Of his tastes, habits, and friendships at Oxford there are few records. Among his acquaintance were Boulter, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin—whose memory is unenviably perpetuated, in company with Ambrose Phillips, in Pope’s Epistle to Arbuthnot,

“Does not one table Bavius still admit,
Still to one Bishop Phillips seem a wit?”—

and possibly the famous Sacheverell.[6] He is said to have shown in the society of Magdalen some of the shyness that afterwards distinguished him; he kept late hours, and read chiefly after dinner. The walk under the well-known elms by the Cherwell is still connected with his name. Though he probably acted as tutor in the college, the greater part of his quiet life at the University was doubtless occupied in study. A proof of his early maturity is seen in the fact that, in his nineteenth year, a young man of birth and fortune, Mr. Rushout, who was being educated at Magdalen, was placed under his charge.

His reputation as a scholar and a man of taste soon extended itself to the world of letters in London. In 1693, being then in his twenty-second year, he wrote his Account of the Greatest English Poets; and about the same time he addressed a short copy of verses to Dryden, complimenting him on the enduring vigour of his poetical faculty, as shown in his translations of Virgil and other Latin poets, some of which had recently appeared in Tonson’s Miscellany. The old poet appears to have been highly gratified, and to have welcomed the advances thus made to him, for he returned Addison’s compliment by bestowing high and not unmerited praise on the translation of the Fourth Book of the Georgics, which the latter soon after undertook, and by printing, as a preface to his own translation, a discourse written by Addison on the Georgics, as well as arguments to most of the books of the Æneid.

Through Dryden, no doubt, he became acquainted with Jacob Tonson. The father of English publishing had for some time been a well-known figure in the literary world. He had purchased the copyright of Paradise Lost; he had associated himself with Dryden in publishing before the Revolution two volumes of Miscellanies; encouraged by the success which these obtained, he put the poet, in 1693, on some translations of Juvenal and Persius, and two new volumes of Miscellanies; while in 1697 he urged him to undertake a translation of the whole of the works of Virgil. Observing how strongly the public taste set towards the great classical writers, he was anxious to employ men of ability in the work of turning them into English; and it appears from existing correspondence that he engaged Addison, while the latter was at Oxford, to superintend a translation of Herodotus. He also suggested a translation of Ovid. Addison undertook to procure coadjutors for the work of translating the Greek historian. He himself actually translated the books called Polymnia and Urania, but for some unexplained reason the work was never published. For Ovid he seems, on the whole, to have had less inclination. At Tonson’s instance he translated the Second Book of the Metamorphoses, which was first printed in the volume of Miscellanies that appeared in 1697; but he wrote to the publisher that “Ovid had so many silly stories with his good ones that he was more tedious to translate than a better poet would be.” His study of Ovid, however, was of the greatest use in developing his critical faculty; the excesses and want of judgment in that poet forced him to reflect, and his observations on the style of his author anticipate his excellent remarks on the difference between True and False Wit in the sixty-second number of the Spectator.

Whoever, indeed, compares these notes with the Essay on the Georgics, and with the opinions expressed in the Account of the English Poets, will be convinced that the foundations of his critical method were laid at this period (1697). In the Essay on the Georgics he seems to be timid in the presence of Virgil’s superiority; his Account of the English Poets, besides being impregnated with the principles of taste prevalent after the Restoration, shows deficient powers of perception and appreciation. The name of Shakespeare is not mentioned in it, Dryden and Congreve alone being selected to represent the drama. Chaucer is described as “a merry bard,” whose humour has become obsolete through time and change; while the rich pictorial fancy of the Faery Queen is thus described:

“Old Spenser next, warmed with poetic rage,
In ancient tales amused a barbarous age—
An age that yet uncultivate and rude,
Where’er the poet’s fancy led pursued,
Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods,
To dens of dragons and enchanted woods.
But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore,
Can charm an understanding age no more;
The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,
While the dull moral lies too plain below.”

According to Pope—always a suspicious witness where Addison is concerned—he had not read Spenser when he wrote this criticism on him.[7]

Milton, as a legitimate successor of the classics, is of course appreciated, but not at all after the elaborate fashion of the Spectator; to Dryden, the most distinguished poet of the day, deserved compliments are paid, but their value is lessened by the exaggerated opinion which the writer entertains of Cowley, who is described as a “mighty genius,” and is praised for the inexhaustible riches of his imagination. Throughout the poem, in fact, we observe a remarkable confusion of various veins of thought; an unjust depreciation of the Gothic grandeur of the older English poets; a just admiration for the Greek and Roman authors; a sense of the necessity of good sense and regularity in writings composed for an “understanding age;” and at the same time a lingering taste for the forced invention and far-fetched conceits that mark the decay of the spirit of mediæval chivalry.

With the judgments expressed in this performance it is instructive to compare such criticisms on Shakespeare as we find in No. 42 of the Spectator, the papers on “Chevy Chase” (73, 74), and particularly the following passage:

“As true wit consists in the resemblance of ideas, and false wit in the resemblance of words, according to the foregoing instances, there is another kind of wit which consists partly in the resemblance of ideas and partly in the resemblance of words, which, for distinction’s sake, I shall call mixed wit. This kind of wit is that which abounds in Cowley more than in any author that ever wrote. Mr. Waller has likewise a great deal of it. Mr. Dryden is very sparing in it. Milton has a genius much above it. Spenser is in the same class with Milton. The Italians even in their epic poetry are full of it. Monsieur Boileau, who formed himself upon the ancient poets, has everywhere rejected it with scorn. If we look after mixed wit among the Greeks, we shall find it nowhere but in the epigrammatists. There are, indeed, some strokes of it in the little poem ascribed to Musæus, which by that, as well as many other marks, betrays itself to be a modern composition. If we look into the Latin writers we find none of this mixed wit in Virgil, Lucretius, or Catullus; very little in Horace, but a great deal of