Addison's compositions in the _Musæ Anglicanæ_ are eight in number. All of them are distinguished by the ease and flow of the versification, but they are generally wanting in originality. The best of them is the _Pygmæo-Gerano-Machia_, which is also interesting as showing traces of that rich vein of humour which Addison worked out in the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_. The mock-heroic style in prose and verse was sedulously cultivated in England throughout the eighteenth century. Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Fielding, developed it in various forms; but Addison's Latin poem is perhaps the first composition in which the fine fancy and invention afterwards shown in the _Rape of the Lock_ and _Gulliver's Travels_ conspicuously displayed itself. A literary success of this kind at that epoch gave a writer a wider reputation than he could gain by compositions in his own language. Armed, therefore, with copies of the _Musæ Anglicanæ_ for presentation to scholars, and with Halifax's recommendatory letters to men of political distinction, Addison started for the Continent. CHAPTER III. ADDISON ON HIS TRAVELS. Travelling in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries involved an amount of thought and precaution which would have seemed inconvenient to the tourist accustomed to abandon himself to the authority of guide-books, couriers, and railway companies. By ardent spirits like Roderick Random it was regarded as the sphere of enterprise and fortune, and not without reason, in days when adventures were to be met with on almost every road in the country, and in the streets and inns of the towns. The graver portion of society, on the other hand, considered it as part of the regular course of education through which every young man of position ought to pass before entering into active life. French was the universally recognised language of diplomacy. French manners and conversation were considered to be the best school for politeness, while Italy was held in the highest respect by the northern nations as the source of revived art and letters. Some of the most distinguished Englishmen of the time looked, it is true, with little favour on this fashionable training. "Lord Cowper," says Spence, on the information of Dr. Conybeare, "on his death-bed ordered that his son should never travel (it is by the absolute desire of the Queen that he does). He ordered this from a good deal of observation on its effects; he had found that there was little to be hoped, and much to be feared, from travelling. Atwell, who is the young lord's tutor abroad, gives but a very discouraging account of it, too, in his letters, and seems to think that people are sent out too young, and are too hasty to find any great good from it."