Joseph Addison and his time

The main facts in Addison’s life could be compressed within the compass of an ordinary telegram, thus:

If, in the style of the modern journalist, you chose to add a spice of mild scandal, you might say that he was married to the Countess of Warwick, but the union was not a happy one. Should a little extra tang be required, it would be quite in order to say that on occasion he drank too much.

Or, supposing that you were very narrow and chose to run a dark smear across his name, you might make much of the fact that he sometimes loaned money to his best friend, Richard Steele, and on one such occasion, sent the sheriff’s officer with an order for the debtor’s arrest, two days after the loan had been made. This story, be it said, you may not find in any existing biography, at least I have not been able to find it, but, nevertheless, it is true, for Dick Steele told it to his friend Richard Savage the poet, who, in turn, told it to Doctor Johnson. Then, of course, James Boswell got hold of it and gave it to the world.

Still, as you know and as I know, and as Nietzsche said, men’s wickedness is much less than the fame of it, so, rightly understood and fairly told, even this, which might be denounced by the thoughtless as an act of base treachery, turns out to be a very ordinary affair, the like of which might easily have befallen me. For the fact is that Richard Steele was Richard Steele, a mighty good fellow, as also was Addison. You see the character of the man as soon as you look at his picture. Ruddy and strong, full of boisterous health is he, one in whom the sap of life rises swiftly. At a glance you see that he can laugh heartily, like Rabelais, like Scarron. If you are supersensitive, if you are timid, you would not go abroad with him, for he is, it is plain to be seen, one who would take you into taverns, into baignoires on occasion, into places where are jovial companions who love a good song, or a jolly story over a bottle. With his kind, you may wind up the night with either a broken head or a belly full, but which ever it was, you would have had a good time. And Addison, a quieter sort, a fine, sensitive type, liked his Irish friend. They had been school boys together, and, later, college chums. They were the same age, too. It was a friendship like that of William of Orange for Bentick, or Queen Anne for Lady Churchill. But Dick Steele was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and being a genius, was bold, reckless of life, of health, of which the unco’ guid call honor. So his wealthy relative cast him off before he had graduated from college, and he became a kind of vagrant. He joined the army, soon tired of the discipline, bought himself out, and lived by his wits. He loved women and he loved wine, but he loved wine more than women. He was an easy going, good natured adventurer [Pg 5]with a strong literary gift and a tremendous imagination. Like Tom Jones, he lived his life in a manner far from perfect, knew it and regretted it. He had spurts of virtue, he made good resolutions, then straightway forgot all about them and went on in the same old way. Give him a guinea and immediately he went about to find a friend to share it. A good meal and an evening spent in jolly company seemed to him a far more attractive way to dispose of gold than the uninteresting payment of tradesmen’s bills. Besides, do what he would, at one time in his career, to pay off all that he owed seemed an utter impossibility. So, as a palliative measure, he would borrow from Peter to pay Paul.

But Richard Steele was also a letter writer. His winning personality, his charm of manner shone on the written page. He was as irresistible as Micawber, as charming as Esmond. Judge for yourself. I take, almost at random, four letters of twenty. They are written to his wife, and, as most men know, to write to a wife is not easy, and less so when one is long overdue, or too late for dinner, and, to boot, a little far gone in one’s cups. Then it requires both dexterity and diplomacy. The letters are, of course, of subsequent date to the Addison loan affair, but serve to show the peculiar, persuasive qualities of the writer.

It is a little significant that nine out of ten letters written to his wife, are graceful notes of apology because of his absence from home. Here is another.

One more will be sufficient, especially as it seems to show that Mrs. Steele was by no means pleased to have messengers knocking at her door at all hours of the night with letters from the errant Richard.

On that I rest my case, as the lawyers say, as having amply proved the persuasive powers of Richard Steele. Such letters would turn a heart of stone.

One day, when Addison was in funds, there came to him a touching letter from his old school fellow. Dick was in trouble again. The letter told all. His flint-hearted creditors pressed. His grate was fireless and there was not as much as a candle in the house. Butcher and baker cast a cold eye upon him. The wolf was at the door, and, eke, the bailiff with a writ. “Impatient people who take all advantage” beset him. For twenty-four hours he had fasted, and starvation stared him in the face. A hundred pounds would save his life.

Picture Addison his friend, a man of wealth and position; Under Secretary of State; a little king surrounded by his circle of admirers; a coffee-house wit; a conversationalist able to keep a “few friends listening and laughing around a table from the time when a play ended till the clock of St. Paul’s struck four o’ the morning”; the guest of the brilliant Lady Mary Montague; collector of Elzevirs and ancient medals. He read the letter once, twice, thrice. There is a rabble of reasons why he should help Dick and a rabble why he should not. He ponders awhile in doubt.... But it is his old Irish school friend in trouble again. It is Dick the luckless. But here is sincere repentance, and, anyway, Dick is under a cloud. Moreover, he is through with “the well-fed [Pg 8]wits” who batten on him. So the messenger is called in, presently leaves with the money and Addison sleeps well.

But not with monetary aid alone is Addison satisfied. He has some knowledge of life in Grub Street—a knowledge also possessed by Goldsmith who told how the luckless author in dark days

So, the next day, Addison climbs Steele’s stairway. He is astonished to find porters running up and down bearing trays loaded with soups, fish, entrees and sweetmeats. He, himself, is elbowed out of the way by servants. There are lights everywhere and, from within, the sound of fiddles. It is long past sunset and no black-hearted bailiff may do his full work. Through the open door is seen the long, crowded table, piled high with wines and meats, champagnes and burgundies, and at the head, brimming with happiness and good humor, without a present care in the world, sits Dick Steele. Small wonder then that the good nature of Addison received a shock and that he determined to give Steele and his “well-fed wits” a lesson.

But big men find it easy to forgive. Vindictiveness is for small minds alone. Indeed, Addison the gentleman never told the story. He, doubtless, soon considered it a closed incident and so forgot all about it. It was Steele the gentleman who gave the tale to the world, and, as a gentleman should, to illustrate his friend’s generosity.

One day a notion struck Steele. He decided to publish a journal on a new plan. It is true there were news sheets in plenty, but, the times were, in some respects, very like our own, and the self-imposed task of the journalist seemed then, as now, to be to provide the weak-minded section of the public with a new variety of mental dissipation each day. Then, as now, too, the spirit of sensationalism was abroad. Then, as now, there was a very active championship of bad causes and the only care of the journal’s owner was to increase his circulation and keep out of the clutches of the law. Every blind popular prejudice and every brutal fanaticism was seized upon avidly and every consideration of decency disregarded. To cater to the baser appetites, the lowest curiosities, the shallowest mind, was the rule. Today, picturing the people of England as of then, from the current news sheets, you see a nation of Yahoos that hate each other, tear each other with their talons with hideous contortions and yells. You see, very much as you see today with us, foul sheets doing lip service, darkening counsel by words without knowledge, fawning on the wealthy, flattering the men in power. To use Swift’s picture as applicable, (Gulliver’s Travels, Part 4, chap. 7):

I can well imagine Dick Steele, his mind busy with the idea of some new play perhaps, turning into some coffee-house to rest, or, if possible, to find some companion with whom [Pg 10]he could have a pleasant talk. It is the Cocoa Tree that he chooses, and it has a back room, long, and low, and brown paneled, and through the window is to be seen the red-walled rose garden. There he finds gathered company. Steele notes the general picture, the browns and grays, here and there a coat of brighter color, this face strongly illuminated and that in shadow, and he also notes that there is a great deal of “goose gabble” by way of conversation. Nothing there to interest him. He picks up the news sheet. It is Dawk’s Protestant Mercury, a popular paper. It has been well read as the coffee stains and finger marks show. He turns it over, passing impatiently the two columns of flamboyant boastings which tell how at any time, “one Englishman can beat three Frenchmen,” scanning swiftly, and rejecting impatiently, its pretended statements of facts as entirely unworthy; then his eye falls on the stirring item of the day, the item to which men first turn as children of a low order of intellect turn today to the funny sheet of a Sunday supplement, and he reads this:

The banality, the stupidity of it all startled him. It held him all that day, and soon the idea filled Steele’s mind that a decent and dignified journalism was possible. He was idealist enough to believe, and optimist enough to hope that a decent paper might become a potent agency of enlightenment and that intelligent [Pg 11]citizens everywhere would be only too glad to look to it for light and leading. It might contain foreign news, dramatic reports and the literary gossip of Will’s and the Grecian, the two coffee houses where the wits foregathered. So, full of the idea, he wrote to Addison of his plan. No sooner did Addison, then in Ireland, learn of it than he was all eagerness to join in. His unexpected decision almost swept Steele off his feet. “I fared,” he said, “like a distressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbor to his aid. I was undone by my auxiliary. When I had once called him in, I could not subsist without dependence on him.” And in another place he wrote: “This paper was advanced indeed. It was raised to a greater thing than I intended it.”

Shortly after the paper was started, the circulation was a little short of three thousand, but in a short time, nine or ten thousand copies of each issue were sold, and, as Addison said each issue was read by twenty people. Of the essays, in all, two hundred and seventy-four were written by Addison and two hundred and thirty-six by Richard Steele.

The plan involved the creation of a fictitious character, one known as the Spectator, a gentleman who had been a studious youth, and, after some travel on classic ground, took up the study of men and manners. He was a kind of sublime Pickwick. And, like that later glorious creation of Dickens, he was a good listener. Fixing his residence in London, he goes hither and yon, to coffee houses, to theaters, to churches and to notable gatherings, and, in the pages of the Spectator, records his impressions and his thoughts. As Dickens gave Samuel Pickwick his lesser lights, his Tupper, and Winkle and Snodgrass, so the Spectator has a [Pg 12]few friends: a templar, a clergyman, a soldier and a merchant, but the high lights are thrown upon Sir Roger de Coverly, the old country baronet, and Will Honeycomb, an old town rake, and through the eyes of these, as through a focussing glass, was shown the life of the day. Soon, readers everywhere became eager to know the doings of the famous club which Sir Roger visited, the sessions of which were recorded by the Spectator.

The first outline of Sir Roger was made by Steele in No. 2, of the Spectator, March 2, 1711, and thereafter Addison used the character, indeed almost seems to have identified himself with it. “We were born for one another,” he wrote.

Thus, and with that fictitious character as a nucleus, began the greatest literary partnership in the history of literature. Thus, also, Addison found himself. Until he wrote in the Spectator, he had, or seems to have had, no knowledge of his powers. He did not know himself. Perhaps Steele knew Addison though; knew of the vast hidden mine of wealth and thus deliberately tapped the inexhaustible vein. [Pg 14]True, Addison had written before the advent of the Spectator, for at college he had been distinguished in a small way, and, later, he had written his poem, the Campaign (1704). That in itself was an excellent model of a becoming and classical style, easily and correctly written, but, alone, it had not the excellence to ensure its author immortality. As it turns out, as we see it from this distance, it was the Spectator that made him, as it gave him an audience to hearten him. And through the character of Sir Roger, he set out to make morality fashionable, and, later, by means of the essay made it his task to reconcile virtue with elegance and to make pleasure subservient to reason. As a by-product there came a mighty literary influence that passed down the ages. For it was upon Addison that Benjamin Franklin founded his style. That prince of living essayists, Michael Monahan, has been strongly affected by the same hand. His influence has touched such widely diverse characters as Oliver Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, Washington Irving, Oliver Wendell Holmes, W. H. Hudson, Ford Maddox Hueffer, Cunningham Grahame, Hilaire Belloc, H. M. Tomlinson, William Marion Reedy. More still. The very existence of these Haldeman-Julius booklets is, in a measure, due to the ideals promulgated by Addison, or, at any rate, at bottom the same notion that moved Steele’s friend moved the editor of this series. In proof, I quote from Spectator No. 10, March 12, 1710:

“It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea tables [Pg 15]and coffee houses. I would, therefore, in a very particular manner, recommend these, my speculations, to well regulated families, and set apart an hour in every morning for tea, and bread and butter; and would earnestly advise them for their good to order this paper to be punctually served up, and to be looked upon as a part of the tea-equipage.”

If I were asked to choose from all that Addison had written in the pages of the Spectator, to take a single essay which might be adduced as evidence that posterity would assign to him the reputation he coveted, I would at once name his Vision of Mirza. To my notion it is the most intensely beautiful thing he wrote. I transcribe it, well remembering the thrill with which I first read it when a mere boy. It seemed to me then the most fantastically beautiful thing ever written.

When I was at Grand Cairo, I picked up several Oriental manuscripts, which I have still by me. Among others I met with one entitled the Visions of Mirza, which I have read over with pleasure. I intend to give it to the public when I have no other entertainment for them; and shall begin with the first vision, which I have translated word by word as follows:

“On the fifth day of the moon, which according to the custom of my forefathers I always keep holy, after having washed myself and offered up my morning devotions, I ascended the high hills of the Bagdad, in order to pass the rest of the day in meditation and prayer. As I was here airing myself on the top of the [Pg 16]mountains, I fell into a profound contemplation upon the vanity of human life; and passing from one thought to another, ‘Surely,’ said I, ‘man is but a shadow, and life a dream.’ While I was thus musing, I cast my eyes toward the summit of a rock that was not far from me, where I discovered one in the habit of a shepherd, with a little musical instrument in his hand. As I looked upon him he applied it to his lips, and began to play upon it. The sound of it was so exceedingly sweet, and wrought into a variety of tunes that were inexpressibly melodious, and altogether different from anything I had ever heard. They put me in mind of those heavenly airs that are played to the departed souls of good men upon their arrival in Paradise, to wear out the impressions of the last agonies, and qualify them for the pleasure of that happy place. My heart melted away in secret raptures.

“I had been often told that the rock before me was the haunt of genius; and that several had been entertained by music who had passed it, but never heard that the musician had before made himself visible. When he had raised my thought by those transporting airs which he played, to taste the pleasure of his conversation, as I looked upon him like one astonished, he beckoned me and by waving his hand directed me to approach the place where he sat. I drew near with that reverence which is due a superior nature; and as my heart was entirely subdued by the captivating strains I had heard, I fell down at his feet and wept. The genius smiled upon me with a look of compassion and affability that familiarized him to my imagination, and at once dispelled all fears and apprehensions with which I approached him. He lifted me from the ground, and taking [Pg 17]me by the hand, ‘Mirza,’ said he, ‘I have heard thee in thy soliloquies; follow me.’

“He then led me to the highest pinnacle of the rock, and placing me on the top of it—‘Cast thy eyes eastward,’ said he, ‘and tell me what thou seest.’ ‘I see,’ said I, ‘a huge valley, and a prodigious tide of water rolling through it.’ ‘The valley that thou seest,’ said he, ‘is the Vale of Misery, and the tide of water that thou seest is part of the great tide of eternity.’ ‘What is the reason,’ said I, ‘that the tide I see rises out of a thick mist at one end, and again loses itself in a thick mist at the other.’ ‘What thou seest,’ said he, ‘is that portion of eternity which is called time, measured out by the sun, and reaching from the beginning of the world to its consummation.’ ‘Examine now,’ said he, ‘this sea that is bounded with darkness at both ends, and tell me what thou discoverest in it.’ ‘I see a bridge,’ said I, ‘standing in the midst of the tide.’ ‘The bridge thou seest,’ said he, ‘is human life; consider it attentively.’ Upon a more leisurely survey of it, I saw that it consisted of threescore and ten entire arches, with several broken arches, which added to those that were entire, made up the number about a hundred. As I was counting the arches, the genius told me that this bridge consisted first of about a thousand arches, but that a great flood swept away the rest, and left the bridge in the ruinous condition I now beheld it. ‘But tell me further,’ said he, ‘what thou discoverest on it.’ ‘I see multitudes of people passing over it,’ said I, ‘and a black cloud hanging on each end of it.’ As I looked more attentively I saw several of the passengers dropping through the bridge into the great tide that flowed underneath it; and upon further examination, perceived that [Pg 18]there were innumerable trap doors that lay concealed in the bridge, which the passengers no sooner trod upon, but that they fell through them into the tide and immediately disappeared. These hidden pitfalls were set very thick at the entrance to the bridge, so that throngs of people no sooner broke through the cloud, but many of them fell into them. They grew thinner toward the middle, but multiplied and came closer together toward the end of the arches that were entire.

“There were indeed some persons, but their number was very small, that continued a kind of hobbling march upon the broken arches, but fell through one after another, being quite tired and spent with so long a walk.

“I passed some time in contemplation of this wonderful structure, and the great variety of objects which it presented. My heart was filled with deep melancholy to see several dropping unexpectedly in the midst of mirth and jollity, and catching at everything that stood by them to save themselves. Some were looking up toward heaven in a thoughtful posture, and in the midst of a speculation stumbled and fell out of sight. Multitudes were very busy in the pursuit of bubbles that glittered in their eyes and danced before them; but often when they thought themselves within reach of them, their footing failed, and down they sank. In this confusion of objects, I observed some with scimitars in their hands, and others with urinals, who ran to and fro upon the bridge, thrusting several persons on trap doors which did not seem to lie in their way, and which they might have escaped had they not thus been forced upon them.

“The genius seeing me indulge myself in this melancholy prospect, told me that I had dwelt [Pg 19]long enough on it. ‘Take thine eyes off of the bridge,’ said he, ‘and tell me if thou seest anything thou dost not comprehend.’ Upon looking up, ‘What mean,’ said I, ‘those great flights of birds that are perpetually hovering about the bridge, and settling on it from time to time? I see vultures, harpies, ravens, cormorants, and among many other feathered creatures several little winged boys, that perch in great numbers on the middle arches.’ ‘These,’ said the genius, ‘are Envy, Avarice, Superstition, Despair, Love, with the like cares and passions that infest human life.’

“Here I fetched a deep sigh. ‘Alas,’ said I, ‘man was made in vain! how is he given away to misery and mortality! tortured in life, and swallowed up in death!’ The genius, being moved with compassion towards me, bid me quit so uncomfortable a prospect. ‘Look no more,’ said he, ‘on man in the first stages of his existence, his setting out for eternity; but cast thine eye onto that thick mist into which the tide bears the several generations of mortals that fall into it.’ I directed my sight as I was ordered, and (whether or no the good genius strengthened it with supernatural force, or dissipated part of the mist that was before too thick for the eye to penetrate) I saw the valley opening at the farther end, and spreading forth into an immense ocean, that had a huge rock of adamant running through the midst of it, and dividing it into equal parts. The clouds still rested on one-half of it, in so much that I could discover nothing in it: but the other appeared to me a vast ocean planted with innumerable islands, that were covered with fruits and interwoven with a thousand little shining seas that ran among them. I could see people dressed in glorious habits [Pg 20]with garlands upon their heads, passing among the trees, lying down by the sides of fountains, or resting on beds of flowers; and could hear a confused harmony of singing birds, falling waters, human voices, and musical instruments. Gladness grew within me upon the discovery of so delightful a scene. I wished for the wings of an eagle, that I might fly away to those happy seats: but the genius told me that there was no passage to them, except through the gates of death that I saw opening every moment upon the bridge. ‘The islands,’ said he, ‘that lie so fresh and green before thee, and with which the whole face of the ocean appears spotted as far as thou canst see, are more in number than the sands on the seashore; there are myriads of islands behind those which thou discoverest, reaching farther than thine eye, or even thine imagination can extend itself. These are the mansions of good men after death, who according to the degree and kinds of virtue in which they excelled, are distributed among these several islands; which abound with pleasures of different kinds and degrees, suitable to the relish and perfection of those who are settled in them; every island is a paradise accommodated to its respected inhabitants. Are not these, O Mirza, habitations worth contending for? Does life appear miserable that gives the opportunities of earning such a reward? Is death to be feared that will convey thee to so happy an existence? Think not man was made in vain, who has such an eternity reserved for him.’ I gazed with inexpressible pleasure on these happy islands. ‘At length,’ said I, ‘show me now, I beseech thee, the secrets that lie hid under those dark clouds which cover the ocean on the other side of the rock of adamant.’ The genius making me no [Pg 21]answer I turned about to address myself to him a second time, but I found that he had left me: I then turned again to the vision which I had been so long contemplating, but instead of the rolling tide, the arched bridge, and the happy islands, I saw nothing but the long hollow valley of Bagdad, with oxen, sheep, and camels, grazing upon the sides of it.”

Remembering the peculiar habits of thought of that day, some indication of which you will find in the chapter that follows, it will be seen that Addison’s aim was a high one. Yet he has the modesty of earnestness. There is no blatant claim to originality, nor verbal pyrotechnics. You sense the quiet of the scholar with a real literary background. “I have,” he wrote, “raised to myself so great an audience, I shall spare no pains to make their instruction agreeable and their diversion useful. For which reason I shall endeavor to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality, that my readers may, if possible, both ways find their account in the speculation of the day. And to the end that their virtue and discretion may not be short, transient, intermitting starts of thought, I have resolved to refresh their memories from day to day till I have recovered them out of that desperate state of vice and folly into which the age has fallen.” (Spec. No. 10.)

The London of Addison and Steele can be very easily reconstructed, from a reading of the Spectator. It did not differ from the London of Hogarth, except in very minor details, nor from the London of Johnson of which, in [Pg 22]1768, Benjamin Franklin wrote in his Memoirs, (111, 315).

That paragraph, of course, paints a special picture and goes to show that in some respects there were incidents afoot very similar to those we know in our day. Always there have been labor troubles and those who would grind the faces of the poor, and interfering efficiency experts in the camps of both parties.

While the streets were narrow with a single kennel in the middle, the narrow ways being impeded by coaches, sedan-chairs, carts and barrows, it is well to bear in mind that it was but a short walk in any direction to the suburban or genuine open country. A breath of fresh air was thus within easy reach of workers and tradesmen. In one direction indeed, it was a little over a mile from the most crowded part of the city to the famous Bagnigge Wells, established on an old residence of Nell Gwynn, where was a pump room, a formal garden, pond and fountains and three rustic bridges crossed the Fleet River. Here was a place open to all

The wealthy and fortunate, with a view to getting polish, were sent to Paris. What they saw there was not vastly different from conditions in their native country. There would be a furtive visit to the Rue du Haut Pave looking toward the Pantheon—a crooked, evil street, an old and murderous street, a vile and dishonored street where murderers and brigands puffed cigarettes in the Cafe Vachette. Or the old Pont Neuf, heavy and forbidding, which one crossed to the gambling house to see, perhaps on one occasion, the famous Vicomte Nucingens on suicide bent, after having staked his all on a last card. Or the Rue de Fossoyeurs at night, with lights swaying and flickering, as citizens abroad carried their lanterns to awe robbers. The swift D’Artagnan lived there, you may remember, and highwaymen carried off young girls over their shoulders, and assassins cared little whose throats they cut.

But what of the haut ton in those days? For Addison, and those in his circle, climbed high, socially. I quote from the Journal of Madam de Maintenon, January 22, 1713.

A Father Tixier tells of being present as [Pg 24]spectator at a royal meal and, “every time Marie-Terese spoke to the English King, he lifted his hat to her, and by the end of the meal his hat was most terribly greasy.”

I quote Jacques Boulanger in conclusion. “... access to the royal residences was not difficult to obtain. At Versailles there were beggars and hucksters selling trifles on the landings and stairways. Thieves plied their trade, and one rogue went so far, one day, as to steal the diamonds on the hat the King had just laid on the table.”

The gambling mania told of by Pepys in an earlier day had by no means decreased. It culminated in the sublime madness of the South Sea Bubble and the equally glorious Mississippi Scheme. On a famous day in February, 1771, Charles James Fox set the pace. In Parliament he delivered a speech on a religious question after having prepared himself, as Gibbon put it, “by passing twenty-two hours in the pious exercise of hazard.” During the game, he lost steadily at the rate of five hundred pounds sterling per hour. On the next day he won six thousand pounds, but, later in the week, he dropped twenty-one thousand pounds in two sittings. The young Lord Stavordale, then eighteen, won eleven thousand pounds in a single day and commented upon what would have been the result had he “played deep.” One day, during the progress of an extended game at Brooks’ gambling club, a new invention was born in this wise. The Earl of Sandwich, one of the players, had sat for several hours without interruption. Unwilling to leave the game, but being hungry, he ordered the servant to bring him some meat without a plate, suggesting that a slice of beef be placed between two slices of bread. By such easy means it is [Pg 25]given to some to achieve fame, to pass a name to posterity!

The most remarkable social product of the age was the coffee-house. Coffee was known in England a century before tobacco. A passage in Evelyn’s diary of May 10, 1637, reads: “I saw one, Nathaniel Coniopos, a Greek, the first I ever saw drink coffee, (which custom came not into England until thirty years after).”

The earliest two coffee houses in England were established in 1652 and 1656, the second, being one James Farr’s. Admission to the coffee house cost a penny, and a cup of tea or coffee, two pence. Favored and regular customers had their own tables and as soon as one of these appeared, the waiting man carried to him the latest gazette or news sheet. Hence, the statement that Addison made that his Spectator reached twenty more people than bought it, would not appear to be extravagant.

In a few years coffee houses spread over the whole of London and it was currently thought that they were established on granite foundation, but thirty years ago they had declined so that only two or three survived fairly unchanged. I recall going to one one night and meeting there that strange saturnine figure of the 1880’s, Lothrop Withington, reputed to have a very extensive knowledge of Elizabethan England. It was in Tottenham Court Road and Gissing used to frequent the place. We sat in a long room with neatly sanded floor. The tables were bare topped, each with a straight bench on either side, with high partitions between each table and its neighbor. At the end of the room was the open fire-place with a couple of shining steaming kettles at which presided a neat woman in a print frock. There was no bill of fare and no variety in the course served. You had a mutton chop with [Pg 26]coffee and bread, or nothing. Entering, a lad brought you a new, long clay pipe called a church-warden. The surroundings were conducive to conversation and the prices charged were extremely modest.

At such coffee houses the affairs of the nation and universe were settled and unsettled; clubs and social groups were formed, and, on occasions, political plots hatched. An amusing account of the various London resorts of this nature in the days of Addison was given in A Brief and Merry History of Great Britain, and, for the information of intellectual strangers, the subjects usually discussed at each was listed and classified thus:

Says the Spectator, having in mind the atmosphere intellectual of this coffee house and that:

That the coffee house was not at all times a cave of harmony is evidenced in many places. We recall that Sir Roger de Coverley had “kicked Bully Dawson in a coffee house for calling him a youngster.” Then, too, a letter written by Colley Cibber to Mr. Pope would seem to show that the irascible and waspish temper of the Twickenham poet had got him into trouble.

Pope, obviously was made for a coffee house career. Dryden, Addison, Steele and Savage on the other hand were in their glories at such gatherings. Once, at St. James’ Coffee House, Addison and his friends had noticed for several days a singular parson, who put his hat on the table, walked up and down the sanded floor for half an hour without speaking to any one, paid his money and left. They dubbed him the “mad parson.” One day Addison saw this “mad parson” step up to a new arrival who appeared to have come from the country, and heard him say, without any introduction:

“Yes, sir,” replied the other, “thank God I remember a great deal of good weather in my time.”

“That is more than I can say,” grumbled the “mad” one. “I never remember any weather that was not too hot or too cold, too dry or too wet; but however God Almighty contrives it, at the end of the year ’tis all very well.”

We gather that occasional dead beats walked the world even as with us. In the Spectator of March 28, 1711, appears the following:

Again, to all men who believe that human nature changes and that only in these latter and effete days are we burdened with bores, dogmatists, pedants and prigs, read what follows. It is Richard Steele writing in No. 145, and under date of August 16, 1711:

Like any other man of cultivated taste and cosmopolitan training, Addison had the contempt of enlightened persons for the fanaticisms of his time. For then, as now, there was political mistrust and suspicion and fanatics were abroad. The changes were rung upon all the familiar phrases of political oratory, gold and pinchbeck alike, and the political rhetorician recklessly indulged in sentiments to which the whole tenor of his career gave the lie. The coffee houses swarmed with those who smelt treason where none existed, who scented plots where were none, who saw in innocent remarks dangerous tendencies, and beheld, in the sweet fiction of the Spectator’s club a diabolical contrivance for intrigue. Very magnificently Addison handles the situation in Spectator No. 46, of April 23, 1711, and we get incidentally a pretty side light on coffee house society.

When I want material for this paper, it is my custom to go abroad in quest of game; and when I meet any proper subject, I take the first opportunity of setting down a hint of it upon paper. At the same time, I look into the letters of my correspondents, and if I find anything suggested in them that may afford matter [Pg 31]of speculation, I likewise enter a minute of it in my collection of materials. By this means I frequently carry about with me a whole sheetful of hints, that would look like a rhapsody of nonsense to anyone but myself. There is nothing in them but obscurity and confusion, raving and inconsistency. In short, they are my speculations in the first principles, that (like the world in its chaos) are void of all light, distinction and order.

About a week since, there happened to me a very odd accident, by reason of one of these my papers of minutes which I had accidentally dropped at Lloyd’s coffee house, where the auctions are usually kept. Before I missed it, there was a cluster of people who had found it, and were diverting themselves with it at one end of the coffee house. It had raised so much laughter among them before I had observed what they were about, that I had not the courage to own it. The boy of the coffee house, when they had done with it, carried it about in his hand, asking everybody if they had dropped a written paper; but nobody challenging it, he was ordered by those merry gentlemen who had before perused it, to get up into the auction pulpit, and read it to the whole room, that if anyone would own it, they might. The boy accordingly mounted the pulpit, and with a very audible voice read as follows:

The reading of this paper made the whole coffee house very merry; some of them concluded it was written by a mad man, and others by somebody that had been taking notes out of the Spectator. One, who had the appearance of a very substantial citizen, told us, with several political winks and nods, that he wished there was no more in the paper than what was expressed in it: that for his part, he looked upon the dromedary, the gridiron, and the barber’s pole, to signify more than was usually meant by those words: and that he thought that the coffee man could not do better than to carry the paper to one of the secretaries of state. He farther added, that he did not like the name of the outlandish man with the golden clock in his stockings. A young Oxford [Pg 33]scholar who chanced to be with his uncle at the coffee house, discovered to us who this Pactolus was: and by that means turned the whole scheme of this worthy citizen into ridicule. While they were making their several conjectures upon this innocent paper, I reached out my arm to the boy as he was coming out of the pulpit, to give it to me; which he did accordingly. This drew the eyes of the whole company upon me; but after having cast a cursory glance over it, and shook my head twice or thrice at the reading of it, I twisted it into a kind of match, and lighted my pipe with it. My profound silence, together with the steadiness of my countenance, and the gravity of my behavior during this whole transaction, raised a very loud laugh on all sides of me; but as I had escaped all suspicion of being the author, I was very well satisfied, and applying myself to my pipe and the Postman, took no further notice of anything that passed about me.

In No. 9, March 19, 1710, we find an account of a Social Club formed by a few in a certain ale house. It is of a lower social strata.

In those days there were lively happenings. Dick Turpin on his bonny Black Bess frightened travelers on Hounslow Heath, made his famous ride from London to York, in twenty-four hours, and, one gray day in November of 1714, died at Tyburn, dressed in his gayest attire with a rose at his button hole. Nor would the crowd allow his body to be given to the surgeons, for, seeing it taken from the gallows, they rescued it, carried it through the town in triumph, then buried it in a deep grave that night.

Claude Duval, too, was a popular hero, the pink of politeness, the gentleman thief it was an honor to be robbed by. He would stop a coach to dance a Sarabandi with the lady, and then rob her escort. He

There was a period of insane speculation commencing with the South Sea Company originated by Harley, Earl of Oxford, with a view to restore public credit. Visions of ingots danced before everyone’s eyes, and stock in any scheme rose rapidly. One bright genius, forerunner of a Ponzi, announced the formation of a company “for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.” The prospectus announced that it required a capital of a half million pounds, of 5,000 shares of a hundred pounds each with a deposit of two pounds on application. Each subscriber paying his initial deposit would be entitled to a hundred pounds per annum per share. The following morning after the prospectus had gone forth, he opened his office in Cornhill, and when he closed that day at three, he was the winner of two thousand pounds clear, so did not re-open his office, nor stay in the country.

In the papers of the period are to be found advertisements and notices, all kinds of mad money-making propositions, as filed at the Council Chamber Whitehall. To name a few:

Duelling was very prevalent. Addison and Steele in the Spectator were untiring in the reprobation of it. Steele constantly exposed [Pg 36]the absurdity of the practice and endeavored to bring his readers to his way of thinking. His comedy, The Conscious Lover, contains an admirable exposure of the abuse of the word honor, which led men to so fanatic an absurdity. Swift, in his own savage way, remarked that he could “see no harm in rogues and fools shooting one another.” Addison summed up nearly all that could be said on the subject in the following powerful paragraph:

“A Christian and a gentleman are made inconsistent appellations of the same person. You are not to expect eternal life if you are not to forgive injuries, and your mortal life is rendered uncomfortable if you are not ready to commit a murder in resentment of an affront; for good sense, as well as religion, is so utterly banished in the world that men glory in their very passions, and pursue trifles with the utmost vengeance, so little do they know that to forgive is the most arduous pitch human nature can arrive at. A coward has often fought—a coward has often conquered, but a coward never forgave.”

“The placing the point of honor in this false kind of courage, has given occasion to the very refuse of mankind, who have neither virtue nor common sense, to set up for men of honor. An English peer who has not long been dead, (this was William Cavendish, the first duke of Devonshire, who died August 18, 1707) used to tell a pleasant story of a French gentleman that visited him early one morning at Paris, and after great professions of respect, let him know that he had it in his power to oblige him; which in short, amounted to this—that he believed that he could tell his lordship the person’s name who jostled him as he came out [Pg 37]from the opera: but before he would proceed, he begged his lordship that he would not deny him the honor of making him his second. The English Lord to avoid being drawn into a very foolish affair, told him that he was under engagements for his two next duels to a couple of particular friends; upon which the gentleman immediately withdrew, hoping his lordship would not take it ill if he meddled no further in an affair from whence he was to receive no advantage.

“The beating down of this false notion of honor in so vain and lively a people as those of France, is deservedly looked upon as one of the most glorious parts of their present king’s reign. It is a pity but the punishment of these mischievous notions should have in it some particular circumstance of shame or infamy: that those who are slaves to them may see, that instead of advancing their reputations, they lead them to ignominy and dishonor.

“Death is not sufficient to deter men who make it their glory to despise it; but if every one that fought a duel were to stand in the pillory, it would quickly lessen the number of these imaginary men of honor, and put an end to so absurd a practice.

“When honor is to support virtue’s principles, and runs parallel to the laws of God and our country, it cannot be too much cherished and encouraged: but when the dictates of honor are contrary to those of religion and equity, they are the greatest depravations of human nature, by giving wrong ambitions and ideas of what is good and laudable; and should therefore be exploded by all governments, and [Pg 38]driven out of the bane and plague of human society.”

The article was penned in consequence of an affair on the 8th of May, 1711, when Sir Cholmely Deering, M.P., for the county of Kent, was slain in a duel by Mr. Richard Thornhill, also member of the House of Commons. Three days after, by the efforts of Addison, Sir Peter King brought the subject under the notice of the Legislature, and after dwelling at considerable length on the alarming increase of the practice, obtained leave to bring in a bill for the prevention and punishment of duelling.

As an Irishman, fighting against duelling, Steele was going contrary to all the traditions of his countrymen. In Ireland, not only military men, but men of every profession had to work a way to eminence with pistol or sword. Each political party had its regular corps of fire eaters who qualified themselves for the position by spending their whole time at target practice. They boasted that they could hit upon an opponent in any part of his body they pleased, and made up their minds before the encounter began whether they should kill him, disable him, or disfigure him for life.

We have it on the authority of Sir Jonah Barrington in his “Personal Sketches of His Own Time” that “no young fellow could finish his education till he had exchanged shots with some of his acquaintances. The first questions always asked as to a young man’s respectability and qualifications, particularly when he proposed for a lady-wife were—‘What family is he of?’ ‘Did he ever blaze?’”

Everywhere, as you see, there are coarse things, great and gross sensuality, wild animality, unrestrained joy and not a little bestial [Pg 39]pleasure. Virtue had the semblance of puritanism and the memory of the days under the rule of the kill-joys was a nightmare. So, men who wrote the news sheets of the day saw nothing for it but to foster that brutal bloody impulse that seemed to sway the masses of their readers. If it was necessary to feed them, then the fare given was raw flesh, violence, blood. This must be borne in mind in order to fully appreciate the wonderful change brought about in five short years by two men of fine tastes and delicate sensibilities. Steele in No. cxxxiv of the Tatler, condemning the cruelty of the age, says he has “often wondered that we do not lay outside a custom which makes us appear barbarous to nations much more rude and unpolished than ourselves. Some French writers have represented this diversion of the common people much to our disadvantage, and imputed it to natural fierceness and cruelty of temper, as they do some other entertainments peculiar to our nation. I mean these elegant diversions and bull baiting and prize fighting, with the like ingenious recreation of the Bear-garden. I wish I knew how to answer this reproach that is cast upon us, and excuse the death of many innocent cocks, bulls, dogs, and bears, as have been set together by the ears, or died untimely deaths, only to make us sport.”

Bearing that in mind, I call your attention to an advertisement of the time which I copy from the Harlean MSS. 5931,46. Here it is, word for word:

There is report of a similar entertainment by the hand of Steele in No. 436 of the Spectator, July 21, 1712. Steele does not plunge into the blood and the filth; he passes through on tiptoe and so daintily that the mire does not stick.

“Being a person of insatiable curiosity, I could not forbear going on Wednesday last to a place of no small renown for the gallantry of the lower order of Britons, namely, the Bear-garden, at Hockley-in-the-Hole; where, (as a whitish-brown paper, put into my hands in the street, informed me) there was to be a trial of skill exhibited between two masters of the noble science of defense, at two of the clock precisely. I was not a little charmed at the solemnity of the challenge, which ran thus:

“If the generous ardor of James Miller to dispute the reputation of Timothy Buck had something resembling the old heroes of romance, Timothy Buck returned answer in the same paper with the light spirit, adding a little indignation at being challenged, and seeming to condescend to fight James Miller, not in regard of Miller himself, but in that, as the fame went out, he had fought Parkes of Coventry. The acceptance of the combat ran in these words:

“I shall not here look back on the spectacles of the Greeks and Romans of this kind, but must believe that this custom took its rise from the ages of knight-errantry; from those who loved one woman so well that they hated all men and women else; from those who would fight you, whether you were or were not of their mind; from those who demanded the combat of their contemporaries both for admiring their mistress or discommending her. I cannot therefore but lament that the terrible part of the ancient fight is preserved, when the amorous side of it is forgotten. We have retained the barbarity but not the gallantry of the old combatants. I could wish, me thinks, these gentlemen had consulted me in the promulgation of the conflict. I was obliged by a fair young maid, whom I understood to be called Elizabeth Preston, daughter of the keeper of the garden, with a glass of water; who I imagined might have been, for form’s [Pg 44]sake, the general representative for the lady fought for, and from her beauty the proper Amaryllis on these occasions. It would have run better in the challenge, ‘I, James Miller, sergeant, who have traveled parts abroad, and came last from the frontiers of Portugal, for the love of Elizabeth Preston, do assert that the said Elizabeth is the fairest of women.’ Then the answer, ‘I, Timothy Buck, who have stayed in Great Britain during all the war in foreign parts for the sake of Susannah Page, do deny that Elizabeth Preston is so fair as the said Susannah Page. Let Susannah Page look on, and I desire no favor of James Miller.’

“This would give the battle quite another turn; and a proper station for the ladies whose complexion was disputed by the sword, would animate the disputants with a more gallant incentive than the expectation of money from the spectators; though I would not have that neglected, but thrown to that fair one whose lover was approved by the donor.

“Yet considering the thing wants such amendments, it was carried with great order. James Miller came on first, preceded by two disabled drummers, to show, I suppose, that the prospect of maimed bodies did not in the least deter him. There ascended with the daring Miller a gentleman, whose name I could not learn, with a dogged air, as unsatisfied that he was not principal. This son of anger lowered at the whole assembly, and, weighing himself as he marched around from side to side, with a stiff knee and shoulder, he gave intimations of the purpose he smothered till he saw the issue of this encounter. Miller had a blue ribbon tied around the sword arm; which ornament I conceive to be the remain of that custom of wearing a mistress’s favor on such occasions of old.

“Miller is a man of six foot eight inches in [Pg 45]height, of a kind but bold aspect, well fashioned, and ready of his limbs, and such a readiness as spoke his ease in them was obtained from a habit of motion in military exercise.

“The expectation of the spectators was now almost at its height; and the crowd pressing in, several active persons thought they were placed rather according to their fortune than their merit, and took it in their heads to prefer themselves from the open area or pit to the galleries. This dispute between desert and property brought many to the ground, and raised others in proportion to seats by turns, for the space of ten minutes till Timothy Buck came on, and the whole assembly giving up their disputes, turned their eyes upon the champions. Then it was that every man’s affections turned from one or the other irresistibly. A judicious gentleman near me said, ‘I could methinks be Miller’s second, but I had rather have Buck for mine.’ Miller had an audacious look that took the eye; Buck had a perfect composure that engaged the judgment. Buck came on in a plain coat, and kept all his air till the instant of engaging, at which time he undressed to his shirt, his arm adorned with a bandage of red ribbon. No one can describe the sudden concern in the whole assembly; the most tumultuous crowd in nature was as still and as much engaged as if all their lives depended upon the first blow. The combatants met in the middle of the stage, and shaking hands, as removing all malice, with much grace to the extremities of it; from whence they immediately faced about, and approached each other, Miller with a heart full of resolution, Buck with a watchful, untroubled countenance: Buck regarding principally his own defense, Miller chiefly thoughtful of annoying his opponent. It is not easy to describe the many [Pg 46]escapes and imperceptible defenses between two men of quick eyes and ready limbs. But Miller’s heat laid him open to the rebuke of the calm Buck, by a large cut on the forehead. Much effusion of blood covered his eyes in a moment, and the huzzas of the crowd undoubtedly quickened the anguish. The assembly was divided into parties upon their different ways of fighting; while a poor nymph in one of the galleries apparently suffered for Miller, and burst into a flood of tears. As soon as his wound was wrapped up, he came on again with a little rage, which disabled him further. But what brave man can be wounded into more caution and patience? The next was a warm, eager onset, which ended in a decisive stroke on the left leg of Miller. The Lady in the gallery during this second strife, covered her face, and for my part, I could not keep my thoughts from being mostly employed on the consideration of her most unhappy circumstance that moment, hearing the clash of swords, and apprehending life or victory concerned her lover in every blow, but not daring to satisfy herself on whom they fell. The wound was exposed to the view of all who could delight in it, and sewed up on the stage. The surly second of Miller declared at this time that he would that day fortnight fight Mr. Buck at the same weapons, declaring himself the master of the renowned Gorman; but Buck denied him the honor of that courageous disciple, and, asserting that he himself had taught that champion, accepted the challenge.

“There is something in human nature very unaccountable on such occasions, when we see the people take a painful gratification in beholding these encounters. Is it cruelty that administers this sort of delight? Or is it a pleasure that is taken in the exercise of [Pg 47]pity? It was, methought, pretty remarkable that the business of the day being a trial of skill, the popularity did not run so high as one would have expected on the side of Buck. Is it that the people’s passions have their rise in self love, and thought themselves (in spite of all the courage they had) liable to the fate of Miller, but could not so easily think themselves qualified like Buck?

“Tully speaks of this custom with less horror than one would expect, though he confesses it was much abused in his time, and seems directly to approve of it under its first regulations, when criminals only fought before the people. Crudele gladiatorum spectaculum et inhumanum nonnullis videri solet; et haud scio annon ita sit ut nunc fit; cum vero sontes ferro depugnabant, auribus fortasse multa, oculis quidem nulla, poterat esse fortior contra dolorem et mortem disciplina. The shows of gladiators may be thought barbarous and inhuman, and I know not but it is so as it is now practiced; but in those times when only criminals were combatants, the ear might perhaps receive many better instructions, but it is impossible that anything which affects our eyes should fortify us so well against pain and death.”

But brave, bellicose, blood-thirsty as was the Briton in the days of Addison, he was very fearful of unseen things. He feared a witch as we fear a microbe. He was full of morbid possibilities, his nerves were strangely susceptible. As a man in our day will fight the daily fight fearlessly, will declare his intellectual independence, will be bold in the expression of his opinions, yet quail and cringe at the name of the unseen Mrs. Grundy, so those who yelled at bull fights, glorified in the bloodshed of the [Pg 48]ring side or went forth in the street to do battle for a political cause, feared with a most lively fear dark demoniac powers who worked by occult means and subtle fascinations of evil.

In the paper that next follows, there is an exquisite touch when Sir Roger catches sight of a cat and the broomstick behind the old woman’s door. That to him seems to be proof positive of dark and nefarious doings—proof as positive as, not so long ago, it was considered proof positive by an excited crowd in a small town, when an old woman with a German name was found to have in her house a blue print of a railroad bridge. That it might have a perfectly legitimate origin was, to illogical minds, unthinkable. No. There was a blue print, and blue prints were sometimes used by spies. Germany had spies, and the old woman had a German name. So she went to jail. What further proof was needed? And who dare object to summary proceedings, lest he also be judged tainted?

“There are some opinions in which man should stand neuter, without engaging his assent to one side or the other. Such a hovering faith as this, which refuses to settle upon his determination, is absolutely necessary in a mind that is careful to avoid errors and prepossessions. When the arguments press equally on both sides in matters that are indifferent to us, the safest method is to give up ourselves to neither.

“It is with this temper of mind that I consider [Pg 49]the subject of witchcraft. Whenever I hear the relations that are made from all parts of the world, not only from Norway and Lapland, from the East and West Indies, but from every particular nation in Europe, I cannot forbear thinking that there is such an intercourse and commerce with evil spirits, as that which we express by the name of witchcraft. But when I consider that the ignorant and credulous parts of the world abound most in these relations, and the persons among us who are supposed to engage in such an infernal commerce, are people of weak understanding and crazed imagination—and at the same time reflect upon the many impostures and delusions of this nature that I have detected in all ages, I endeavor to suspend my belief till I hear more certain accounts than any which have yet come to my knowledge. In short, when I consider the question, whether there are such persons in the world as those we call witches, my mind is divided between two opposite opinions, or rather (to speak my thoughts freely) I believe there is, and has been, such a thing as witchcraft; at the same time can give no credit to any particular instance of it.

“I am engaged in this speculation, by some occurrences that I met with yesterday, which I shall give my reader an account of at large. As I was walking with my friend Sir Roger by the side of one of his woods, an old woman applied herself to me for charity. Her dress and figure put me in the mind of the following description in Otway:

“As I was musing on this description, and comparing it with the object before me, the knight told me, that this very old woman had the reputation of a witch all over the country; that her lips were observed to be always in motion; and that there was not a switch about her house which her neighbors did not believe had carried her several hundred miles. If she chanced to stumble, they always found sticks or straws that lay in the figure of a cross before her. If she made any mistake at church, and cried amen in the wrong place, they never failed to conclude that she was saying her prayers backward. There was not a maid in the parish that would take a pin of her, though she should offer a bag of money with it. She goes by the name of Moll White, and has made the country ring with several imaginary exploits which are palmed upon her. If the dairy-maid does not make her butter come so soon as she would have it, Moll White is at the bottom of the churn. If a horse sweats in the stable, Moll White has been upon his back. If a hare makes an unexpected escape from the hounds, the huntsman curses Moll White. ‘Nay,’ says Sir Roger, ‘I have known the master of the pack, upon such an occasion, send one of his servants to see if Moll White had been out that morning.’

“This account raised my curiosity so far, that I begged my friend Sir Roger to go with me [Pg 51]into her hovel, which stood in a solitary corner under the side of the wood. Upon our first entering, Sir Roger winked to me, and pointed to something that stood behind the door, which upon looking that way, I found to be an old broom-staff. At the same time he whispered to me in the ear to take notice of a tabby cat that sat in the chimney corner, which, as the old knight told me, lay under as bad a report as Moll herself; for beside that Moll is said to accompany her in the same shape, the cat is reported to have spoken twice or thrice in her life, and to have played several pranks above the capacity of an ordinary cat.

“I was secretly concerned to see human nature in so much wretchedness and disgrace, but at the same time could not forbear smiling to hear Sir Roger, who is a little puzzled about the old woman, advising her as a justice of peace to avoid all communication with the devil, and never to hurt any of her neighbors’ cattle. We concluded our visit with a bounty which was very acceptable.

“In our return Sir Roger told me that Moll had been often brought before him for making children spit pins, and giving maids the nightmare; and that the country people would be tossing her into a pond and trying experiments with her every day, if it was not for him and his chaplain.

“I have since found upon inquiry that Sir Roger was several times staggered with the reports that had been brought him concerning this old woman, and would frequently have bound her over to the county sessions, had not his chaplain with much ado persuaded him to the contrary.

“I have been the more particular in this account, because I hear there is scarcely a village in England that has not a Moll White in [Pg 52]it. When an old woman begins to doat, and grow chargeable to a parish, she is generally turned into a witch, and fills the whole country into extravagant fancies, imaginary distempers, and terrifying dreams. In the meantime, the poor wretch that is the innocent occasion of so many evils, begins to be frightened at herself, and sometimes confesses secret commerces and familiarities that her imagination forms in a delirious old age. This frequently cuts off charity from the greatest objects of compassion, and inspires people with a malevolence towards those poor discrepit parts of our species, in whom human nature is defaced by infirmity and dotage.”

A word of explanation here seems necessary. At the time of Sir Roger’s supposed movements, memory of the great Matthew Hopkins was lively in many places, and, now and then, imitators sprang up, just as today, while the idea is generally discarded and thrown on the scrap heap of exploded opinions, you will find in back country districts, “water witches” who will undertake to locate water or minerals and tell the depth at which they are to be found.

Matthew Hopkins lived in Essex and had made himself conspicuous in discovering the devil’s mark on many witches. He had a peculiar monopoly for a time, and, being a specialist, was much sought after, aiding the judges with his knowledge of “such cattle” as he called them, whenever a witch was suspected. Lesser lights in the way of specialists soon appeared.

Later, he assumed the title of “Witch Finder General” and traveled through the central counties witch hunting. In one year, he brought more than sixty old women to the stake. His favorite method was that advocated by King [Pg 53]James in his “Demonologie.” The hands and feet of the suspected one were cross tied, then, wrapped in a blanket, they were laid on their backs in a pond. If they sank, they were adjudged innocent, but if they floated for a short time, as was often the case, especially when they were laid carefully on the water, they were judged guilty and burned.

Another test was to make the suspected one repeat the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed. If a word was missed or wrongly pronounced, she was accounted guilty. It was said that witches could not weep more than three tears, and those only from the left eye. Thus, the natural excitement and its effect became a proof of guilt.

Hopkins traveled through his counties like a man of consideration, attended by two assistants, put up at the chief inn of the place, and always at the cost of the authorities. His charges were twenty shillings a town, his expenses of living while there, and his transportation. This he claimed whether he found witches or not. If he found any, he charged twenty shillings a head in addition when they were brought to execution. For three years he carried on this infamous trade, success making him so insolent and rapacious, that high and low became his enemies. The Rev. Mr. Gaul, a clergyman of Houghton, in Huntingdonshire, wrote a pamphlet accusing him of being a common nuisance. Hopkins replied in an angry letter to the mayor of Houghton, stating his intention of visiting their town, but desiring to know whether it held many such sticklers for witchcraft as Mr. Gaul, and asking whether they were willing to receive and entertain him with the customary hospitality. He added by way of threat, that in case he did not receive a satisfactory reply, “He would waive their shire altogether and betake himself [Pg 54]to such places where he might do and punish, not only without control, but with thanks and recompense.”

Mr. Gaul describes, in his pamphlet, one of the modes employed by Hopkins. It was proof even more atrocious than the swimming test. He says, that the “witch-finding general” used to take the suspected witch and place her in the middle of a room, upon a stool or table, cross-legged, or in some other uneasy posture. If she refused to sit in this manner, she was bound with strong cords. Hopkins then placed persons to watch her, for four and twenty hours, during which time she was to be kept with meat and drink. It was supposed that one of her imps would come during that interval, and suck her blood. As the imp might come in the shape of a wasp, a moth, a fly or other insect, a hole was made in the door or window to let it enter. The watchers were ordered to keep a sharp lookout, and endeavor to kill any insect that appeared in the room. If any fly escaped, or if they could not kill it, the woman was guilty; the fly was her imp, and she was sentenced to be burned, and twenty shillings went into the pockets of master Hopkins. In this manner he made one old woman confess because four flies had appeared in the room, that she was attended by four imps, named “Ilemazar,” “Pyewackett,” “Peck-in-the-crown,” and “Grizel-Greedigut.”

Hopkins was eventually caught in his own trap. Suspected presently, he was beset by a mob in the village of Suffolk, and accused of being himself a wizard. An old reproach was brought against him, that he had, by means of sorcery, cheated the devil out of a certain memorandum book, in which Satan had entered the names of all the witches in England. “Thus,” said someone, “you find out witches, not by [Pg 55]God’s aid, but by the devil’s.” In vain he denied his guilt. The crowd put him to his own test. He was stripped and given the swimming test. Some say that he floated, was taken out, tried and executed upon no other proof of his guilt. Others assert that he was drowned. As no judicial entry of his trial and execution is found in any register, it appears most probable that he was killed.

We come to Sir Roger himself, the character that Addison loved as Dickens loved Pickwick, as Cervantes loved Don Quixote, as Rabelais loved his Pantagruel. Sir Roger was no wooden puppet, no dummy stuffed with straw. He lived. He had his faults, his opinions, his character. His is a type that has passed away. The county squire, in his position as magistrate, land owner, benefactor, respected authority, no longer exists. Be it remembered, there was, as William Morris used to point out, much of good, as well as much of evil, in the feudal system. In that day the land owner’s domain, was a little state, paternally governed. We have freed ourselves from that, to become institution governed. A Sir Roger scolded his tenants, knew their affairs, gave them advice, assistance, orders. There was indeed, a “mixture of the father and the master of the family” in him. He lived with his people and was respected, obeyed, loved; the simplicity of his tastes put him on something very near a level with them. That was something, as it is always something to see authority face to face.

“Having often received an invitation from my [Pg 56]friend Sir Roger de Coverley to pass away a month, with him in the country, I last week accompanied him hither, and am settled with him for some time at his country-house. Sir Roger, who is well acquainted with my humor, lets me rise and go to bed when I please; dine at his own table or in my own chamber as I see fit; sit still and say nothing without bidding me be merry. When the gentlemen of the country come to see him, he only shows me at a distance: as I have been walking in his field I have observed them stealing a sight of me over an hedge, and have heard the knight desiring them not to let me see them, for that I hated to be stared at.

“I am the more at ease in Sir Roger’s family, because it consists of sober and staid persons: for, as the knight is the best master in the world, he seldom changes his servants; and, as he is beloved by all about him, his servants never care for leaving him; by this means his domestics are all in years, and grown old with their master. You would take his valet-de-chambre for his brother; his butler is gray-headed, his groom is one of the gravest men I have ever seen, and his coachman has the looks of a privy-counsellor. You see the goodness of the master even in the old house dog, and in a gray pad that is kept in the stable with great care and tenderness out of regard to his past services, though he has been useless for several years.

“I could not but observe with a great deal of pleasure the joy that appeared in the countenances of these ancient domestics upon my friend’s arrival at his country seat. Some of them could not refrain from tears at the sight of their old master! every one of them pressed forward to do something for him, and seemed discouraged if they were not employed. At [Pg 57]the same time the old knight, with a mixture of the father and master of the family, tempered the inquiries after his own affairs with several kind questions relating to themselves. This humanity and good nature engages everybody to him, so that, when he is pleasant upon any of them, all his family are in good humour, and none so much as the person whom he diverts himself with: on the contrary, if he coughs, or betrays any infirmity of old age, it is easy for a bystander to observe a secret concern in the looks of all his servants.

“My worthy friend has put me under the particular care of his butler, who is a very prudent man, and as well as the rest of his fellow-servants, wonderfully desirous of pleasing me, because they have often heard their master talk of me as his particular friend.

“My chief companion, when Sir Roger is diverting himself in the woods or in the fields, is a very venerable man who is ever with Sir Roger, and has lived in his house in the nature of a chaplain above thirty years. This gentleman is a person of good sense and some learning, of a very regular life and obliging conversation: he heartily loves Sir Roger, and knows that he is very much in the old knight’s esteem, so that he lives in the family rather as a relation than a dependent.

“I have observed in several of my papers, that my friend Sir Roger, amidst all his good qualities, is something of a humorist; and that his virtues, as well as his imperfections, are, as it were, tinged by a certain extravagance, which makes them particularly his, and distinguishes them from those of other men. This cast of mind, as it is generally very innocent in itself, so it renders his conversation highly agreeable, and more delightful than the same degree of sense and virtue would appear in [Pg 58]their common colours. As I was walking with him last night, he asked me how I liked the good man whom I have just mentioned; and without staying for my answer, told me that he was afraid of being insulted with Latin and Greek at his own table; for which he desired a particular friend of his at the university to find him out a clergyman rather of plain sense than much learning, of a good aspect, a clear voice, a sociable temper; and, if possible, a man that understood a little of the back-gammon. My friend, says Sir Roger, found me out this gentleman, who, besides the endowments required of him, is, they tell me, a good scholar, though he does not show it. I have given him the parsonage of the parish; and, because I know his value, have settled upon him a good annuity for life. If he outlives me, he shall find that he was higher in my esteem than perhaps he thinks he is. He has now been with me thirty years; and, though he does not know I have taken notice of it, has never in all that time asked anything of me for himself, though he is every day soliciting me for something in behalf of one or the other of my tenants, his parishioners. There has not been a law-suit in the parish since he has lived among them; if any dispute arises they apply themselves to him for the decision; if they do not acquiesce in his judgment, which I think never happened above once or twice at the most, they appeal to me. At his first settling with me, I made him a present of all the good sermons which have been printed in English, and only begged of him that every Sunday he would pronounce one of them in the pulpit. Accordingly he has digested them into such a series, that they follow one another naturally, and make a continued system of practical divinity.

“As Sir Roger was going on in his story, the gentleman we were talking of came up to us; and, upon the knight’s asking him who preached tomorrow, (for it was Saturday night,) told us, the Bishop of St. Asaph in the morning, and Dr. South in the afternoon. He then showed us a list of preachers for the whole year, where I saw with a great deal of pleasure Archbishop Tillotson, Bishop Sanderson, Dr. Barrow, Dr. Calamy, with several living authors who have published discourses of practical divinity. I no sooner saw this venerable man in the pulpit, but I very much approved of my friend’s insisting upon the qualifications of a good aspect and a clear voice; for I was so charmed with the gracefulness of his figure and delivery, as well as with the discourses he pronounced, that I think I never passed any time more to my satisfaction. The sermon repeated after this manner is like the composition of a poet in the mouth of a graceful actor.

“I could heartily wish that more of our country clergy would follow this example; and, instead of wasting their spirits in laborious compositions of their own, would endeavor after a handsome elocution, and all those other talents that are proper to enforce what has been penned by greater masters. This would not only be more easy to themselves, but more edifying to the people.”

The peculiar relations between landowner and tenant as pictured by Addison, seem to be confirmed quite independently by that crusted old Tory, Sir Jonah Barrington. He writes:

“At the great house all disputes among the tenants were then settled, quarrels reconciled, old debts arbitrated; a kind Irish landlord reigned despotic in the ardent affections of [Pg 60]the tenantry, their pride and pleasure being to obey and support him.

“But there existed a happy reciprocity of interest. The landlord of that period protected the tenant by his influence; any wanton injury to a tenant being considered as an insult to a landlord; and if either of the landlord’s sons were grown up, no time was lost by him in demanding satisfaction from any gentleman, for maltreating even his father’s blacksmith.

“No gentleman of this degree ever distrained a tenant for rent: indeed the parties appeared to be quite united and knit together. The greatest abhorrence, however, prevailed as to tithe protectors, coupled with no great predilection for the clergy who employed them. These latter certainly were, in principle and practice, the real country tyrants of that day, and first caused the assembling of the White Boys.

“I have heard it often said that at the time I speak of, every estated gentleman in the Queen’s county was honored by the gout. I have since considered that its extraordinary prevalence was not difficult to be accounted for, by the disproportionate quantity of acid contained in their seductive beverage, called rum-shrub, which was then universally drunk in quantities incredible, generally from supper time till morning, by all country gentlemen, as they said, to keep down their claret.

“My grandfather could not refrain, and therefore he suffered well; he piqued himself on procuring, through the interests of Batty Lodge (a follower of the family who had married a Dublin grocer’s widow), the very first importation of oranges and lemons to the Irish capital every season. Horse loads of these packed boxes, were immediately sent to the [Pg 61]great house of Cullenaghmore; and no sooner did they arrive, than the good news of fresh fruit was communicated to the colonel’s neighboring friends, accompanied by the usual invitation.

“Night after night the revel afforded uninterrupted pleasure to the joyous gentry: the festivity being subsequently renewed at some other mansion, till the gout thought proper to put the whole party hors de combat; having the satisfaction of making cripples for a few months of each as he did not kill.

“While the convivials bellowed with only toe or finger agonies, it was a mere bagatelle; but when Mr. Gout marched up the country, and invaded the head or the stomach, it was then called no joke; and Drogheda usquebaugh, the hottest distilled drinkable liquor ever invented, was applied to for aid, and generally drove the tormentor in a few minutes to his former quarters. It was, indeed, counted specific; and I allude to it more particularly, as my poor grandfather was finished thereby.

“It was his custom to sit under a very large branching bay-tree in his armchair, placed in a fine, sunny aspect at the entrance to the garden. I particularly remember his cloak, for I kept it twelve years after his death; it was called a cartouche cloak, from a famous French gang who, it was said, invented it for his gang for the purpose of evasion. It was made of very fine broadcloth, of a bright blue color on one side, and a bright scarlet on the other; so that on being turned, it might deceive even a vigilant pursuer.

“There my grandfather used to sit of a hot sunny day, receive any rents he could collect, and settle any accounts which his indifference on that head permitted him to think of.

“At one time he suspected a young rogue of [Pg 62]having slipped some money off his table when paying rent; and therefore, when afterwards the tenants began to count out their money, he used to throw the focus of his large reading glass upon their hands: the smart, without any visible cause, astonished the ignorant creatures! they shook their hands, and thought it must be the devil who was scorching them. The priest was let into the secret: he seriously told them all it was the devil, who had mistaken them for the fellow that had stolen the money from the colonel; but that if he (the priest) was properly considered, he would say as many masses as would bother fifty devils, were it necessary. The priest got his fee; and another farthing never was taken from my grandfather.”

Addison is too true an artist to give the impression that his character, his Sir Roger, is a type of the squire in general. Lightly, at the close of the essay on Sir Roger at church, he sketches another sort of man, the country squire full of pride and prejudice, who like Fielding’s Squire Western in Tom Jones, is a good fellow in the main, but hard, violent, dogmatic. Such a man is like a bull, headstrong, sometimes offensive, quick to anger, always ready to give battle. He is like a badly broken horse and ready to rear and kick at the least sign of opposition to his own will. He will storm and rage, then, of a sudden there is a change and he is swiftly at the other extreme. Consider that glorious creation of Fielding’s, Squire Western, a contemporary of Sir Roger.

He is told that Tom Jones has dared to fall in love with his daughter. Then the storm breaks:

Then, soon, there is the change. He is reconciled to Tom. He becomes as full of love as he was formerly of hate. The marriage shall not be delayed a day:

Nor again must it be supposed that the picture which Addison gives of the well kept church is actually representative of the condition of all church buildings in that day. Sir Roger, interested in his surroundings, was at no time unwilling to spend time and money on improvements. Others did not. There was another side to the picture. Cowper, writing an article for the Connoiseur, (No. 26, August 19, 1756) says:

“The ruinous condition of some of these edifices gave me great offence; and I could not help wishing that the honest vicar, instead of indulging his genius for improvements, by inclosing his gooseberry bushes within a Chinese rail, and converting half an acre of his globe land into a bowling green, [Pg 64]would have applied part of his income to the more laudable purpose of sheltering his parishioners from the weather, during their attendance on the divine service. It is no uncommon thing to see the parsonage house well thatched, and in exceeding good repair, while the church, perhaps, has scarce any other roof than the ivy that grows upon it. The noise of owls, bats and magpies, makes the principal part of the church music in many of these ancient edifices; and the walls, like a large map, seem to be portioned out into capes, seas and promontories, by the various colors by which the damps have stained them. Sometimes, the foundation being too weak to support the steeple any longer, it has been expedient to pull down that part of the building, and to hang the bells under a wooden shed on the ground beside it. This is the case in a parish in Norfolk, through which I lately passed, and where the clerk and the sexton, like the two figures in St. Dunstan’s, serve the bells in capacity of clappers, by striking them alternately with a hammer.

“In other churches I have observed that nothing unseemly or ruinous is to be found, except in the clergyman, and the appendages of his person. The squire of the parish or his ancestors, perhaps, to testify their devotion, and leave a lasting memorial of their magnificence, have adorned the altar piece with the richest crimson velvet, embroidered with vine leaves and ears of wheat; and have dressed up the pulpit with the same splendor and expense; while the gentleman who fills it, is exalted in the midst of all this finery, with a surplice as dirty as a farmer’s frock, and a periwig that seems to have transferred its faculty of curling to the band which appears in full buckle beneath it.

“But if I was concerned to see several distressed pastors, as well as many of our country churches in a tottering condition, I was more offended with the indecency of worship in others. I could wish that the clergy would inform their congregations, that there is no occasion to scream themselves hoarse in making the responses; that the town crier is not the only person qualified to pray with due devotion; and that he who bawls the loudest may, nevertheless, be the wickedest fellow in the parish. The old women, too, in the aisle might be told that their time would be better employed in attending to the sermon than in fumbling over their tattered testaments till they have found the text; by which time the discourse is drawing to its conclusion....

“The good old practice of psalm singing is, indeed, wonderfully improved in many country churches since the days of Sternhold and Hopkins; and there is scarce a parish clerk who has so little taste as not to pick his staves out of the New Version. This has occasioned great complaints in some places, where the clerk has been forced to bawl by himself, because the rest of the congregation cannot find the psalm at the end of the prayer book; while others are highly disgusted with the innovation, and stick as obstinately to the Old Version as to the Old Style. The tunes themselves have also been set to jiggish measures; and the sober drawl, which used to accompany the two first staves of the 100th psalm with the Gloria patri, is now split into as many quavers as an Italian air. For this purpose there is in every county an itinerant band of vocal musicians, who make it their business to go round to all the churches in their turns, and, after a prelude with the pitch pipe, astonish the audience with hymns [Pg 66]set to the new Winchester measure and anthems of their own composing. As these new fashioned psalmodists are necessarily made up of young men and maids, we may naturally suppose that there is a perfect concord and symphony between them; and, indeed, I have known it happen that these sweet singers have more than once been brought into disgrace by too close unison between the thorough bass and the treble.

“... The Squire, like the King, may be styled Head of the Church in his own parish. If the benifice be in his own gift, the vicar is his creature, and of consequence entirely at his devotion; or, if the care of the church be left to a curate, the Sunday fees of roast beef and plum pudding, and a liberty to shoot in the manor, will bring him as much under the Squire’s command as his dogs and horses. For this reason the bell is often kept tolling, and the people waiting in the church yard an hour longer than the usual time; nor must the service begin till the Squire has strutted up the aisle, and seated himself in the great pew in the chancel. The length of the sermon is also measured by the will of the Squire, as formerly by the hour glass; and I know one parish where the preacher has always the complaisance to conclude his discourse, however abruptly, the minute that the Squire gives the signal, by rising up after his nap....

“... The ladies, immediately on their entrance, breathe a pious ejaculation through their fan sticks, and the beaux very gravely address themselves to the haberdasher’s bills glued upon the lining of their hats....”

One incident of Addison’s boyhood is particularly interesting as exemplifying the conflict of opinion on matters religious. All pleasure [Pg 67]had been barred under the Puritan rule, and the nation oppressed as never before under a religious despotism. Then, under Charles II, the pendulum swung too far in the other direction and sensual pleasure was exalted into a worship, and impiety into a creed. The aftermath of all that had its effect.

So we have a key to what follows, taken from an essay by Addison in Spectator No. 125:

Again in a Spectator of an earlier date, we find a semi-humorous letter setting forth the troubles of a man, a member of the Established Church, whose wife has become a dissenter. Thus:

I am always very well pleased with a country Sunday, and think, if keeping holy the seventh day were only a human institution, it would be the best method that could have been thought of for the polishing and civilizing of mankind. It is certain the country people would soon degenerate into a kind of savage and barbarians, were there not such frequent returns of a stated time in which the whole village meet together with their best faces and in their cleanliest habits, to converse with one another upon different subjects, hear their duties explained to them, and join together in adoration of the Supreme Being. Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week, not only as it refreshes in their minds the notion of religion, but as it puts both the sexes upon appearing in their most agreeable forms, and exerting all such qualities as are apt to give them a figure in the eye of the village. A country fellow distinguishes himself as much in the church-yard, as a citizen does upon the Change, the whole parish politics being generally discussed in that place either after sermon or before the bell rings.

My friend Sir Roger, being a good churchman, has beautified the inside of his church with several texts of his own choosing; he [Pg 69]has likewise given a handsome pulpit-cloth, and railed-in the communion table at his own expense. He has often told me that, at his coming to his estate, he found his parishioners very irregular; and that, in order to make them kneel and join in the responses, he gave every one of them a hassock and a common prayer book; and, at the same time, employed an itinerant singing-master, who goes about the country for that purpose, to instruct them rightly in the tunes of the psalms; upon which they very much value themselves, and indeed outdo most of the country churches that I have ever heard.

As Sir Roger is landlord to the whole congregation, he keeps them in very good order, and will suffer nobody to sleep in it besides himself; for if by chance he has been surprised into a short nap at sermon, upon recovering out of it he stands up and looks about him, and, if he sees anybody else nodding, either wakes them himself or sends his servants to them. Several other of the old knight’s peculiarities break out upon these occasions; sometimes he will be lengthening out a verse in the singing-psalms, half a minute after the rest of the congregation have done with it; sometimes, when he is pleased with the matter of his devotion, he pronounces Amen three or four times in the same prayer; and sometimes stands up when everybody else is upon their knees, to count the congregation, or see if any of his tenants are missing.

I was yesterday very much surprised to hear my friend, in the midst of the service, calling out to one John Matthews to mind what he was about, and not disturb the congregation. This John Matthews, it seems, is remarkable for being an idle fellow, and at that time was kicking his heels for diversion. This authority [Pg 70]of the knight, though exerted in that odd manner which accompanies him in all circumstances in life, has had very good effect upon the parish, who are not polite enough to see anything ridiculous in his behaviour; besides that the general good sense and worthiness of his character makes his friends observe these little singularities as foils that rather set off than blemish his good qualities.

As soon as the sermon is finished, nobody presumes to stir until Sir Roger is gone out of the church. The knight walks down from his seat in the chancel between a double row of his tenants, that stand bowing to him on each side; and every now and then inquires how such-an-one’s wife, or mother, or son, or father do, whom he does not see at church; which is understood as a secret reprimand to the person that is absent.

The chaplain has often told me, that upon a catechising day, when Sir Roger has been pleased with a boy that answers well, he has ordered a bible to be given to him next day for his encouragement; and sometimes accompanies it with a fitch of bacon to his mother. Sir Roger has likewise to add five pounds a year to the clerk’s place; and, that he may encourage the young fellows to make themselves perfect in the church service, has promised, upon the death of the present incumbent, who is very old, to bestow it according to merit.

This fair understanding between Sir Roger and his chaplain, and their mutual concurrence in doing good, is the more remarkable, because the very next village is famous for the differences and contentions that arise between the parson and the squire, who live in a perpetual state of war. The parson is always preaching at the squire, and the squire, to be [Pg 71]revenged on the parson, never comes to church. The squire has made all his tenants atheists and tithe-stealers; while the parson instructs them every Sunday in the dignity of his order, and insinuates to them in almost every sermon that he is a better man than his patron. In short, matters have come to such an extremity, that the squire has not said his prayers either in public or private this half-year; and that the parson threatens him, if he does not mend his manners, to pray for him in the face of the whole congregation.

Feuds of this nature, though too frequent in the country, are very fatal to the ordinary people; who are so used to be dazzled with riches, that they pay as much difference to the understanding of a man of an estate, as of a man of learning; and are very hardly brought to regard any truth, how important soever it may be, that is preached to them, when they know there are several men of five hundred a-year who do not believe it.

Without any doubt whatsoever, the outstanding characteristic of our present day life is the extreme lack of sociability. It is the more apparent to me, because I have lived in countries at times, especially in Patagonia, where, in some respects, the manners and the customs of the people closely approached the manners and customs of the early eighteenth century. There were scandalous roisterers and hard drinkers there, and vice was in fashion, nor was it a delicate kind of vice. Many of the ladies would lend an ear to obscene ballads, on occasions swear and blaspheme very prettily, and consider as a good joke, the coarse words and oaths that flowed through their lovers’ conversation like filth through a sewer. We were never in a hurry and a horseback [Pg 72]journey was an occasion for sociability. It was much so in the Addison days. People on the highway had a will to companionship. Will Wimble, as you see in the paper that follows, “joined a couple of plain men who rode before,” and “conversed with them.” It was always so. You pick up your Fielding to see Tom Jones traveling mile after mile in company with a chance acquaintance. Joseph Andrews is carried on his way by a man with a spare horse. Peregrine Pickle on the road to Dover overtakes and journeys with all sorts and conditions of sociable men and Roderick Random never lacks a chance friend.

Indeed, in the days when men were not so eager to save time which, when saved, they knew not what to do with, to encounter a fellow wayfarer was counted a high and joyful privilege. It meant companionship and a “God be wi’ ye” at parting. If fellowship is Heaven, as Morris put it, and the lack of fellowship is hell, then indeed we of today are much further advanced along the downward path that is paved with good intentions. Your present-day autoist is far more prone to knock the wayfarer down than to pick him up, or to insult his ears with a derisive fanfare on his klaxon than he is to bid him “God speed.” And so to Sir Roger.

A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart; his next, to escape the censures of the world; if the last interferes with the former, it ought to be entirely neglected; but otherwise there cannot be a greater satisfaction to an honest mind than to see those [Pg 73]approbations which it gives itself seconded by the applauses of the public: a man is more sure of his conduct, when the verdict which he passes upon his own behavior is thus warranted and confirmed by the opinion of all that know him.

My worthy friend Sir Roger is one of those who is not only at peace within himself, but beloved and esteemed by all about him. He receives a suitable tribute for his universal benevolence to mankind, in the returns of affection and good will, which are paid him by every one that lives within his neighborhood. I lately met with two or three odd instances of that respect which is shown to the good old knight. He would needs carry Will Wimble and myself with him to the country assizes: as we were upon the road Will Wimble joined a couple of plain men who rode before us, and conversed with them for some time; during which my friend Sir Roger acquainted me with their characters.

“The first of them,” says he, “that has a spaniel by his side, is a yeoman of about a hundred pounds a year, an honest man: he is just within the Game-Act, and qualified to kill an hare or a pheasant: he knocks down a dinner with his gun twice or thrice a week; and by that means lives much cheaper than those that have not so good an estate as himself. He would be a good neighbor if he did not destroy so many partridges: in short, he is a very sensible man; shoots flying; and has been several times foreman of the petty jury.

“The other that rides along with him is Tom Touchy, a fellow for taking the law of everybody. There is not one in the town where he lives that he has not sued at quarter-sessions. The rogue had once the impudence to go to law with the Widow. His head is full of costs, [Pg 74]damages, and ejectments; he plagued a couple of gentlemen so long for a trespass in breaking one of his hedges, till he was forced to sell the ground it enclosed to defray the charges of the prosecution: his father left him fourscore pounds a year; but he has cast and been cast so often, that is not now worth thirty. I suppose he is going upon the old business of the willow-tree.”

As Sir Roger was giving me this account of Tom Touchy, Will Wimble and his two companions stopped short until we came up to them. Will it seems had been giving his fellow traveler an account of his angling one day in such a hole; when Tom Touchy, instead of hearing out his story, told him, that Mr. Such-an-one, if he pleased, might take the law of him for fishing in that part of the river. My friend Sir Roger heard them both upon a round trot; and, after having paused some time, told them, with the air of a man who would not give his judgment rashly, that much might be said on both sides. They were neither of them dissatisfied with the knight’s determination, because neither of them found himself in the wrong by it; and upon which we made the best of our way to the assizes.

The court was set before Sir Roger came, but notwithstanding all the justices had taken their places upon the bench, they made room for the old knight at the head of them; who, for his reputation in the country, took occasion to whisper in the judge’s ear, that he was glad his lordship had met with so much good weather in his circuit. I was listening to the proceedings of the court with much attention, and infinitely pleased with the great appearance of solemnity which so properly accompanies such a public administration of our laws; when, after about an hour’s sitting, I [Pg 75]observed to my great surprise, in the midst of a trial, that my friend Sir Roger was getting up to speak. I was in some pain for him till I found he had acquitted himself of two or three sentences, with a look of much business and great intrepidity.

Upon his first rising the court was hushed, and a general whisper ran among the country people that Sir Roger was up. The speech he made was so little to the purpose, that I shall not trouble my readers with an account of it; and I believe was not so much designed by the knight himself to inform the court, as to give him a figure in my eye, and keep up his credit in the country.

I was highly delighted, when the court rose, to see the gentlemen of the country gathering about my old friend, and striving who should compliment him the most; at the same time that the ordinary people gazed upon him at a distance, not a little admiring his courage, that was not afraid to speak to the judge.

In our return home we met with a very odd accident; which I cannot forbear relating, because it shows how desirous all who know Sir Roger are of giving him marks of their esteem. When we reappeared upon the verge of his estate, we stopped at a little inn to rest ourselves and our horses. The man of the house had, it seems, been formerly a servant in the knight’s family; and, to do honor to his old master, had some time since, unknown to Sir Roger, put him up in a sign-post before the door; so that the Knight’s Head had hung out upon the road a week before he himself knew anything of the matter. As soon as Sir Roger was acquainted with it, finding that the servant’s indiscretion proceeded wholly from affection and good-will, he only told him that he had made him too high a compliment; and, [Pg 76]when the fellow seemed to think that hardly could be, added with a more decisive look, that it was too great an honor for any man under a duke; but told him at the same time, that it might be altered with a very few touches, and that he himself would be at the charge of it. Accordingly they got a painter by the knight’s directions to add a pair of whiskers to the face, and by a little aggravation of the features to change it into the Saracen’s Head. I should not have known this story, had not the innkeeper, upon Sir Roger’s alighting, told him in my hearing, that his Honor’s head was brought back last night with the alterations that he had ordered to be made in it. Upon this my friend with his usual cheerfulness related the particulars above mentioned, and ordered the head to be brought into the room. I could not forbear discovering greater expressions of mirth than ordinary upon the appearance of this monstrous face, under which, notwithstanding it was made to frown and stare in a most extraordinary manner, I could still discover a distant resemblance of my old friend. Sir Roger, upon seeing me laugh, desired me to tell him truly if I thought it possible for the people to know him in that disguise. I at first kept my usual silence; but, upon the knight conjuring me to tell him whether it was not still more like himself than a Saracen, I composed my countenance in the best manner I could, and replied, that much might be said on both sides.

These several adventures, with the knight’s behavior in them, gave me as pleasant a day as ever I met with in any of my travels.

If you went abroad at night in those days, it was better to carry a stout cudgel than a walking cane. Says the poet Gay, in his [Pg 77]“Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London” Part III, ii, 326,

The young men of the age, like everyone else, mistook brutality for pleasure just as do shallow minds today. The difference is, that whereas we take it out at second hand, looking at blood letting in a moving picture, or wasting time on a so-called funny sheet where the humor turns on someone being hurt, they were more sincere and honest about it. Gay, in his “hogshead womb” refers to the curious practice of the Mohocks, (which seemed to have something in common with our Ku Klux Klans in a love for cruelty and mob work), by which they caught a woman, packed her in a barrel, and set her rolling down a steep hill. You have seen, and perhaps enjoyed that kind of thing in a screen “comedy.” As the screen men at times picture impossible cowboys making innocent citizens dance by firing revolvers close to their feet, so the Mohocks made them dance by pricking their legs with their swords. Sometimes they went further, and, like latter day self-appointed patriotic leagues, killed those they tortured. Of the Mohocks, Swift writes, in his Journal to Stella, “Did I tell you of a race of rakes, called the Mohocks, that play the devil about this town every night, slit people’s noses and beat them? Faith, they shan’t cut mine; I like it better as it is. The dogs will cost me at least a crown a week in chairs.”

The good knight had sufficient reason for [Pg 78]his fear, for the Mohocks at one time were a very serious menace. Eustace Bludgell in No. 347 of the Spectator, of April 8, 1712, has a paper on the subject. The fellows who banded themselves together to terrorize quiet citizens, sometimes worked upon the superstitious fears of the ignorant, “like those specters and apparitions which frighten several towns and villages in her majesty’s dominions,” says Bludgell. The Mohocks tried to form a sort of invisible empire, like the Ku Klux Klan of today. They had their Emperor of the Mohocks, who sent anonymous letters of a threatening nature, which were signed, ridiculously enough “Taw Waw Eben Zan Kalader.” They pretended to constitute themselves into guardians of law and order, issuing manifestoes setting forth that “We have received information, from sundry quarters of this great and populous city, of several outrages committed” and so on. They were, of course, full of the sentimentality that finds absurd expression in proclamations that they were defenders of the honor of women. Read this, from Bludgell’s paper:

My friend Sir Roger De Coverley, when we last met together at the club, told me that he had a great mind to see the new tragedy with me, assuring me, at the same time, that he had not been at a play these twenty years. “The last I saw,” said Sir Roger, “was the Committee, which I should not have gone to neither, had I not been told beforehand that it was a good Church of England comedy.” He then proceeded to inquire of me who this distressed mother was; and upon hearing that she was Hector’s widow, he told me that her husband was a brave man, and that when he was a school boy he had read his life at the end of the dictionary. My friend asked me, in the next place, if there would not be some danger in coming home late, lest the Mohocks should be abroad. “I assure you,” says he, “I thought I had fallen into their hands last night; for I observed two or three lusty black men that followed me half way up Fleet Street, and mended their pace behind me, in proportion as I put on to get away from them. You must know,” said the Knight with a smile, “I fancied they had a mind to hunt me; for I remember an honest gentleman in my neighborhood, who was served such a trick in King Charles the Second’s time; for which reason he has not ventured himself in town ever since. I might have shown them very good sport, had this been their design; for as I am an old fox [Pg 80]hunter, I should have turned and dodged, and have played them a thousand tricks they had never seen in their lives before.” Sir Roger added, that if these gentlemen had any such intention, they did not succeed very well in it; “for I threw them out,” says he, “at the end of Norfolk Street, where I doubled the corner and got shelter in my lodgings before they could imagine what had become of me, however,” says the knight, “if Captain Sentry will make one with us tomorrow night, and you will both call on me about four o’clock, that we may be at the house before it is full, I will have my own coach in readiness to attend you, for John tells me he has got the fore wheels mended.”

The Captain, who did not fail to meet me there at the appointed hour, bid Sir Roger fear nothing, for that he had put on the same sword which he made use of at the battle of Steenkirk. Sir Roger’s servants, and among the rest my old friend the butler, had, I found, provided themselves with good oaken plants, to attend their master on this occasion. When he had placed him in the coach, with myself at his left hand, the Captain before him, and his butler at the head of his footmen in the rear, we convoyed him in safety to the play house, where, after having marched up the entry in good order, the Captain and I went in with him, and seated him betwixt us in the pit. As soon as the house was full, and the candles were lighted, my old friend stood up and looked about him with that pleasure, which a mind seasoned with humanity naturally feels in itself, at the sight of a multitude of people who seem pleased with one another, and partake of the same common entertainment, I could not but fancy to myself as the old man hearing a cluster of them praise Orestes, struck in with them, and told them, that he thought his friend [Pg 81]Pylades was a very sensible man; as they were afterwards applauding Pyrrhus Sir Roger put in a second time: “And let me tell you,” says he, “though he speaks but little, I like the old fellow in whiskers as well as any of them.” Captain Sentry seeing two or three wags, who sat near us, lean with an attentive ear toward Sir Roger, and fearing lest they should smoke the knight, plucked him by the elbow, and whispered something in his ear, that lasted till the opening of the fifth act. The knight was wonderfully attentive to the account which Orestes gives of Pyrrhus’s death; and at the conclusion of it, told me it was such a bloody piece of work that he was glad it was not done upon the stage. Seeing afterwards Orestes in his raving fit, he grew more than ordinary serious, and took occasion to moralize (in his way) upon an evil conscience; adding that Orestes in his madness, looked as if he saw something.

As we were the first that came into the house, so we were the last that went out of it; being resolved to have a clear passage for our old friend, whom we did not care to venture among the justling of the crowd. Sir Roger went out fully satisfied with his entertainment, and we guarded him to his lodging in the same manner that we brought him to the playhouse; being highly pleased, for my own part, not only with the performance of the excellent piece which had been presented, but with the satisfaction which it had given the old man.

Note. Much as the simple knight seemed to have been pleased with the play, The Distrest Mother was a dull version by Ambrose Philips of Racine’s Andromaque. Fielding made a burlesque of it in his Covent Garden Tragedy, 1712. The Committee, to which Sir Roger refers, had [Pg 82]a sub-title by which it was better known, The Faithful Irishman. It was written by Robert Howard, Dryden’s brother-in-law, and first produced in 1665.

A country cousin could no more pass a week in London in those days without going to Vauxhall, than could a countryman stay any length of time in New York without finding his way to Coney Island. The earliest mention of the place is in Evelyn’s diary, 2nd July, 1661, when he went to see the “New Spring Garden at Lambeth; a pretty contrived plantation where sometimes they would have music and sit upon barges on the water.” Charles II, who missed nothing in the line of gaiety, had built for him “a fine room, the inside all of looking glass, and fountains very pleasant to behold,” which, the grave Morland, his Master Mechanic reports, was for the reception of “the King and his ladies.”

Later, little improvements were made and there was an artificial cascade, a water mill, a bridge with a mail coach passing over it, a cottage scene with animated figures drinking and smoking by machinery. Samuel Pepys, who missed nothing, says, “July 27, 1688—So over the water with my wife and Deb and Mercer, to Spring Garden, and there ate and walked, and observed how rude some of the young gallants of the town are become, to go into people’s arbors, where there are not men, and almost gore the women—which troubled me to see the vice and confidence of the age.” Tom Brown, a little later, speaks of the close walks and wildernesses, which “are so intricate, that the most experienced mothers have often lost themselves looking for their daughters.”

In the days of Sir Roger, the fashionable [Pg 83]way of going to the gardens was by water, and an evening there, with a glass of ale and a slice of hung beef was the usual course. Walpole, in a letter of 1750, gives an interesting account of a Vauxhall party: “I had a card from Lady Petersham to go with her to Vauxhall. I went accordingly to her house and found her and the little Asche, or the Pollard Ashe as they call her; they had just finished their last layer of red, and looked as handsome as crimson could make them.... We marched to our barge, with a boat of French horns attending, and little Ashe singing. We paraded some time up the river and at last debarked at Vauxhall.... Here we picked up Lord Granby, arrived very drunk from Jenny Whim’s (a tavern between Chelsea and Pimlico). At last we assembled in our booth, Lady Caroline in the front, with the visor of her hat erect, and looking gloriously handsome. She had fetched my brother Orford from the next box, where he was enjoying himself with his petite partie, to help us to mince the chickens. We minced seven chickens in a china dish, which Lady Caroline stewed over a lamp with three pats of butter and a flagon of water, stirring and rattling and laughing, and we, every minute, expecting the dish to fly about our ears. She had brought Betty the fruit girl, with hampers of strawberries and cherries, from Roger’s, and made her wait on table and then made her sit by herself at a little table.... In short, the air of our party was sufficient, as you will easily imagine, to take up the whole attention of the gardens; so much so, that from eleven o’clock to half an hour after one, we had the whole concourse round our booth. At last they came into the little garden of each booth on the sides of ours, till Harry Vane took up a bumper, and [Pg 84]drank their healths, and was proceeding to treat them with greater freedom. It was three o’clock before we got home.”

Oliver Goldsmith in his “Beau Tibbs at Vauxhall” makes his hero say, significantly, “As for virgins, it is true they are a fruit that don’t much abound in our gardens here: but if ladies, as plenty as apples in autumn, and as complying as any houri of them all, can content you, I fancy we have no need to go to heaven for paradise.”

As I was sitting in my chamber, and thinking on a subject for my next Spectator, I heard two or three irregular bounces at my landlady’s door, and, upon the opening of it, a loud cheerful voice inquiring whether the philosopher was at home. The child who went to the door answered very innocently, that he did not lodge there. I immediately recollected that it was my good friend Sir Roger’s voice; and that I had promised to go with him on the water to Spring-garden, in case it proved a good evening. The knight put me in mind of my promise from the bottom of the staircase, but told me, that if I was speculating, he would stay below till I had done. Upon my coming down, I found all the children of the family got about my old [Pg 85]friend, and my landlady herself, who is a notable prating gossip, engaged in a conference with him; being mightily pleased with his stroking her little boy upon the head, and bidding him be a good child, and mind his book.

We were no sooner come to the Temple-stairs, but we were surrounded with a crowd of watermen, offering us their respective services. Sir Roger, after having looked about him very attentively, spied one with a wooden leg, and immediately gave him orders to get his boat ready. As we were walking toward it, “You must know,” said Sir Roger, “I never make use of anybody to row me, that has not either lost a leg or an arm. I would rather bate him a few strokes of his oar than not employ an honest man that has been wounded in the Queen’s service. If I was a lord or a bishop, and kept a barge, I would not put a fellow in my livery that had not a wooden leg.”

My old friend, after having seated himself and trimmed the boat with his coachman, who, being a very sober man, always serves for ballast on these occasions, we made the best of our way for Vauxhall. Sir Roger obliged the waterman to give us the history of his right leg; and, hearing that he had left it at La Hogne, with many particulars which passed in that glorious action, the knight, in the triumph of his heart, made several reflections as to the greatness of the British nation; as, that one [Pg 86]Englishman could beat three Frenchmen; that we could never be in danger of popery so long as we took care of our fleet; that the Thames was the noblest river in Europe; that London bridge was a greater piece of work than any of the seven wonders of the world; with many other honest prejudices which naturally cleave to the heart of a true Englishman.

After some short pause, the old knight, turning about his head twice or thrice, to take a survey of this great metropolis, bid me observe how thick the city was with churches, and that there was scarce a single steeple on this side Temple-bar. “A most heathenish sight!” says Sir Roger: “there is no religion at this end of the town. The fifty new churches will very much mend the prospect: but church-work is slow, church-work is slow.”

I do not remember I have anywhere mentioned, in Sir Roger’s character, his custom of saluting everybody that passes by him with a good-morrow or good-night. This the old man does out of the overflowings of his humanity, though at the same time it renders him so popular among all his country neighbours, that it is thought to have gone a good way in making him once or twice knight of the shire. He cannot forbear this exercise of benevolence even in town, when he meets with any one in his morning or evening walk. It broke from him to several boats that passed by upon the water; [Pg 87]but to the knight’s great surprise, as he gave the good-night to two or three of the young fellows a little before our landing, one of them, instead of returning the civility, asked us what queer old put we had in the boat, and whether he was not ashamed to go a-wenching at his years; with a great deal of the like Thames ribaldry. Sir Roger seemed a little shocked at first; but, at length assuming a face of magistracy, told us, “That if we were a Middlesex justice, he would make such vagrants know that her Majesty’s subjects were no more to be abused by water than by land.”

We were now arrived at Spring-garden, which is exquisitely pleasant at this time of the year. When I consider the fragrancy of the walks and bowers, with the choirs of birds that sung upon the trees, and the loose tribe of people that walked under the shades, I could not but look upon the place as a kind of Mahometan paradise. Sir Roger told me it put him in mind of a little coppice by his house in the country, which his chaplain used to call an aviary of nightingales. “You must understand,” says the knight, “there is nothing in the world that pleases a man in love so much as your nightingales. Ah, Mr. Spectator! the many moonlight nights that I have walked by myself, and thought on the Widow by the music of the nightingale!” He here fetched a deep sigh, and was falling into a fit of musing, when a mask, [Pg 88]who came behind him, gave him a gentle tap upon the shoulder, and asked him if he would drink a bo mead with her. But the knight, being startled by so unexpected a familiarity, and displeased to be interrupted in his thoughts of the Widow, told her, She was a wanton baggage, and bid her go about her business.

We concluded our walk with a glass of Burton ale, and a slice of hung beef. When we had done eating, ourselves, the knight called a waiter to him, and bid him carry the remainder to the waterman that had but one leg. I perceived that the fellow stared upon him at the oddness of the message, and was going to be saucy; upon which I ratified the knight’s commands with a peremptory look.

As we were going out of the garden, my old friend thinking himself obliged, as a member of the quorus, to animadvert upon the morals of the place, told the mistress of the house, who sat at the bar, that he should be a better customer to her garden, “if there were more nightingales and fewer improper persons.”

Transcriber’s note

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation and italicization were standardized.

Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following change:

Page 3: “smear acros his”	“smear across his”
Page 4: “Rabelias, like Scarron”	“Rabelais, like Scarron”
Page 4: “bagnois on occasion”	“baignoires on occasion”
Page 5: “He was irresistible”	“He was as irresistible”
Page 7: “under Secretary of State”	“Under Secretary of State”
Page 7: “collector of Elizivirs and”	“collector of Elzevirs and”
Page 14: “Hilare Belloc, H. M.”	“Hilaire Belloc, H. M.”
Page 22: “sawyers dstroying saw”	“sawyers destroying saw”
Page 24: “at Brook’s gambling”	“at Brooks’ gambling”
Page 27: “atention to the narratives”	“attention to the narratives”
Page 27: “a letter writer by”	“a letter written by”
Page 31: “Thomas Incl of London”	“Thomas Inkle of London”
Page 35: “formation af a company”	“formation of a company”
Page 37: “would quickly lesson”	“would quickly lessen”
Page 40: “tried to get beneath”	“tries to get beneath”
Page 42: “Hockley-inthe-Hole; where”	“Hockley-in-the-Hole; where”
Page 64: “figures in St. Dustan’s”	“figures in St. Dunstan’s”
Page 66: “pleasuse had been”	“pleasure had been”
Page 76: “Acordingly they got”	“Accordingly they got”
Page 76: “himself than a Sarcacen”	“himself than a Saracen”
Page 77: “so the Mohawks made”	“so the Mohocks made”
Page 78: “only to repair thmselves”	“only to repair themselves”
Page 81: “applauding Pyrrhu Sir”	“applauding Pyrrhus Sir”
Page 81: “gives of Pyrrhu’s death”	“gives of Pyrrhus’s death”
Page 86: “work that any”	“work than any”

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Joseph Addison and his time

Joseph Addison and His Time