ce, he lost his
employment. But Tangier had been ceded by Portugal to England as part of
the marriage portion of the Infanta Catharine; and to Tangier Lancelot
Addison was sent. A more miserable situation can hardly be conceived. It
was difficult to say whether the unfortunate settlers were more
tormented by the heats or by the rains, by the soldiers within the wall
or by the Moors without it. One advantage the chaplain had. He enjoyed
an excellent opportunity of studying the history and manners of Jews and
Mahometans; and of this opportunity he appears to have made excellent
use. On his return to England, after some years of banishment, he
published an interesting volume on the Polity and Religion of Barbary,
and another on the Hebrew Customs and the State of Rabbinical Learning.
He rose to eminence in his profession, and became one of the royal
chaplains, a Doctor of Divinity, Archdeacon of Salisbury, and Dean of
Lichfield. It is said that he would have been made a bishop after the
Revolution, if he had not given offence to the government by strenuously
opposing, in the Convocation of 1689, the liberal policy of William and
Tillotson.

In 1672, not long after Dr. Addison's return from Tangier, his son
Joseph was born. Of Joseph's childhood we know little. He learned his
rudiments at schools in his father's neighborhood, and was then sent to
the Charter House. The anecdotes which are popularly related about his
boyish tricks do not harmonize very well with what we know of his riper
years. There remains a tradition that he was the ringleader in a barring
out, and another tradition that he ran away from school and hid himself
in a wood, where he fed on berries and slept in a hollow tree, till
after a long search he was discovered and brought home. If these stories
be true, it would be curious to know by what moral discipline so
mutinous and enterprising a lad was transformed into the gentlest and
most modest of men.

We have abundant proof that, whatever Joseph's pranks may have been, he
pursued his studies vigorously and successfully. At fifteen he was not
only fit for the University, but carried thither a classical taste and a
stock of learning which would have done honor to a Master of Arts. He
was entered at Queen's College, Oxford; but he had not been many months
there, when some of his Latin verses fell by accident into the hands of
Dr. Lancaster, Dean of Magdalene College. The young scholar's diction
and versifi