ute the general justice
of Johnson's remarks on this passage. But we must point out one
circumstance which appears to have escaped all the critics. The
extraordinary effect which this simile produced when it first appeared,
and which to the following generation seemed inexplicable, is doubtless
to be chiefly attributed to a line which most readers now regard as a
feeble parenthesis,--

"Such as, of late, o'er pale Britannia pass'd."

Addison spoke, not of a storm, but of the storm. The great tempest of
November, 1703, the only tempest which in our latitude has equalled the
rage of a tropical hurricane, had left a dreadful recollection in the
minds of all men. No other tempest was ever in this country the occasion
of a parliamentary address or of a public fast. Whole fleets had been
cast away. Large mansions had been blown down. One Prelate had been
buried beneath the ruins of his Palace. London and Bristol had presented
the appearance of cities just sacked. Hundreds of families were still in
mourning. The prostrate trunks of large trees, and the ruins of houses,
still attested, in all the southern counties, the fury of the blast.
The popularity which the simile of the Angel enjoyed among Addison's
contemporaries has always seemed to us to be a remarkable instance of
the advantage which, in rhetoric and poetry, the particular has over the
general.

Soon after the Campaign, was published Addison's Narrative of his
Travels in Italy. The first effect produced by this Narrative was
disappointment. The crowd of readers who expected politics and scandal,
speculations on the projects of Victor Amadeus, and anecdotes about the
jollities of convents and the amours of cardinals and nuns, were
confounded by finding that the writer's mind was much more occupied by
the war between the Trojans and Rutulians than by the war between France
and Austria; and that he seemed to have heard no scandal of later date
than the gallantries of the Empress Faustina. In time, however, the
judgment of the many was overruled by that of the few; and, before the
book was reprinted, it was so eagerly sought that it sold for five times
the original price. It is still read with pleasure; the style is pure
and flowing; the classical quotations and allusions are numerous and
happy; and we are now and then charmed by that singularly humane and
delicate humor in which Addison excelled all men. Yet this agreeable
work, even when considered merely as the