atron went out of office, and his pension
was unpaid: and hearing that this great scholar, now eminent and known to
the _literati_ of Europe (the great Boileau,(81) upon perusal of Mr.
Addison's elegant hexameters, was first made aware that England was not
altogether a barbarous nation)--hearing that the celebrated Mr. Addison, of
Oxford, proposed to travel as governor to a young gentleman on the grand
tour, the great Duke of Somerset proposed to Mr. Addison to accompany his
son, Lord Hartford.

Mr. Addison was delighted to be of use to his grace and his lordship, his
grace's son, and expressed himself ready to set forth.

His grace the Duke of Somerset now announced to one of the most famous
scholars of Oxford and Europe that it was his gracious intention to allow
my Lord Hartford's tutor one hundred guineas per annum. Mr. Addison wrote
back that his services were his grace's, but he by no means found his
account in the recompense for them. The negotiation was broken off. They
parted with a profusion of _congees_ on one side and the other.

Addison remained abroad for some time, living in the best society of
Europe. How could he do otherwise? He must have been one of the finest
gentlemen the world ever saw: at all moments of life serene and courteous,
cheerful and calm.(82) He could scarcely ever have had a degrading
thought. He might have omitted a virtue or two, or many, but could not
have had many faults committed for which he need blush or turn pale. When
warmed into confidence, his conversation appears to have been so
delightful that the greatest wits sat wrapt and charmed to listen to him.
No man bore poverty and narrow fortune with a more lofty cheerfulness. His
letters to his friends at this period of his life, when he had lost his
Government pension and given up his college chances, are full of courage
and a gay confidence and philosophy: and they are none the worse in my
eyes, and I hope not in those of his last and greatest biographer (though
Mr. Macaulay is bound to own and lament a certain weakness for wine, which
the great and good Joseph Addison notoriously possessed, in common with
countless gentlemen of his time), because some of the letters are written
when his honest hand was shaking a little in the morning after libations
to purple Lyaeus overnight. He was fond of drinking the healths of his
friends: he writes to Wyche,(83) of Hamburgh, gratefully remembering
Wyche's "hoc". "I have been drinking yo