sure, without the money he would still have been Addison; yet something, no doubt, of the mellow sweetness of humanity in him was due to this fostering of his youth. He went abroad in 1699, and addressed himself in the first place to the learning of French, which he did slowly at Blois, without apparently gaining much enlightenment as to the state of France or the other countries which he visited in his prolonged tour. No doubt, with his pension and the income of his fellowship, Addison traveled like a young man of fortune and fashion in those times of leisure, with excellent introductions everywhere, seeing the best society, and the greatest men both in rank and letters. Boileau admired his Latin verses as much as the English statesmen did, and the young man went upon his way more and more convinced that Latin verses were the highroad to fame. From France he went to Italy, making a classical pilgrimage. “Throughout,” says Mr. Leslie Stephen, quaintly, “if we are to judge by his narrative, he seems to have considered the scenery as designed to illustrate his beloved poets.” The much-debated uses of travel receive a new question from the records of such a journey, pursued with the fullest leisure and under the best auspices; and one wonders whether the man who hurries across a continent in a few weeks, catching flying impressions, and forming crude judgments, is, after all, much less advantaged than he who, oblivious of all the human interests around him, discusses Rome, for instance, as if it had no interest later than Martial or Silius Italicus--as if neither Church, nor Pope, nor all the convulsions of the Middle Ages, nor Crusader, nor Jesuit, had ever been. This extraordinary impoverishment of the imagination was the fashion of the time, just as it has been the fashion in other days to fix upon the vile records of the Renaissance as the one thing interesting in the history of a noble country. According to that fashion, however, Addison did everything that a young man of the highest culture could be expected to do. He traced the footsteps of Æneas, and remembered every spot on which a classical battle had been fought, or an ode sung. He wrote an eloquent essay upon medals, and lingered among the sculptures of the museums; and he picked up a subject for a heroic tragedy from the suggestion of a foolish play which he saw at a Venetian theater. With his head full of such themes, he had gone out from Oxford, and with a deepened sense of their importance he came back again. Though in after days he touches lightly with his satiric dart the young man who can talk of nothing better on his return than how “he had like to have been drowned at such a place; how he fell out of a chaise at another”; yet in the hymn of praise with which he celebrates his own return from all the dangers of foreign travel something like the same record is made, though in a more imposing manner: