But this was not owing to malice, but to the bashful good nature which distinguished him. It is true, too, that he hints a beauty, and hesitates in his expressions of love. He says himself the finest things, and then blushes as if detected in a crime; or he praises an obvious and colossal merit in another, and then starts at the sound himself had made. His encomiums resemble the evening talk of lovers, being low, sweet, and trembling. Were we to speak of Addison phrenologically, we should say that, next to veneration, wit, and ideality, his principal faculties were caution and secretiveness. He was cautious to the brink of cowardice. We fancy him in a considerable fright in the storm on the Ligurian Gulf, amidst the exhalations of the unhealthy Campagna, and while the avalanches of the Alps--"the thunderbolts of snow"--were falling around him. We know that he walked about behind the scenes perspiring with agitation while the fate of "Cato" was still undecided. Had it failed, Addison never could, as Dr Johnson, when asked how he felt after "Irene" was damned, have replied, "Like the Monument." We know, too, that he sought to soothe the fury and stroke down the angry bristles of John Dennis. To call the author of the "Campaign" a coward were going too far; but he felt, we believe, more of a martial glow while writing it in his Haymarket garret than had he mingled in the fray. And as to his secretiveness, his still, deep, scarce-rippling stream of humour, his habit, commemorated by Swift, when he found any man invincibly wrong, of flattering his opinions by acquiescence, and sinking him yet deeper in absurdity; even the fact that no word is found more frequently in his writings than "secret" ("secret joy," "secret satisfaction," "secret solace," are phrases constantly occurring,) prove that, whatever else he had possessed of the female character, the title of the play, "A Wonder--a Woman keeps a Secret," had been no paradox in reference to him. Having his lips in general barred by the double bolts of caution and secretiveness, one ceases to wonder that the "invisible spirit of wine" was welcomed by him as a key to open occasionally the rich treasures of his mind; but that he was a habitual drunkard is one calumny; that he wrote his best _Spectators_ when too much excited with wine is another; and that he "died drunk" is a third,--and the most atrocious of all, propagated though it has been by Walpole and Byron. His habits, however, were undoubtedly too careless and convivial; and there used to be a floating tradition in Holland-house, that, when meditating his writings there, he was wont to walk along a gallery, at each end of which stood a separate bottle, out of both of which he never failed, _en passant_, to sip! This, after all, however, may be only a mythical fable.