The end of a man’s life is seldom so interesting as its beginning. After he has achieved all of which he is capable, our interest is more usually a sad than a cheerful one. Addison made in 1716 what seems to have been an ambitious marriage, though he was not the man, one would think, to care for the rank which gave his wife always a distinct personality and another name than his. The Countess of Warwick, however, was, it would appear, a beautiful woman. She had the charge of a troublesome boy, for whom, no doubt, she would be eager to have the advice of such a man as Mr. Addison, whom all the world respected and admired. The little house at Chelsea (the house was called Sandford Manor House, and was some years ago figured against its present doleful background of gasometers, in the _Century_) which that statesman had acquired, and where he delighted to withdraw from the noise and contention of town, was within reach through the fields of Holland House, the residence of Lady Warwick. They had known each other for years, and Addison had written exquisite little letters to the boy-earl--no doubt with intentions upon the heart of the mother, to which, as is well known, that method is a very successful way--long before. It was, Dr. Johnson says, a long and anxious courtship; and perhaps--who knows?--when Steele performed that picture of the beloved knight sitting silent before the two fine ladies and unable to articulate the desires of his honest heart, it was some similar performance of the shy man of genius who found utterance with such difficulty, which was in Dick’s mind. But perhaps Addison grew bolder when he was a secretary of state. The great Mr. Addison, the delightful “Spectator,” the author of “Cato,” the man whose praises were in everybody’s mouth, and whom Whig and Tory delighted to honor, was no insignificant fine gentleman for a lady of rank to stoop to; and finally those evening walks over the fields, and pleasant rural encounters--for Chelsea was the country in those days, and Holland House quite retired among all the songsters of the grove, and out of town--came to a legitimate conclusion. Addison was forty, and her ladyship had been a widow for fifteen years; but there is no reason for concluding that there was no romance in the wedding, which, however, is always a nervous sort of business under such circumstances. There was the boy, too, to be taken into account, who evidently was not a nice boy, but a tale-bearer, who did not love his mother’s faithful lover, and made mischief when he could. There seems no evidence, however, that the marriage was unhappy, beyond a malicious note of Pope’s, which all the commentators have enlarged. The poor women who have the misfortune to be married to men of genius, fare badly at the hands of the critics. There seems no warrant whatever for Thackeray’s picture of the vulgar vixen whom he calls Mrs. Steele. Steele’s letters exist, but not those of poor Prue, who was so