for music above the English, the English have a genius for other performances of a much higher nature, and capable of giving the mind a much nobler entertainment.” We wonder if our “Spectator” would be less affronted now by the constant adaptation of equivocal French plays to the English stage, than by the anomaly of a representation given in language which nobody understood? He would, perhaps, feel it to be an advantage often not to understand, and doubt whether the English after all “have a genius for other performances of a much higher nature.” We are not informed that the “Tatler” and “Spectator,” the real foundation of his fame, gave Addison any help in his career. That was assured by the “Campaign.” He received his first post, that of “a commissionership with £200 a year,” at once, in the end of 1704: his pension having ceased at King William’s death in 1702: the interval is not a very long one, and during this time he had retained his college fellowship. In 1706 he became under-secretary. In 1708, his chief, Lord Sunderland, was dismissed, and Addison along with him; but the latter stepped immediately into the Irish secretaryship, which was worth £2000 a year. Two years afterward occurred the political convulsions brought about by the trial of Sacheverell and the intrigues of the back stairs, which brought Harley into power, and Addison with his leaders was once more out of office; but in 1714 they came triumphantly back, and he rose to the height of political elevation as secretary of state with a seat in the Cabinet. Though he did not retain this position long on account of his failing health, he retired on a pension of £1500 a year. In 1711, at a period when he was supposed to be at a low ebb of fortune, in the cold shade of political opposition, he was able to buy the estate of Bilton, near Rugby, for which he paid £10,000--which is not bad for a moment of misfortune. Altogether Addison was provided for as the deserving and honorable hero--the wise youth of one of his own allegories, the good apprentice--should be, by poetic justice, but is not always in the experience of the world. The success of the “Spectator,” however, which was more his than Steele’s (as the “Tatler” had been much more Steele’s than Addison’s), was apparently very considerable; Addison himself says, in an early number, that it had reached the circulation of three thousand copies a day. On a special occasion fourteen thousand copies are spoken of; and the passing of the Stamp Act, which destroyed many of the weaker publications of the time, did comparatively little harm to the “Spectator,” which doubled its price without much diminishing its popularity. It had also what no other daily, and very few periodicals of any time, ever reach, the advantage of a permanent issue afterward, in a succession of volumes, of which the first edition seems to have reached an issue of ten thousand copies. Fortunate writers! pleasant public! The “Times,” and the rest of our