characters of the most opposite kind may be allied. To Pope's delicate, nervous, and retiring spirit, the fearless vivacity of Steele must have offered strong points of repulsion; but the charm, or the chance, by which his recklessness of heart, his irregularity of principle, and his rash extravagance, could be reconciled to the sensitive caution, if not the frigid prudence, of Addison, must be left among those problems which amuse curiosity without much hope of explanation. Addison's acquaintance at any time must have been an honor, for his literary distinctions were already high; but he possessed the more tangible merit of a connexion with political life which placed him prominently in the world. With that singular alternation, by which posterity reverses the grounds of contemporary fame, the writer of the Spectator' has eclipsed the statesman. But Addison's life was spent in the most continual career of office: he had commenced it as a confidential agent of the English cabinet with prince Eugene, while in command of the Imperialists in Italy in 1705, he had attended lord Halifax in his Hanoverian legation; having previously been made commissioner of appeals, as successor to the celebrated Locke: in 1706, he was appointed one of the under-secretaries of state; and on Wharton's appointment to the lord-lieutenancy : ture. of Ireland, he accompanied him as secretary,—an office of great importance. To those employments his literary labors were long subsidiary. The Tatler,' started by Steele, April, 1709, in his absence, was made the receptacle merely of his humorous idleness: but his return from Ireland, by relieving him from the cares of state, allowed the deeper devotion of his time to literaThe appearance of the Spectator,' March 1st, 1711, proved the vigor of thought and knowlege which the drudgery of office had hitherto absorbed without being able to extinguish; and its success placed him instantly without a rival in the prose writers of the age, for the sale often swelled to twenty thousand a-day. This triumphant series closed within little more than a year, in September, 1712: it was followed by another, and by the Guardian.' But politics had already resumed their sway over Addison: Cato,' itself the play of a politician, was the last production of his taste; and he gave himself up to power. On the death of the queen, he successively held the offices of secretary to the lords justices, secretary to lord Sunderland in the government of Ireland, a lord of trade, and, finally, was by George I. raised to the high station of one of the secretaries of state in 1717. In two years after, 1719, death closed the busy career of a man who had gone through all those varieties of life and honors before his forty-eighth year. Pope's introduction to Addison was then less to an author of acknowleged fame than to a public personage of established rank; and the notice of such an individual must be regarded among the incidents that so strikingly smoothed his path through the common difficulties of young ambition. My acquaintance with Addison,' said he, in one of his communications with Spence, 'began in 1712: I liked him then as well as I liked any man, and was very fond of his conversation.' But their natures and habits were equally at variance: Addison could not forget the political feelings in which he had acted, enjoyed, and suffered; Pope's religion and his avowed opinions equally ranked him among the opponents of the Hanover succession. A mutual distaste soon displayed itself. Pope conceived, that when Addison advised him against employing the machinery of sylphs in the Rape of the Lock,' and pronounced it exquisite, merum sal, as it stood, he had attempted to extinguish an excellence which he sufficiently foresaw to fear: the intercourse still continued, but it was poisoned; first falling into alienation, it was at length imbittered into hostility. Soon after this period, Pope gave the first dis play of his powers in a department of poetry, which, if it does not resistlessly overpower the imagination, makes an easy conquest of the heart. The Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady' is now established equally beyond praise and censure it has long borne the highest fame of pathetic poetry; but the story of its subject has been a matter of more various opinion. The first attempt to develop the mystery, was that this lady, having entertained a partiality for a person of inferior degree, refused a match proposed to her by her uncle, who was her guardian; and, that finding her affections too firmly rooted, he forced her abroad;'* where the catastrophe happened. But this statement appears to be contradicted by Pope, who, in a letter to her, says, But if you are resolved in revenge to rob the world of so much example as you may afford it, I believe your design will be vain; for even in a monastery your devotions cannot carry you so far towards the next world, as to make this lose the sight of you: but you will be like a star, that while it is fixed in heaven shines over all the earth.' This style is fantastic, but it certainly gives no impression that the lady's retirement was involuntary. Ruffhead's Life of Pope. 6 By another biographer it is farther stated, that her name was Wainsbury, that she was a remarkably deformed person, and that her life was ended by hanging.'" Yet, as we must be reluctant to believe all circumstances likely to diminish the interest of the poem; so we have all the evidence that the poem can give of her distinguished loveliness. The last solution is, that her attachment was not to any Englishman, of whatever rank; but to a young prince of the French blood-royal, Charles Emmanuel, duke of Berry, whom in earlier years she had met at the court of France.'t In 1712, the probable date of the poem, the duke was in his twenty-sixth year. The story in this shape, it must be acknowleged, exhibits but little evidence; and that little is by no means increased because it came from Voltaire on the authority of Condorcet. Yet the poem clearly implies that its subject was a person of some distinction, that once had honor, virtue, titles, fame;' and that she loved in a rank even higher than her own : Why bade ye else, ye powers, her soul aspire Thus the question still rests in darkness, to exer • Warton. + Bowles. |