the influences of the Renaissance and of the Reformation. The former, as everywhere, aroused not only susceptibility to the graces of culture and of art, but a slumbering power of pagan enjoyment whose lasting literary expression is to be found in the lyrics, and still more in the great dramas, which are commonly called Elizabethan. At the same time the solemn enthusiasm of the Reformation developed a passionate fervor of religious feeling which ultimately masked itself beneath the formal austerities of the Puritans. These devotees have been more misunderstood than any other figures in English history. Superficially grim, narrow, bigoted, and often extremely practical in conduct, they have been reputed by tradition inhumanly devoid of any traits which should make comprehensible the admitted intensity of their convictions. Only after intimate study of their lives and their records does one begin to perceive the intense idealism of their faith. It was because to them the only realities were the ineffable glories of the unseen world that they at once so palpably neglected the charms and the beauties of earthly life, and spoke in symbols which to those who do not sympathize seem canting and unimaginative. Once force yourself into a mood which actually, intensely believes that this earthly life is only a fragment of eternity in which the unmerited mercy of an offended God may perhaps grant to some of us the free grace of salvation from the damning consequences of sin, ancestral and personal alike, and you will begin to understand how to the Puritans every instant of human existence was pregnant with a meaning such as the less secure faith of later times can hardly suspect.

The pagan recklessness of the Renaissance clashed with the Hebraic fervor of the Puritan Reformation. In such a storm of passion as nowadays seems incredible, Cavaliers and Puritans met and fought. The king's head fell; driven into exile or obscurity, the Royalists languished for twelve years

In place

under the grimly formalizing masters of the Commonwealth. Sincere fervor on both sides was burning itself out. of passionate idealism the Puritan temper was actually growing into that decadent unloveliness which has often been held to embrace all Puritan history. In place of pagan recklessness, meanwhile, the Royalists, many of them idle among the fascinating vices of continental corruption, were developing shameless licentiousness. With the return of Charles II this decadent paganism came into a power which was checked by nothing more vital than the decadent formalism of the later Puritans. When Addison was born the English race was exhausted by a century of passionate striving for the realities which lie unattainably behind the phenomena of life; good forces and evil alike were weakened until they showed themselves only in the decadent forms of heartless phrases and shameless sensuality.

In the years of Addison's youth and of his early manhood this state of things had persisted. With occasional amelioration, the personal morals of the Reformation remained the ideals of fashion. Whatever vigor the more serious feeling of the time may have declared meanwhile, it never took the form of passionate idealism, of sincere effort to perceive and to master the realities which lie beyond human ken. Superficially, up to the time of the Spectator itself, the exhausted traditions of the passionate past still maintained the incompatibility of goodness and pleasure, of graces and virtue.

The English race, which had been undergoing this spiritual experience, preserved meanwhile an instinct which has been constant throughout its history, and which remains generally characteristic of English-speaking Americans as well. Continental nations have always laughed at English propriety at the persistency, for example, with which decent English travellers are presumed to repeat the adjectives "shocking" and "improper." Such opinions, continental scoffers hold,

cannot be spontaneously sincere; wherefore the English are declared a nation of hypocrites. One can see why to everybody, in reckless moods, shocking and improper things offer temptation; and an instinctive recoil from them, as distinguished from courageous rejection, often seems to imply pretence to more than human excellence of motive. Any normal Englishman, however, and any normal American of true English stock, who will honestly look within himself, will discover somewhere in his moral nature a distinct propensity not common in people of alien blood. As a race we sincerely like to be respectable. Of course we all know that it is very pleasant to do a great many things which we ought not to do. With equal instinctiveness, however, we know that it is also pleasant to be and to be recognized as something like what we ought to be. At the same time, too, we are instinctively aware that the delights of true respectability do not involve anything approaching such trouble as must come to whoever would conceal habits of devouring forbidden fruit. Quick-witted races perhaps enjoy being one thing and seeming another. The intellectual activity demanded by such a course, on the other hand, is painfully unattractive to the sluggish temperament of our native stock. Throughout history, accordingly, men of English blood have generally preferred to be respectable. What foreigners call our hypocrisy is really a spontaneous manifestation of our profound mental inertia.

The precise function of the Spectator was honestly to proclaim afresh this ideal to which the English race has always remained on the whole loyal. The Tatler had begun as a newspaper. In less than two years it had unwittingly changed into something like a censor of morals, which maintained a more normally English standard than that which had fashionably prevailed since the Gallicized times of Charles II. Now the rather dubious Isaac Bickerstaff, who so far as he had any personality was a charlatan, proved by no means a convenient

censor. Accordingly, he faded out of the Tatler; and, when the new periodical began, his place was taken by the nameless Spectator.

In

Some such personage was really an artistic necessity. For a good fellow in early middle life, who walked about in a huge wig, and often went to bed the worse for wine, to lecture his contemporaries would have been unseemly. For Addison, besides, an assumed personality was needful as a matter of temperament. The man was always shy, self-conscious. every line of the writing which he did in his own person this trait is palpable. So long as in his own imagination he remained Mr. Joseph Addison, with his public career to look after as well as his private morals, he was really incapable of such abandonment of himself to his art as must underlie any lasting artistic achievement. As an imaginary Spectator, on the other hand, he was free to say and to do whatever he felt to be in accordance with his assumed character. No small part of the charm of Addison's Spectator, in short, may be traced to the happy accident of this underlying bit of private theatricals.

The character of the Spectator, too, gave Addison and his fellow contributors to the famous paper an additional advantage. Their real object was to preach, to affect thought and conduct by bringing philosophy down to daily life. Their philosophy, to be sure, amounted to little more than urbane respectability; but that made no difference. Preaching, to be effective, demands one of two visible sanctions — either the authority of a divine commission, which sometimes reveals itself in the shape of priestly orders, and sometimes in that of inspired fervor; or else the authority which comes from prolonged and wide experience. On March 1, 1711, when the first Spectator appeared, Addison was two months short of his thirty-ninth birthday. Steele was only a little older, and most of their coadjutors were younger still. To have preached in

their own persons, would evidently have been to assume an authority beyond their years. In no one point does the fine humor which always preserved Addison from absurdity appear more plainly than in the assumption by these men in early middle life of an age which should give their utterances weight.

The age of the Spectator, as well as the sketch of his personal career in the first paper, was a deliberate fiction. The broader traits which he displayed through the whole career of his journal were very probably genuine. Addison certainly wrote the passage in which the Spectator introduces himself; with equal certainty he had no direct hand in more than half of the papers which followed. Very clearly, however, the character of the Spectator was generally maintained throughout the series with a consistency which has been less remarked than it deserves. One still hears much of the characters of Sir Roger de Coverley and of Will Honeycomb, but little concerning the personal character of the Spectator himself. As one reads his lucubrations, however, one grows insensibly to feel that he is as distinctly individualized as any personage in English fiction; his individuality is generally unrecognized only because it is so contemplatively unobtrusive.

As such it has much in common with Addison's own. Characteristic, too, of Addison as well as of the Spectator are the traits which define themselves for whoever reads paper after paper. The full effect of these papers may best be appreciated nowadays by a deliberate effort to revive the conditions under which they originally appeared. Keep your Spectator at hand. Turn to it once a day, and read, in the order of their appearance, one paper at a time. A fortnight of such daily intercourse with the Spectator as was the delight of London in the time of Queen Anne will teach you more about him than months of elaborate, detailed study. You will grow to know him as people knew John Leech thirty years ago, as more lately we