uman; but he venerated nothing. Neither in the masterpieces of
art nor in the purest examples of virtue, neither in the Great First
Cause nor in the awful enigma of the grave, could he see anything but
subjects for drollery. The more solemn and august the theme, the more
monkey-like was his grimacing and chattering. The mirth of Swift is the
mirth of Mephistopheles; the mirth of Voltaire is the mirth of Puck.
If, as Soame Jenyns oddly imagined, a portion of the happiness of
Seraphim and just men made perfect be derived from an exquisite
perception of the ludicrous, their mirth must surely be none other than
the mirth of Addison; a mirth consistent with tender compassion for all
that is frail, and with profound reverence for all that is sublime.
Nothing great, nothing amiable, no moral duty, no doctrine of natural or
revealed religion, has ever been associated by Addison with any
degrading idea. His humanity is without parallel in literary history.
The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without
abusing it. No kind of power is more formidable than the power of making
men ridiculous; and that power Addison possessed in boundless measure.
How grossly that power was abused by Swift and by Voltaire is well
known. But of Addison it may be confidently affirmed that he has
blackened no man's character, nay, that it would be difficult, if not
impossible, to find in all the volumes which he has left us a single
taunt which can be called ungenerous or unkind. Yet he had detractors,
whose malignity might have seemed to justify as terrible a revenge as
that which men not superior to him in genius wreaked on Bettesworth and
on Franc de Pompignan. He was a politician; he was the best writer of
his party; he lived in times of fierce excitement, in times when persons
of high character and station stooped to scurrility such as is now
practised only by the basest of mankind. Yet no provocation and no
example could induce him to return railing for railing.

Of the service which his Essays rendered to morality it is difficult to
speak too highly. It is true that when the Tatler appeared, that age of
outrageous profaneness and licentiousness which followed the Restoration
had passed away. Jeremy Collier had shamed the theatres into something
which, compared with the excesses of Etherege and Wycherley, might be
called decency. Yet there still lingered in the public mind a
pernicious notion that there was some connection betwe