HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL

PREFACE

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THE SPECTATOR.

THE project of writing the celebrated Essays

that form these volumes is said to have originated with Sir RICHARD STEELE; but the plan upon which such a work should be conducted was the result of much deliberate arrangement with his friend ADDISON, and it is highly probable that the scheme and opinion of ADDISON, to whom STEELE had ever been accustomed to pay great deference, exclusively operated in moulding what may be termed the fable and outline of the Spectator.

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The first paper appeared on Thursday, March 1, 1710-11; in it ADDISON gives an account of the birth, education, &c. of the SPECTATOR, and sketches the silent character he was to preserve, with great felicity of humour. The second, by STEELE, delineates the characters of the Club, the principal of whom is Sir ROGER DE COVERLEY.

The introduction of a club into this paper, whose characters, taken from the principal classes of society, and consistently supported, dramatize as it were the whole series of essays, was a contrivance admirably calculated to afford the requisite degree of unity. The character of the SPECTATOR is never lost sight of; it is insinuated through the entire production, and renders it, in fact, a complete picture of the mind of an individual. By this means a very considerable portion of interest and curiosity is excited; we entertain an affection for the writer who has thus given us such a masterly portrait of himself, and we perceive with delight that through the medium of this minute delineation of his person and manners, and those of his associates, he has formed a common centre of attraction, round which the whole work turns with a correspondence and beauty of design

which have for ever established it as the best model of the periodical essay.

Many succeeding Essayists have approximated very closely to some of the acknowledged excellencies of ADDISON. Morality, imagery, wit, and taste, are diffused with no sparing hand over their pages; but in the spirit and unity of their plan they have altogether failed, or fallen infinitely short of their celebrated prototype.

The artful and finished construction, indeed, of the design on which the Spectator is founded, is such, that the most perfect rules may be drawn from it for the regulation of this species of composition; and it is to be regretted that it has not more frequently met with liberal imitation from our numerous periodical writers. It must be obvious, that a mere, series of detached essays without any dependency of parts, without any organization which can constitute them a whole, can never make the impression, nor excite the lively interest, which the well-arranged scheme of ADDISON SO completely effects.

It is in the Spectator that the genius of our author beams with unclouded lustre. The essays most valuable for their humour, invention, and

precept, are the product of his pen; and it soon became, in consequence of his large contributions, the most popular work this country has produced. But we shall cease to enter into a detail of the merit and talent so conspicuous, and so universally acknowledged, and hasten to lay before our readers a biographical sketch of our author.

JOSEPH ADDISON was the son of the Rev. Lancelot Addison, dean of Litchfield, and Jane, daughter of Nathaniel Gulston, esq. He was born at Milston, near Ambrosbury, in Wiltshire, on May 1, 1672, at his father's rectory. After receiving the rudiments of education at Ambrosbury and Salisbury, he was removed for farther improvement to the Charter-house, under the tuition of Dr. Ellis; at which seminary he contracted an intimacy with Mr. Steele (afterwards Sir Richard), which continued through life.

At the early age of fifteen, Addison was entered of Queen's college, Oxford, where the facility with which he applied to classical literature, and particularly to Latin poetry, was soon taken notice of, and caused him to be elected a demy of Magdalen College, where he took the degrees of bachelor and master of arts. Such

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was the approbation his Latin poems met with, that eight pieces were printed in the second volume of the collection entitled "Musarum Anglicarum Analecta," where they excited very general applause. The topics are both serious and light; and in the latter a vein of that humour, for which he was afterwards so distinguished, is discernible.

It was not till his twenty-second year that he became an author in his own language; and his first attempt of that kind was a short copy of verses addressed to the veteran poet Dryden. It was followed by a translation of great part of the fourth Georgic of Virgil. Both these gave him the reputation of a skilful and correct versifier. Soon after, he exercised himself in the field of criticism; and communicated to Dryden a discourse on' Virgil's Georgics, which was prefixed, without a name, to that writer's translation of the Georgies. Other poetical efforts succeeded; and in 1695 he opened the career of his fortune as a literary man, by a complimentary poem on one of the campaigns of King William, addressed to the Lord-keeper Somers. This had the effect of engaging the friendship and patronage of that eminent statesman; and was probably the cause of his laying