Now let us compare his treatment of Addison. In the first place, scattered through the eighteen pages devoted to that writer (single-volume edition) we find no less than twenty-two illustrative passages, varying in length from six to 176 lines of very fine print. In his general treatment M. Taine begins by tracing the physical, social, and moral environment of Addison, thus leading us up to the consideration of the man and the writer by a natural process of evolution. We are first shown what kind of a man to expect, and then we are made acquainted with him. And all this is done with the most vivid and brilliant touches. Mere biographical details are either ignored or given incidental mention. The opening paragraph is a _tableau vivant_, which we see Addison at Oxford, "studious, peaceful, loving solitary walks under the elm avenues." We are told how, from boyhood, "his memory is stuffed with Latin verses"; how "this limited culture, leaving him weaker, made him more refined" how "he acquired a taste for the elegance and refinement, the triumphs and the artifices, of style"; how he became "an epicure in literature"; how "he naturally loved beautiful things"; how "Addison, good and just himself, trusted in God, also a being good and just"; how he writes his lay sermons; how "he cannot suffer languishing or lazy habits"; how "he is full of epigrams against flirtations, extravagant toilets, useless visits"; how "he explains God, reducing him to a mere magnified man"; with what literal precision he describes Heaven; how he "inserts prayers in his papers and forbids oaths"; how he made morality fashionable. These illustrations of M. Taine's method might be multiplied indefinitely, but enough have surely been quoted to demonstrate how vastly more vivid and concrete is the idea of Addison, the man and the writer, gained by this method in comparison with that which was in general vogue before the publication of M. Taine's book. In the one case the reader has come into contact with a mere abstraction--a man of straw, with not a single feature that impresses itself on the imagination or the memory. In the other, he has come into communion with a real living soul--a man "of like passions with ourselves."