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Essays of Joseph Addison; CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Gift of Samuel B. Bird '21 Essays of Joseph Addison; 3 1924 013 167 428 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013167428 EDITION DE LUXE :s: t:t £ S S A. Y S OF tt: JOSEPH ADDISON 6,^ _ 1^1 c^ CHOSEN AND EDITED BY JOHN RICHARD GRECN. M. A., LL. DJ^37-a HONORARY FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD THE ROGER DE GOVERLEY CLUB LONDON AND NEW YORK EDITION DE LUXE This Edition of Addison's Essays is limited to One Thousand copies, printed for subscribers only jf^ JZl<^ ^J CONTENTS PAOB INTEODUCTION V SIR ROGER DE COVERLET xxv Sir Roger at Home 1 Sir Roger and Will. Wimble 6 Sir Roger at Church 10 Sir Roger and the Witches 14 Sir Roger at the Assizes 18 Sir Roger and the Gipsies 23 Sir Roger in Town 37 Sir Roger in Westminster Abbey 32 Sir Roger at the Play 37 Sir Roger at Yauxhall 42 Deathof Sir Roger 46 THE TATLER'S COURT 51 —Trial of the Dead in Reason 53 Trial of the Petticoat ; 58 Trial of the Wine-brewers 63 STATESWOMEN 69 Party Patches 71 Women and Liberty 76 The Ladies' Association 80 Meeting of the Association 85 Politics and the Fan 90 Pretty DisafiEection 95 HUMORS OF THE TOWN 101 The Royal Exchange 103 Stage Lions 108 The Political Upholsterer 113 A Visit from the Upholsterer 117 The Fortune Hunter 131 CONTENTS. ji PAQI Tom Folio 126 The Man of the Town 130 The Trunk-maker at the Play 134 CofiEee-House Politicians 139 London Cries 144 The Cat-Call 149 The Newspaper 154 Coffee-House Debates 159 The Vision of Public Credit 163 TALES AND ALLEGORIES 167 The Visions of Mirzah 169 The Tale of IVIarraton ' 175 The Golden Scales 181 Hilpa and Shalum 186 The Vision of Justice , 193 THE COURT OF HONOR 305 Institution of the Court 207 Charge to the Jury 211 Trial of Punctilios 216 —Cases of False Delicacy 221 „ Trial of Ladies' Quarrels 226 ^ Trial of False Affronts 231 COUNTRY HUMORS 235 The Tory Foxhunter 237 The Foxhunter at a Masquerade 243 Conversion of the Foxhunter 247 Country Manners 252 Country Fashions 256 Country Etiquette., i 260 The Grinning Match 265 HUMORS OF FASHION 271 ABeau's Head 273 A Coquette's Heart 377 The Hood 281 The Head-dress 285 The Fan Exercise 289 A Lady's Diary 293 Fashions from France 399 Woman on Horseback 304 CONTENTS. iii PAGE VARIOUS ESSAYS , 309 Omens 311 Lady Orators 316 Adventures of a Shilling 321 Husbands and Wives 336 Religions in Waxwork 330 A Friend of Mankind 337 Advice in Love 343 Thoughts in Westminster Abbey 346 INTRODUCTION. We commonly regard the Age of the Eevolution as an age of military exploits and political changes, an age whose warlike glories loom dimly through the smoke of Blenheim or of Eamillies, and the greatness of whose political issues still impresses us, though we track them with difficulty through a chaos of treasons and cabals. But to the men who lived in it the age was far more than this. To them the Eevolution was more than a merely political revolution ; it was the recognition not only of a change in the relations of the nation to its rulers, but of changes almost as great in English society and in English intelligence. If it was the age of the Bill of Eights, it was the age also of the Spectator. If Marlborough and Somers had their share in shaping the new England that came of 1688, so also had Addison and Steele. And to the bulk of people it may be doubted whether the change that passed over literature was not more startling and more interesting than the change that passed over '\ politics. Few changes, indeed, have ever been so radical and complete. Literature suddenly doffed its stately garb of folio or octavo, and stepped abroad in the light and easy dress of pamphlet and essay. Its jlong arguments and cumbrous sentences condensed themselves into the quick reasoning and terse easy phrases of ordinary conversation. Its tone lost the yi INTRODUCTION. pedantry of the scholar, the brutality of the contro- versialist, and aimed at being unpretentious, polite, urbane. The writer aimed at teaching, but at teach- ing in pleasant and familiar ways ; he strove to make evil unreasonable and ridiculous; to shame men by wit and irony out of grossness and bad manners ; to draw the world to piety and virtue by teaching piety and virtue themselves to smile. And the change of subject was as remarkable as the change of form. Letters found a new interest in the scenes and charac- ters of the common life around them, in the chat of the coffee-house, the loungers of the Mall, the humors of the street, the pathos of the fireside. Every one has felt the change that passed in this way over our literature ; but we commonly talk as if the change had been a change in the writers of the time, as if the intelligence which produces books had suddenly taken of itself a new form, as if men like Addison had conceived the Essay and their readers had adapted themselves to this new mode of writing. The truth lies precisely the other way. In no department of human life does the law of supply and demand operate so powerfully as in literature. "Writers and readers are not two different classes of men: both are products of the same social and mental conditions: and the thoughts of the one will be commonly of the same order and kind as the thoughts of the other. Even in the form which a writer gives to his thought, there will be the same compelling pressure from the world about him ; he will unconsciously comply with what he feels to be the needs of his readers; he will write so as best to be read. And thus it is that if we seek a key to this great literary change of the Age of the Eevolution, we must look for it not in the writers of INTRODUCTION. vii the Kevolution so much as in the public for whom they wrote. I restrict myself here, however, to a single feature of this change. " As a bashful and not forward boy," says the novelist Eichardson, " 1 was an early favorite with all the young women of taste and reading in the neighborhood. Half-a-dozen of them, when met to work with their needles, used, when they got a book they liked and thought I should, to borrow me to read to them, the mothers sometimes with them, and both mothers and daughters used to be pleased with the observations they put me on making." The close of this bit of boyish autobiography is amusingly charac- teristic ; and there are ^till, I trust, readers of Eichard- son to whom this little group of Englishwomen, " met to work with their needles," may have its interest, as the first of a series of such groups which gathered round the honest printer throughout his life, and out of which, half-a-century later, the one great imagina- tive achievement of the age of the Georges, the story of Clarissa, was to spring. But it is not for Eichard- son's sake, or for Clarissa's, that I quote it here. I quote it because it is one of the earliest instances that I can recall of the social revolution of which I spoke, in its influence on letters. Till now English letters had almost exclusively addressed themselves to men. As books had been written by men, so—it was as- sumed—they would be read by men; and not only was this true of the philosophical and theological works of the time, but even its more popular literature, the novelettes—for instance—of Greene and his fellow- Elizabethans, bear on the face of them that they were written to amuse not women but men. The most popular branch of letters, in fact, the drama, so ex- Viii INTRODUCTION, clusively addressed itself to male ears that up to the Kestoration no woman filled even a woman's part on the boards, nor could a decent woman appear in a theater without a mask. Even the great uprooting of every political, social, and religious belief in the Civil Wars left this conception of literature almost un- touched. The social position of woman indeed profited little by the Great Kebellion. If she appeared as a preacher among the earlier Quakers, no feature of the Quaker movement gave greater scandal among Englishmen at large; and Milton's cry for Divorce was founded not on any notion of woman's equality, but on the most arrogant assertion ever made of her inferiority to man. It is a remarkable fact that amidst the countless schemes of political reform which the age produced, schemes of every possible order of novelty and extravagance, I do not remember a single one which proposed that even the least share of political power should be given to women. And yet it is from the time of the Great Eebellion that the change in woman's position really dates. The new dignity given to her by the self-restraint which Puritanism imposed on human life, by the spiritual rank which she shared equally with husband or son as one of " the elect of God," by the deepening and concentration of the af- fections within the circle of the home, which was one of the results of its withdrawal of the " godly " from the general converse and amusements of the outer world, told quickly on the social position of woman.
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