secret from the public. Perhaps his manners were not such as society, though very easy in those days, could tolerate; perhaps--but this is simple guesswork. All we know of Defoe is that as a writer he was of the greatest influence and note, but as a man nothing. He died poor and alone; he had little reward for unexampled labor. When Addison was secretary of state, and Prior an ambassador, he was nobody--a sword in the hand of an unscrupulous statesman; a shopkeeper manufacturing his genius and selling it by the yard. A sadder conclusion never was told. CHAPTER V ADDISON, THE HUMORIST There is not a name in the entire range of English literature to which so full and universal an appreciation has been given by posterity as that of Addison. He had his critics in his day. He had, indeed, more than critics, and from one quarter at least has received in his breast the finest and sharpest sting which a friend estranged could put into poetic vengeance. But the burden even of contemporary voices was always overwhelmingly in his favor, and nowadays there is no one in the world, we believe, that has other than gentle words for the gentle writer--the finest critic, the finest gentleman, the most tender humorist of his age. It is not only admiration, but a sort of personal affection with which we look back, detecting in all the bustling companies of that witty and depraved period his genial figure, with a delightful simplicity in the midst of all the formalism, and whole-heartedness among the conceits and pretensions, of the fops and wits, the intriguing statesmen and busy conspirators, of an age in which public faith can scarcely be said to have existed at all. He had his little defects, which were the defects of the time. And perhaps his age would not have loved him as it did had he been entirely without a share in its weaknesses. As it was, no one could call him a milksop then, as no one would venture to record any offensive name against him now. The smile of benevolent good nature, of indulgent humor, of observation always as sweet and merciful as it is acute and refined, is never absent from his countenance. He treats no man hardly; the ideal beings whom he creates are the friends of all: we could, indeed, more easily spare dozens of living acquaintances than we could part with Sir Roger de Coverley. Addison is the very embodiment of that delightful gift of humor on which we pride ourselves so much as a specially English quality; his soft laugh touches all the chords of sympathy and loving comprehension with a tender ridicule in which the applauses of admiration are conveyed with double effect. That his style is the perfection, in its way, of English style is less dear and delightful to us than that what it conveys is the perfection of feeling. His art is the antipodes of that satirical art which allows human excellence only to gird at it, and insinuate motives which diminish or destroy. Addison, on the other hand, allows