It is with no halting, staid, discriminative pen that he descants upon the pleasantries and follies, the very reference to which give life and colour to a weary argument. By the aid of these threads of human sentiment we fancy we come the closer to him in his musings and his wanderings, now hieing, as he does, to the pantiles or the playhouse, now to the Temple Stairs or Vauxhall Gardens. Posterity takes delight in reversing the footsteps of its favourites. It attempts to return with them to the scenes which they themselves have left for good so long ago. And so with Addison, we accustom ourselves to see him mixing in a crowd of masquers and dominos, or supping in upper chambers with ministers of state and tavern wits. The fancy is a harmless one, and not far removed from reality. Imagine, therefore, Mr. Joseph Addison at Hockley-in-the-Hole or at Cupar's Gardens, but be sure that to-morrow's sermon will want nothing of its grace and sparkle because inspired over-night in a mug-house parlour. Addison has in fact conceived and transmitted to us some of the loftiest notions ever formed of a Deity, and of the unending trespass against divine law. Among surroundings possibly resonant with ribaldry, he could reflect, as few before him have so impartially and equably reflected, how much of vileness is to be set down to the score of thoughtlessness and inanity, how much to a high-handed defiance of the Master he owns. One number of the 'Spectator,' that of November 8th, 1711, sends forth the sternest challenge to the government of error. Few other secular works have made so moderate and at once so eloquent a protest. Adapting the notion of Locke that the unaided realisation of the Deity is formed by observation of the qualities we should desire to find in ourselves, but sublimated by the notion of infinity attaching to each of them, Addison proceeds to argue a state of veneration being the normal condition of the mental frame. The horror that is conceived by a child, or, as it may be, by a grown man, at the jarring dissonance of an oath is nothing else than a sense of injury dealt out to this deeply-rooted conviction. A condition of reverence being thus inherent, it follows that the images which reason has unconsciously reared must meet with some disturbing shock before they can be impaired or dismembered. But the blow once fairly delivered, the victim of the assault in too many cases passes out into the ranks of the assailants. The boundary line between the state of abhorrence and the succeeding one of aggression is so faint that it may almost imperceptibly be overpassed, and is apt to become the more obscure with growth of years.