absurd as that of the Cock-Lane ghost,
and forgeries as rank as Ireland's Vortigern, puts faith in the lie
about the Thundering Legion, is convinced that Tiberius moved the senate
to admit Jesus among the gods, and pronounces the letter of Agbarus,
King of Edessa, to be a record of great authority. Nor were these errors
the effects of superstition; for to superstition Addison was by no means
prone. The truth is that he was writing about what he did not
understand.

Miss Aikin has discovered a letter, from which it appears that, while
Addison resided at Oxford, he was one of several writers whom the
booksellers engaged to make an English version of Herodotus; and she
infers that he must have been a good Greek scholar. We can allow very
little weight to this argument, when we consider that his fellow
laborers were to have been Boyle and Blackmore. Boyle is remembered
chiefly as the nominal author of the worst book on Greek history and
philology that ever was printed; and this book, bad as it is, Boyle was
unable to produce without help. Of Blackmore's attainments in the
ancient tongues, it may be sufficient to say that, in his prose, he has
confounded an aphorism with an apothegm, and that when, in his verse, he
treats of classical subjects, his habit is to regale his readers with
four false quantities to a page.

It is probable that the classical acquirements of Addison were of as
much service to him as if they had been more extensive. The world
generally gives its admiration, not to the man who does what nobody else
even attempts to do, but to the man who does best what multitudes do
well. Bentley was so immeasurably superior to all the other scholars of
his time that few among them could discover his superiority. But the
accomplishment in which Addison excelled his contemporaries was then, as
it is now, highly valued and assiduously cultivated at all English seats
of learning. Everybody who had been at a public school had written Latin
verses; many had written such verses with tolerable success, and were
quite able to appreciate, though by no means able to rival, the skill
with which Addison imitated Virgil. His lines on the Barometer and the
Bowling Green were applauded by hundreds, to whom the Dissertation on
the Epistles of Phalaris was as unintelligible as the hieroglyphics on
an obelisk.

Purity of style and an easy flow of numbers are common to all Addison's
Latin poems. Our favorite piece is the Battle of th