He died in 1719, at the early age of forty-seven. The story goes that he sent for young Warwick when he was on his death-bed, that he might see how a Christian could die: which we should say was unlike Addison, save for the reason that he had been drawing morals all his life, and might at that supreme moment be beyond seeing the ridicule of a last exhibition. Perhaps it was in reality a message of charity and forgiveness to the wayward boy, who, there seems reason to believe, was not fond of his stepfather. And thus the great writer glided gently out of a life in which he had more honor than falls to the lot of most men, and, let us hope, a great deal of mild satisfaction and pleasure. Thackeray has a little scoff at him as a man without passion. “I doubt until after his marriage whether he ever lost his night’s rest or his day’s tranquillity about any woman in his life.” Neither, perhaps, did Sir Roger, whose forty years’ love-making and unrequited affection was a sentimental luxury of the most delicate kind, as his maker intended it to be. But Addison’s fine and meditative genius had no need of passion. He is the “Spectator” of humankind. He had little temptation in his own calm nature to descend into the arena; the honors of the fight came to him somehow without any soil of the actual engagement. No smoke of gunpowder is about his laurels, no spot of blood upon his sword. He looks on at the others fighting, always with a nod of encouragement for the man of honor and virtue, of keen scorn for the selfish and evil-minded, of pity for the fallen. But it is not his part to fight. He makes no pretense of any inclination that way. He is the looker-on; and, as such, more valuable than a thousand men-at-arms.
He died at Holland House, that fine historical mansion sacred to the wits of a later age, but which in Addison’s time contained no tyrannical tribunal of literary patronage, whatever else there might be there which was contrary to peace. His life and death there make an association more touching, and at the same time of sweeter meaning, than the after-struggles of the Whig men of letters for Lady Holland’s arbitrary favors. The great humorist died in the middle of summer, in June, 1719, and was carried from that leafy retirement to the Jerusalem Chamber, where he lay in state: why, it seems difficult to understand--but his position had in it a kind of gentle royalty unlike that of other men. He was buried at Westminster by night, the wonderful solemn arches over the funeral party, half seen by the wavering lights, going off into vistas of mysterious gloom, echoing with the hymns of the choir, who sang him to his rest. Did they sing, one wonders, one of those verses which had been the most intimate utterance of his life: that great hymn of creation, scarcely inferior to the angelic murmurings of medieval Francis in his cell at Assisi?--