes hardly so good a subject for a
lecturer as the great gloomy man of intellect, or the frivolous man of
pleasure. Thackeray tells us all that is to be said about him as a
humorist in so few lines that I may almost insert them on this page:
"But it is not for his reputation as the great author of _Cato_ and _The
Campaign_, or for his merits as Secretary of State, or for his rank and
high distinction as Lady Warwick's husband, or for his eminence as an
examiner of political questions on the Whig side, or a guardian of
British liberties, that we admire Joseph Addison. It is as a Tattler of
small talk and a Spectator of mankind that we cherish and love him, and
owe as much pleasure to him as to any human being that ever wrote. He
came in that artificial age, and began to speak with his noble natural
voice. He came the gentle satirist, who hit no unfair blow; the kind
judge, who castigated only in smiling. While Swift went about hanging
and ruthless, a literary Jeffreys, in Addison's kind court only minor
cases were tried;--only peccadilloes and small sins against society,
only a dangerous libertinism in tuckers and hoops, or a nuisance in the
abuse of beaux canes and snuffboxes." Steele set _The Tatler_ a going.
"But with his friend's discovery of _The Tatler_, Addison's calling was
found, and the most delightful Tattler in the world began to speak. He
does not go very deep. Let gentlemen of a profound genius, critics
accustomed to the plunge of the bathos, console themselves by thinking
that he couldn't go very deep. There is no trace of suffering in his
writing. He was so good, so honest, so healthy, so cheerfully
selfish,--if I