Meantime, Addison had begun his career both in politics and in letters. He had not been in haste--Mr. Addison was never in haste. In 1698, some three years after his friend Steele left Oxford, he had been elected Fellow of Magdalen College, and seemed well satisfied with the retired and scholarly life there. He had some modest literary aspirations. In 1697 he published some verses entitled _An Account of the English Poets_, which make it evident that he had no relish for Chaucer and Spenser, and which do not mention Shakespeare at all. In Latin poetry his taste was happier. He made a translation of the Georgics of Virgil, prefaced by an essay that won compliments from the great Dryden, and he wrote Latin verses of his own that were thought to be of quite surprising excellence. His classical studies may not have broadened his taste or his intellect very much, but they doubtless did something to cultivate that smoothness and nicety of phrase for which he was afterward to be so noted. In those years at Magdalen everybody supposed he would go into the church. He seemed a parson born and bred. And he doubtless would have taken orders, had it not been for a piece of signal good fortune that befell him. Dryden had introduced young Addison to Mr. Congreve, and Mr. Congreve had introduced him to Montague, afterward Lord Halifax. Montague it was worth while to know. Really a great statesman and financier, he had won some reputation as a poet in his earlier days, and was always ambitious to be accounted the friend and patron of letters. In those years the leaders of both political parties were coming to see the need of enlisting the services of young men of wit and learning; and Montague, whose appreciation perhaps was quickened by some complimentary verses in excellent Latin, deemed this Mr. Addison too promising an ally to lose. Accordingly, in 1699, when he was twenty-seven, Addison was given a handsome pension of three hundred pounds a year, bidden go travel on the continent, keep his eyes open, and learn French. He remained on the continent about three years, when, at the death of King William, his pension lapsed, and at the breaking out of the great war of the Spanish Succession he was obliged to return to England. His prospects for the next three years were not bright. He had written some good Latin verses, and some English verses that were not so good. On his return from his travels he printed a rather dull account of them, which few people read then and which nobody reads now. He was known to a little circle of great men, but he was dangerously near poverty.