Passing to the essays where the spirit is deliberately playful, one naturally consults the paper No. 547 of the Spectator, where a list of speculations is recommended as 'an infallible cure for hypochondriac melancholy,' and here it is found that Horace is the preponderating influence in motto-giving; was this because Addison had in mind Horace's often repeated recommendations with regard to Anticyra? Yet strange to say, a vision of the dissection of a beau's head, with the laughable motto, Tribus Anticyris caput insanabile, is not included amongst the 'infallible cures.' Fruges consumere nati3 is the biting motto for a week's journal of a gentleman, whose time was chiefly 'taken up in those three important articles of eating, drinking and sleeping.' Libelli Stoici inter sericos Jacere pulvillos amant* heads a half humorous, half serious plea in behalf of education for women. The motto for a satire upon signposts,5 intimates that Addison has ceased for the moment from either moral reflections or the chastisement of human foibles. That Addison was fond of the country is indicated in several of his papers, and he found in Horace a kindred 1 Wks. 4. 75. 2 Spectator 275: A. P. 300. 3 Ibid. 317: E. 1. 2. 27. 4 Guardian 155: Epd. 8. 15-16. 5 Spectator 28: O. 2. 10. 19-20. spirit. The country-seat of Sir Roger de Coverley is described in No. 106 of the Spectator, with the motto,1 Hinc tibi copia Manabit ad plenum benigno Ruris honorum opulenta cornu. In another paper' he says, 'We always find the poet in love with a country-life, where nature appears in the greatest perfection, and furnishes out all those scenes that are most apt to delight the imagination. Scriptorum chorus omnis amat nemus, et fugit urbes.' This Horatian line he has already used as the motto for one of the papers of the Tatler, in which he has dwelt upon the love of the country as a natural instinct of all authors. The Spectator in the country, walking alone in one of Sir Roger de Coverley's woods, meditates upon the immortality of the soul,* Inter silvas Academi quærere verum. His description of his own ideal of a garden begins with the motto," An me ludit amabilis Insania? audire et videor pios Quos et aquæ subeunt et auræ. In a later essay, in which he has been extolling and advocating the practice of planting, he concludes: "Many of the old philosophers passed away the greatest parts of their lives among their gardens. 10. 1. 17. 14-16. 2 Spectator 414 (Wks. 3. 404): E. 2. 2. 77. 3 No. 218. 4 Spectator 111: E. 2. 2. 45. 5 Ibid. 477 (Wks. 3. 499): O. 3. 4. 5-8. • Ibid. 583 (Wks. 4. 137). Every reader who is acquainted with Homer, Virgil, and Horace, the greatest geniuses of all antiquity, knows very well with how much rapture they have spoken on the subject.' Within the essays themselves, the references to classic writers are innumerable. Addison has his favorite philosophers, Plato and Socrates; his favorite critics, Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus; his favorite poets, Homer, Virgil, and Horace; his favorite story-tellers, Ovid and Plutarch; he draws from all the historians; to Cicero and to Seneca, from whom he took hardly any mottos for his papers, he refers frequently. He seldom quotes lines of Horace in the body of his papers; his method of referring to him is twofold: first, to turn to him for direct authority; secondly, to embody Horatian sentiments within his essay either wittingly, or else, half unconscious of his source, giving them to his English public because he believes them to be wise and useful. In a Examples of the first method are numerous. discussion by the members of the Club of which the Spectator was a member, upon the speculations of their esteemed fellow, the Templar joined, and 'showed, by the examples of Horace, Juvenal, Boileau, and the best writers of the age, that the follies of the stage and court had never been accounted too sacred for ridicule, how great soever the persons might be that patronized them.' There is a curious likeness and dissimilarity to this remark in a paper of the Guardian,2 published two years later: 'Horace, Juvenal, Boileau, and indeed the greatest writers in almost every age, have exposed, with all the strength of wit and good sense, the vanity of a man's valuing himself upon his ancestors, and endeavoured to show that true nobility consists in virtue, not in birth.' He concludes an essay upon laughter with observing, that the 1 Spectator 34 (Wks. 2. 295). 2 No. 137 (Wks. 4. 259-260). Spectator 249 (Wks. 3. 148): O. 1. 2. 33-34. metaphor of laughing, applied to fields and meadows when they are in flower, or to trees when they are in blossom, runs through all languages. . . . This shows that we naturally regard laughter, as what is in itself both amiable and beautiful. . . Venus . . . is represented by Horace as the goddess who delights in laughter.' Speaking of Pope's Art of Criticism,' he praises the way in which 'the observations follow one another like those in Horace's Art of Poetry, without that methodical regularity, which would have been requisite in a prose author.' Further, if a reader examines Horace's Art of Poetry, he will find but very few precepts in it, which he may not meet with in Aristotle, and which were not commonly known by all the poets of the Augustan age. His way of expressing and applying them, not his invention of them, is what we are chiefly to admire.' That Homer has raised the imagination of all the good poets that have come after him" is instanced by 'Horace, who immediately takes fire at the first hint of any passage in the Iliad or Odyssey, and always rises above himself when he has Homer in his view.' There are several instances where no direct allusion is made to Horace, but where it is apparent that Addison was thinking of him. Walking in the great yard of Sir Roger de Coverley's country-house, the Spectator remarks :3 'We do not find the fury of a lion in so weak and defenceless an animal as a lamb, nor the meekness of a lamb in a creature so armed for battle and assault as the lion.' Dr. Arnold draws attention to the resemblance of this observation to one in Horace, Neque calce lupus quemquam neque dente petit bos. 1 Spectator 253 (Wks. 3. 154). 2 Ibid. 417 (Wks. 3. 417). 3 Ibid. 121 (Wks. 2. 462). + Selections from Addison's Papers contributed to the Spectator, Oxford, 1891: S. 2. 1. 55. Addison continues his remarks upon the 'variety of arms with which nature has differently fortified the bodies of several kinds of animals,' and in the whole passage he seems to be developing the thought expressed in brief by Horace in the lines immediately preceding that above quoted. There is a delightfully humorous reminiscence of Horace in the sentence: 'Nay, authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding-places in a voluminous writer.' In an amusing paper2 on the sorrows and expedients of absent lovers, Addison introduces a supposititious letter from Asteria, who has 'parted with the best of husbands, who is abroad in the service of his country.' Though Horace is nowhere mentioned, the choice of the name 'Asteria' for the distressed abandoned lady is a graceful intimation that Addison is not unmindful of the author who, in the Seventh Ode of the Third Book, gives an inimitable instance of the sorrows of lovers in absence from each other. Sometimes Addison refers to Horace by implication only, as when in his essay on taste he remarks that 'men of great genius in the same way of writing seldom rise up singly, but at certain periods of time appear together, and in a body; as they did at Rome in the reign of Augustus.' There are other instances where Addison may or may not have written with Horace in his mind, and where it is difficult to decide which is the case. He surely thought of the lines, Si vis me flere, dolendum est Primum ipsi tibi,* 1 Spectator 124 (Wks. 2. 472): A. P. 359, 360. 2 Ibid. 241 (Wks. 3. 133). 3 Ibid. 409 (Wks. 3. 392). 4 Ibid. 397 (Wks. 3. 374): A. P. 102-103. |