nded. The same contrast is in their
works. Swift dwelt and gloated on the evil about him, exposed it in
more than its own deformity, and left his reader to reflect on his own
degradation. Addison, to whom that evil was almost equally apparent,
but who turned from its contemplation with horror, exerted all his
talents to correct it. "The great and only end of these speculations,"
he tells the reader of the _Spectator_, "is to banish vice and
ignorance out of the territories of Great Britain."

With solemn reproof and delicate raillery, Addison urged women to lay
aside coarseness and folly, and preached against the licentiousness,
swearing, gambling, duelling, and drunkenness of the men. He attacked
with both argument and ridicule the idea so prevalent since the
Restoration, that vice was necessarily associated with pleasure and
elegance, virtue with Puritanism and vulgarity. To teach people to be
witty without being indecent, gay without being vicious, such was the
object of Addison. As M. Taine says, he made morality fashionable. To
do this he exposed the folly and ugliness of vice. But he did more. He
held up to the public view characters who exemplified his teachings,
and were calculated to attract imitation. In the creation and
delineation of these characters he unconsciously began the English
novel.

We should look in vain in the pages of Fielding, of Scott, or of George
Eliot, for a more perfect sketch of character than that of Sir Roger
de Coverley. And the minor personages are little less delicately and
naturally drawn. There is the Bachelor of the Inner-Temple, "an
excellent critick," to whom "the time of the play is his hour of
business"; Sir Andrew Freeport, the typical merchant; Captain Sentry,
"a gentleman of great courage, good understanding, but invincible
modesty"; Will Honeycomb, "an honest, worthy man where women are not
concerned"; the clergyman, who has ceased to have "interests in this
world, as one who is hastening to the object of all his wishes, and
conceives hope from his decays and infirmities." "These are my ordinary
companions," says the _Spectator_, whom we soon learn to know very well
too.

Addison's knowledge of human nature, and his skill in delineating it in
single touches, place him in the front rank of writers of fiction,
notwithstanding the limit of his contributions to this department of
literature. In a few words we are made to see and know the Quaker who
reproves the insolent ca