verba" till the Saxon element seems almost eliminated from his style. Addison took features of his style from almost all his predecessors: he assumes the characters of essayist, moralist, philosopher, and critic, but he blends them all together in his new capacity of journalist. He had accepted the public as his judges; and he writes as if some critical representative of the public were at his elbow, putting to the test of reason every sentiment and every expression. Warton tells us, in his _Essay on Pope_, that Addison was so fastidious in composition that he would often stop the press to alter a preposition or conjunction; and this evidence is corroborated in a very curious and interesting manner by the MS. of some of Addison's essays, discovered by Mr. Dykes Campbell in 1858.[95] A sentence in one of the papers on the _Pleasures of the Imagination_ shows, by the various stages through which it passed before its form seemed satisfactory to the writer, what nice attention he gave to the balance, rhythm, and lucidity of his periods. In its original shape the sentence was written thus: "For this reason we find the poets always crying up a Country Life; where Nature is left to herself, and appears to y{e} best advantage." This is rather bald, and the MS. is accordingly corrected as follows: "For this reason we find all Fancifull men, and y{e} poets in particular, still in love with a Country Life; where Nature is left to herself, and furnishes out all y{e} variety of Scenes y{t} are most delightful to y{e} Imagination." The text as it stands is this: "For this reason we always find the poet in love with a country life, where nature appears in the greatest perfection, and furnishes out all those scenes that are most apt to delight the imagination."[96] This is certainly the best, both in point of sense and sound. Addison perceived that there was a certain contradiction in the idea of Nature being "left to herself," and at the same time _furnishing_ scenes for the pleasure of the imagination; he therefore imparted the notion of design by striking out the former phrase and substituting "seen in perfection;" and he emphasised the idea by afterwards changing "delightful" into the stronger phrase "apt to delight." The improvement of the rhythm of the sentence in its final form is obvious. With so much elaboration of style it is natural that there should be in Addison's essays a disappearance of that egotism which is a characteristic--and a charming one--of Montaigne; his moralising is natural, for the age required it, but is free from the censoriousness of the preacher; his critical and philosophical papers all assume an intelligence in his reader equal to his own.