[In the following essay, Woodberry discusses Dobson 's volume of the works of Addison and Steele.]

Addison lies under more obligations to happy fortune than any other Englishman of high literary rank. Halifax saved him from the Church and the probable oblivion of a seat on the bench of bishops, and sent him to cultivate his genius by foreign travel. When, on his return, he seemed sinking into poverty, the same warm patron introduced him to Godolphin's notice and procured for him the inspiration of "The Campaign" in the shape of a promise of office. Throughout life, as thus in its opening, friends, admirers, employments, themes, and applause were found for him; and if in his death he had not the crowning favor of a good biographer, the defect was more than made up in later years by the luck of having Macaulay for his eulogist. It is not so long since those eloquent pages of the great essay declaimed of Addison's elevation and purity, his genius, his inestimable influence on English morals, and his superiority to Steele—"poor Dick," as Addison called him, well knowing his heart to be the warmest and most forgiving that beat with fidelity to his own. At the time, Macaulay's rhetoric, force, and fame bore down the feeble protests that strove here and there against the injustice and untruthfulness of the funeral oration he had pronounced over his predecessor in the Great-Mogulship of the middle classes. He had not, however, erased the name of "Atticus"—ah, if Addison had only escaped Pope's satire as nobly as Swift's jests! "Atticus" is a perpetual interrogation mark affixed to Addison's repute; it cannot be passed by; it tempts curiosity, it leads on to investigation, and the inquiry issues at last in a book like Mr. Courthope's study.

With all his sincere regard for his hero, and his regrets that there is nothing new to say, Mr. Courthope is a very candid biographer and frank critic. He strews the confessions of Addison's limitations along his pages instead of massing them, but they are all mentioned and defined. The early works, the translations, the "Account of the English Poets," the Latin verses are tenderly handled; the dust is hardly brushed off them. The opera, "Rosamond," is dismissed with the quotation from Dr. Burney that nothing more need be said of Addison's musical talent than that he was insensible to Handel and had a predilection for Clayton. The tragedy, "Cato" is bowed out on its merits, as owing its success solely to long-extinct party passions—a play in which "all the actors seem to be oppressed with an uneasy consciousness that they have a character to sustain, and are not confident of coming up to what is expected of them." The comedy, "The Drummer," is declared "a standing proof of Addison's deficiency in dramatic genius." Even as a poet, though a rally is made in favor of "The Campaign," Addison is suspected by Mr. Courthope of an "uneasy consciousness that he was really inferior to such men as John Phillips and Tickell." There is nothing left for Addison (of course he made no mark in Parliament or in his administrative offices) but to be found preëminent as an essayist; and yet Mr. Courthope, while acknowledging this necessity, can do plain justice to Steele:

There is scarcely a department of essay-writing developed in the 'Spectator' which does not trace its origin to Steele. It is Steele who first ventures to raise his voice against the prevailing dramatic taste of the age on behalf of the superior morality and art of Shakespeare's plays. . . . Steele, too, it was who attacked, with all the vigor of which he was capable, the fashionable vice of gambling. . . . The practice of duelling, also, which had hitherto passed unreproved, was censured by Steele. . . . The sketches of character studied from life, and the letters from fictitious correspondents, . . . appear roughly, but yet distinctly, drafted in the "Tatler." Even the papers of literary criticism, afterward so fully elaborated by Addison, are anticipated by his friend, who may fairly claim the honor to have been the first to speak with adequate respect of the genius of Milton. In a word, whatever was perfected by Addison was begun by Steele.

After Macaulay's studied depreciation of the originator and manager of the periodical form of the eighteenth-century essayists, this is a very refreshing passage, nor does it overstate Addison's debt to the fag who idolized him from school-days. It is true that Addison was master of a literary manner usually finer than Steele's, though he had less heart, less earnestness, less tenderness, less sympathetic humanity and practical philanthropy. But the obligation to Steele should not be understood to imply too much. Undoubtedly Addison was far more effective in creating modern social public opinion by teaching wit to be decent and virtue to be amiable; by finding the true English mean between the Court and the Puritans; by making good taste, good sense, and good manners the characteristic ideal of the commercial and professional middle class. When all is said, that is the service he was really most instrumental in accomplishing; but it is by its nature a passing one. Sir Walter Scott did a very similar thing when he displaced the novels of the last age by his own; but the value of this revolution is felt only by the historical student. For posterity, Sir Walter's fame, like Addison's, rests on the actual worth of his work to the new age as it comes and goes. In Addison's case, while it is acknowledged that men ought not to cease to be mindful of the humble beginnings by which they rise, nor forget to be grateful to the pioneers of innocent literary amusement and cultivated criticism, nevertheless it cannot be blinked that the larger part of his work is at present essentially commonplace. A new Dr. Johnson might hesitate to advise our youth to give their days and nights to Addison; in fact, our youth do not read, nor perhaps do they need to read, any of his sketches except the "Roger de Coverley" papers and the "Tory Foxhunter." The rest may be left, some to those who are still interested in sedan chairs and link-boys, some to those who are curious about Boileau's standard and the properties, some to those who do not yawn over homilies on cheerfulness.

What is the fascination that makes our men of letters conceive a special liking for the things of Queen Anne's reign? Thackeray is the embodiment of this partiality, and he may have given a direction to Victorian taste; but there is an original attraction in the age when Bohemianism was classical, in the first of our literary epochs to which we are admitted in undress, and especially in men so human that there is no presumption in our thinking of the best of them oftentimes as of "the friends who never could be ours." Austin Dobson is under the spell; it has made him a seasoned habitué of the haunts of Queen Anne's city. He knows his London like an antiquary, and rebuilds it like a dramatist. The strenuous exactness of modern biography, it is true, interferes with the proper effects of theatrical art, the names of the supernumeraries confuse the cast, the necessary minutiælig; of the action and episodes in corners crowd the stage, and at the best it is only a chronicle play; but with all this research and verification and detail of affairs that cramp the literary hand at nearly every sentence, Mr. Dobson's drawings have the lively truth of Steele's own sketches of himself and the town. Something of this vividness is due to taking many of the scenes en bloc from Steele's confessions,—those autobiographic passages, so free from self-consciousness, which most endear him, as they best paint him, to our thoughts. Such revelations, however, do not suffice for a biography, but must be joined, and lighted up, and made to reflect upon one another, and the other characters must be given their right relation to the dialogue, and little anecdotes must be told by the way; in all this there can be no aid from Steele. By what felicity, for instance, shall the semblance of a form be given to Mrs. Steele? Many a reader must have shared our curiosity respecting her, and our chagrin, also, at the ill-success of any efforts to get into her good graces, if only so far as to obtain one fair view of the domestic charmer to whom all those marital billets-doux were sent. Who was she?—for that correspondence is like nothing so much as some torn romance, in which one reads of only one lover. The biographer has evoked her from the shades, unsubstantial, but at least imaginable; he has even caught a glimpse of her, with the mind's eye, still in "the indolent sommeils du matin (dear to Millamant) of irresponsible maidenhood." He first suggests her qualities: "As an unmarried woman she had been a beauty and a 'scornful lady,' to use the seventeenth-century synonym for a coquette, and she apparently continued to retain as a wife a good deal of that affected disdain and tenacity of worship which had characterized her as a spinster. She seems also to have been given to vapors, and variable beyond the license of her sex; and from her injunction to her husband, when choosing a house, to get one near a church, was probably something of a dévoté." Then, with literary tact, he concludes with a drawing quite in Thackeray's masculine manner: "The escape from impecuniosity is less easy for the woman than for the man. Steele, with his elastic vitality and his keen interest in human nature, could easily fling to the Cretan winds both Barbadoes and the bailiffs over a bottle with an opportune 'school-fellow from India.' But it must have been far otherwise for 'dearest Prue,' nursing the wreck of her expectations in tearful tête-à-tête with the sympathetic Mrs. Binns, or waiting nervously, in an atmosphere of Hungary water, for the long expected tidings that her husband's vaguely defined affairs were at last successfully composed." Such was "Prue," not without some traits of kindness for "good Dick," more than are indicated here.

As with the enigmatical and ever-retiring Lady Steele, so in a higher degree with the well-known persons and broadly flaunting fashions of the time, Mr. Dobson has the art of the literary limner. Addison and Swift, with the amiable gentlemen of the Guards, or the boards, or the public offices, Lord Cutts or Lord Finch, Estcourt or Mainwaring, or even her ladyship of various employments, Mrs. De la Rivière Manley, are continually gliding in and out; and the crowd of gamblers and duelists and Mohawks of all kinds, the fops and gulls and boobies, the beaux and the fine madams, make up the busy background of the ever-frivolous town. It has sometimes seemed marvelous to us that such vitality resides in these old modes. Never was a literary work of high rank so burdened with mortality, one would think, as these "Tatlers" and "Spectators," and their sequent brood of ephemeral periodicals, interminably hatching, whose name truly was legion. If the comedy of manners is, as is said, necessarily short-lived, and satire does not survive its sting, and moralizing, however elegant, falls from the silver-lipped pulpit orator like lead to the ground, how is it that the fates have dealt so kindly with the Society-Circular that Steele edited, which is full of all such matter of decay? It lives, certainly, and still delights; and if the great reputation of Addison has made it classical, yet it is Steele's nature, as much as Addison's art, that keeps it whole and sound. Mr. Dobson continually reminds the reader of this, and rightly; for Addison's name has cast his loyal school-fellow's so much into the shade that it is with surprise that one comes upon such an encomium of Steele as is here quoted from Gay, in which the whole credit of the "Tatler," and the revolution of tastes and manners it began, is given with whole-souled vigor to the popular gazetteer. So welcome was Bickerstaff at teatables and assemblies so "relished and caressed by the merchants on the Change," writes Gay, that "there is not a Lady at Court, nor a Banker in Lombard Street, who is not verily persuaded that Captain Steele is the greatest Scholar and best Casuist of any man in England." Steele deserved this praise, for he was not only the active and inventing principal in the venture, but to this day the humanity of his genius is as essential to the immortality of the eighteenth-century essay as are the contemplative benignity and the instinct for refining the mind's creations which belonged to his more imposing and more belauded associate. But let us not throw stones at Addison, however unfairly the award of reputation may seem to have been made between the two members of one of the most fortunate as well as famous, literary partnerships; neither let us allow Steele to suffer too much by the humility of his affection, and the readiness with which his own lips ran over with noble compliments to his friend.

Criticism and biography, however, are very distinct things; and Mr. Dobson invites and detains attention, as he must that of any lover of literature who has felt the glamour of that reign of Queen Anne's, not because of his wise and kindly discrimination between the work and genius of the two fraternal essayists, and his nice allotments of place and fame to each; nor because of the revival of the temporalities of the theater, the coffee-house, the Parliament, the house in Bloomsbury Square, and the box at Hampton-Wick, with all their belongings; but because here is the life of a man who may properly be inscribed as Mr. Dobson inscribes him, among English Worthies, who was, over and above all else, the most humane, the most winning and cheerful heart in the literary England of his time.

The discovery of Steele in the character of an English Worthy, instead of Man of Letters, has a touch of the same humorous surprise in it that his comrades of the mess must have felt at his original appearance in literature as "The Christian Hero." In his own day he found it a hard matter to deserve that reputation—to be a wit of the coffee-house was the easy thing; now the tables are turned, and the too humanly complying Captain of the Life-Guards, denied the boon companionship of Swift and Addison under the literary editing of our century, turns up among the worshipfuls. His heart would swell with the new title, could he be made to think it belonged to him. Mr. Dobson does his best to make the reader think so. He knows very well, however, that his is not the usual task of the biographer of a previous age, merely to evoke the spirit of a dead mortal: the historian and the novelist have been beforehand with him, and when the literary imagination has seized upon a character of the past, truth has as little chance against its illusions as against a popular hero. Macaulay's sinister dislike and Thackeray's warm affection have created a Steele for us; and different as their judgments are, the divergence springs rather from their temperaments than from their conceptions of the culprit's career. Mr. Dobson suggests that Steele, in this character of the culprit, whether graceless or humbly apologetic, is not a justifiable representation of the whole man, and that the flings of the one and the condonements of the other of the great literary portrait painters are too much in one tone of color. For himself, he has tried, though against tremendous rhetorical odds, to give us only a natural picture.

Had it not been for some intricacies in his career, and the entanglement of his fame in consequence of that famous foreign alliance by which he called Addison to his aid, Steele's character would never have seemed anything but simple. It is not even rare, except for the excess of its attractiveness and the subtle power which the literary gift seems to blend with the other elements of human nature. Indeed, Thackeray was able to idealize it so plausibly because it approaches so near to a general type. Mr. Dobson analyzes it briefly into a weak will and an honest purpose; and this conjunction, as in the case of other people, frequently brought Steele into trouble. Furthermore, his own lips and the lips of his enemies, and fortune in the shape of hundreds of his familiar letters, made his affairs the open gossip of Queen Anne's tavern and our own libraries. It was perhaps a disadvantage to him that he always "owned up" and ate humble pie. His reputation affords a striking instance of the damaging effects of self-depreciation, not only in his life, but in literature. Of the trio, Swift had more mind, Addison more cultivation—vastly more; and Steele was as destitute of the contemplative serenity of the one as of the intellectual fury of the other. But he was distinguished from both as being the man of heart, the lovable one, the one "like unto ourselves." Mr. Dobson has indicated this primary quality in Steele while discussing Addison's superiority as a "classical" writer; "but," he says, "for words which the heart finds when the head is seeking; for phrases glowing with the white heat of a generous emotion; for sentences which throb and tingle with manly pity or courageous indignation, we must turn to the essays of Steele." Style, of this sort, is one of the great virtues of a writer.

Nor did Steele lack a second great virtue, invention. If one were disposed to cavil, he might smile at this, and remind us of the search Steele made in the beginning of his career for the philosopher's stone, and of the fish-pool patent he took out at the end of it; and truly he had his share of the follies that attend projectors, among whom he is placed by his fertility and the restless practical energy that belonged to his mercurial temperament. But the eighteenth-century essay was a project of another sort, and Steele did originate and conduct it—one of the distinct historic forms of English literature; and, moreover, this involved the invention of light social satire, domestic genre-painting, and all the other forms in which he was the adventurer before Addison came to occupy the land. Though the country perpetuated the name of Americus, let us remember who discovered it. And Steele, in doing this, was not only the forerunner of Addison, to whom at his best he is superior in feeling as at his worst he is inferior in finish; he wrote what Goldsmith read, and ushered in the novelists. But one should not push too far the advantage a man holds by virtue of his historical position in the tendency of a literary age, nor, on the other hand too readily fall into the strain of those writers whose papers on Steele are made up of apologies and claims. It is so natural to love Steele, and to feel that in the world's hurly-burly for justice he is irretrievably the under-dog, that one's pen pleads for him before the head is aware, and, like Lord Finch, "could fight for this man."

Mr. Dobson masks his batteries, but they are there, and they play silent havoc on all those who have undervalued Steele's part in the Queen Anne time, whether in the henpecking manner of Macaulay or with the patronizing charity of our much-beloved Thackeray. It behooves the reader to be wary, or he may suddenly be believing that possibly Steele was a better man than he thought himself; that the political fervor which made him a partisan, and drew the rancor of faction on his name, was patriotic duty; that the moral sense which made him denounce gamblers and duelling, his indignation at wrong, his pity for the suffering, and the quick alliance of his sympathy with the weak, which made him in no sentimental sense the friend of humanity,—and especially that his loyalty to an ideal yet human virtue, which made him such a censor of the town that he pleased them with the wholesome truth about themselves—the reader may begin to know that these are in fact the traits of an English Worthy, and not of the traditional Culprit, the Steele of fiction. He may even find himself admiring him; and if at the end, when all is done, and the pretty Welsh scene near the death, and the dance afterpiece which Mr. Dobson provides are both over, he coolly remembers the Captain of Life-Guards and the Lover-Gazetteer and the Sir Knight at Edinburgh, and cannot quite make up his mind that Steele was a hero, after all, yet he will surely think of him more truthfully, and recognize in him more manhood. That one prefers to think of him as a man of letters, with the failings and brilliancies and the human charm that belong to that quality, is no diminution of praise.

This is the first true life of him, written fully and with sympathy and judgment at once. Steele himself is its subject; and he is found to be as much a man of affairs as of letters. He was, of course, born with the "gift"; but he seems to have employed it usually in the service of life, and on some occasion more pressing than the ordinary call of pure literature to the young man to sit down and write. He was always busy, almost continuously a place-holder, and generally entangled besides with private embarrassments, growing out of his unrealizable fortunes. He had leisure to observe the world, nevertheless, and he was filled from his earliest literary days, at any rate, with a missionary fervor to reform first his own morals and then those of his fellows and of the town. He had a quick eye, and an impulsive pen was a good second to an impressible heart. The comedies, the essays, and the tracts tell the rest of the story, so far as literature is interested. In politics and in all the relations of private life, he acted, at the critical points, with courage, feeling, and honor, whether toward Swift, or Oxford, or Addison. He has written his own domestic and social character where all the world can read it. He suffered from an irresistible temptation to make a clean breast of all his transgressions, on the slightest provocation; and this quality together with the flings of faction at his private name, have laid his weaknesses bare. These Mr. Dobson does not conceal; he does not probe them with respectable morality, nor cover them with patronizing solicitude, but toward the close of his account of a most manly life, so far as purpose, conscience, and honest effort go, he writes down explicitly the obvious truth that there "have been wiser, stronger, greater men"; but he adds the graceful words,—"Many a strong man would have been stronger for a touch of Steele's indulgent sympathy; many a great man has wanted his genuine largeness of heart; many a wise man might learn something from his deep and wide humanity. His virtues redeemed his frailties. He was thoroughly amiable, kindly, and generous. Faute d'archanges il faut aimer des créatures imparfaites. "