[Illustration: SIDNEY, EARL OF GODOLPHIN.
ENGRAVED BY PETER AITKEN, FROM MEZZOTINT BY JOHN SMITH, IN BRITISH MUSEUM. PAINTED BY SIR GODFREY KNELLER.]
his dullness betrays to that critic not so much the soul of a toady, as that of the anxious father with children that starve at home. His young fellows, though they look so careless, have their troubles too. Wherever that keen eye turns another group shows through the crowd, or a lonely whimsical figure as distinct as if there was no one but he. Save perhaps on those Saturdays when he plays his soft accompaniment to Milton’s grand, sonorous organ he is never abstracted or retired from men: on all other occasions, though he is thinking of a great deal else, and has his mind absorbed in other themes, this busy world of which he forms a part is always with him. Sometimes he permits us to see him over their heads only, seated on his familiar bench at his table, from whence he delivers his homilies, with all these figures moving and re-moving on the busy pavement in the foreground; sometimes we are admitted inside, and watch them through open door and window by his side: but he is never to be parted from the society in which he finds his models, his subjects, his audience. Like other men he takes it for granted that the fashion of his contemporaries is to go on forever. For posterity that smiling, keen observer takes no thought.
But of all things else that Addison has done there remains one preëminent figure which is his chief claim to immortality. The “Campaign” has disappeared out of literature; “Cato” is known only by a few well-known lines; the “Spectator” itself, though a work which no gentleman’s library can be without, dwells generally in dignified retirement there, and is seldom seen on any table but the student’s, though we are all supposed to be familiar with it: but Sir Roger de Coverley is the familiar friend of most people who have read anything at all, and the acquaintance by sight, if we may so speak, of everybody. There is no form better known in all literature. His simple rustic state, his modest sense of his own importance, his kind and genial patronage of the younger world, which would laugh at him if it were not overawed by his modesty and goodness, and which still sniggers in its sleeve at all those kind, ridiculous ways of his as he walks about in London, taken in on all sides, with his hand always in his purse and his heart in its right place, are always familiar and delightful. We learn with a kind of shock that it was Steele who first introduced this perfect gentleman to the world, and can only hope that it was Addison’s idea from the first, and that he did not merely snatch out of his friend’s hands and appropriate a conception so entirely according to his own heart. To Steele, too, we are indebted for some pretty scenes in the brief history: for Will the Huntsman’s wooing, which is the most delicate little enamel, and for the knight’s own love-making, which, however, is pushed a little too near absurdity. But it is Addison who leads him forth among his country neighbors, and to the assizes, and meets the gipsies with him, and brings him up to town, carrying him to Westminster and to Spring Gardens, in the wherry with the one-legged waterman, and to the play. The delightful gentleman is never finer than in this latter scene. He has to be conveyed in his coach, attended by all his servants, armed with “good oaken plants,” and Captain Sentry in the sword he had worn at Steinkirk, for fear of the Mohocks, those brutal disturbers of the public peace whom Addison justly feels it would be unbecoming to bring within sight of his noble old knight.
