Joseph Addison

“ I know no evil under the sun so great as the abuse of the understanding, and yet there is no one vice more common. It has diffused itself through both sexes and all qualities of mankind, and there is hardly that person to be found who is not more concerned for the reputation {5} of wit and sense, than honesty and virtue. But this unhappy affectation of being wise rather than honest, witty than good-natured, is the source of most of the ill habits of life. Such false impressions are owing to the abandoned writings of men of wit, and the awkward imitation {10} of the rest of mankind. ”

“ As the months go past, we have in these papers an exhaustless flow of kindly satire upon the manners and minor morals of society,—on behaviour at church, on ogling the ladies, on snuff-taking, on the folly of enormous petticoats and low tuckers, on the brainless fops that display themselves in club windows and the brainless flirts that display themselves in stage boxes. We have bits of keen character-painting too—the small poet who assures you that poets are born, not made; the beau who is caught practising before the mirror to catch a careless air ”

“ If, indeed, we try in any way to bring back to imagination the life of that bygone age, Sir Roger is sure to come to mind at once, at the assizes, at Vauxhall, or, best of all, at home in the country. He is part of that life; as real to our thought as Swift or Marlborough, or as Steele or Addison themselves. ”

“ Yet if society at this time had its seamy side, it was in the age of Anne that Englishmen began to feel the charm of wit and manners, of fashion and breeding. To the man about town, this murky London was the centre of all that was best and brightest in a new society. It was not so large but that he felt at home in every part of it. In one coffee-house he met the wits and men of letters, in another the scholars and clergy, [Pg 26] in another the merchants, in another the men of fashion and gallantry, and in all he could hear bright talk upon the news of the day. ”

“ Yet there are no real inconsistencies in the character of Sir Roger. His whimsical humor, his sentiment, his credulity, his benevolence, his amiable though obstinate temper, are all combined in a personality so convincing that we must always think of him as an actual contemporary of the men who created him. He is the typical conservative English country gentleman of the Queen Anne time, not taking kindly to new ideas, but sturdy, honest, order-loving, of large heart and simple manners. ”

“ It is from an habit {20} of thinking, grown upon me from my youth spent in arms, that I have ever held gentlemen who have preserved modesty, good-nature, justice and humanity in a soldier's life, to be the most valuable and worthy persons of the human race. To pass through imminent dangers, suffer painful watchings, frightful alarms, and {25} laborious marches for the greater part of a man's time, and pass the rest in a sobriety conformable to the rules of the most virtuous civil life, is a merit too great to deserve the treatment it usually meets with among the other part of the world. ”

“ For this reason, Sir Roger was saying last night that he was of opinion none but men of fine parts deserve to be hanged. The reflections of such men are so delicate upon all occurrences which they are concerned in, {15} that they should be exposed to more than ordinary infamy and punishment for offending against such quick admonitions as their own souls give them, and blunting the fine [Pg 60] edge of their minds in such a manner that they are no more shocked at vice and folly than men of slower capacities. There is no greater monster in being, than a very ill man of great parts. ”

“ Upon withdrawing into my room after dinner, I was secretly touched with compassion towards the honest gentleman that had dined with us, and could not but consider, with a great deal of concern, how so good an heart and such busy hands were wholly employed in trifles; {15} that so much humanity should be so little beneficial to others, and so much industry so little advantageous to himself. The same temper of mind and application to affairs might have recommended him to the public esteem, and have raised his fortune in another station of life. ”

“ The particular skill of this lady has ever been to inflame your wishes and yet command respect. To make her mistress of this art, she has a greater share of knowledge, wit, and good sense than is {10} usual even among men of merit. Then she is beautiful beyond the race of women. If you won't let her go on with a certain artifice with her eyes, and the skill of beauty, she will arm herself with her real charms, and strike you with admiration instead of desire. ”

“ The first of our society is a gentleman of Worcestershire, of ancient descent, a baronet, his name Sir Roger de Coverley. His great-grandfather was inventor of that famous country-dance which is called after him. All who know that shire are very well acquainted with the parts {5} and merits of Sir Roger. He is a gentleman that is very singular in his behaviour, but his singularities proceed from his good sense, and are contradictions to the manners of the world only as he thinks the world is in the wrong. ”

“ A furious party spirit, when it rages in its full violence, exerts itself in civil war and bloodshed; and when it is under its greatest restraints naturally breaks out in false-hood, {20} detraction, calumny, and a partial administration of justice. In a word, it fills a nation with spleen and rancour, and extinguishes all the seeds of good-nature, compassion, and humanity. ”

“ Conversation, {5} like the Romish religion, was so encumbered with show and ceremony, that it stood in need of a reformation to retrench its superfluities, and restore it to its natural good sense and beauty. At present, therefore, an unconstrained carriage, and a certain openness of behavior {10} are the height of good breeding. The fashionable world is grown free and easy; our manners sit more loose upon us. Nothing is so modish as an agreeable negligence. In a word, good breeding shows itself most where, to an ordinary eye, it appears the least. ”

“ They will, if it comes easily, get money honestly; but if not, they will not scruple to attain it by fraud, or cozenage. {10} And, indeed, what is the whole business of the trader's account, but to overreach him who trusts to his memory? But were that not so, what can there great and noble be expected from him whose attention is forever fixed upon balancing his books, and watching over his expenses? {15} And at best let frugality and parsimony be the virtues of the merchant, how much is his punctual dealing below a gentleman's charity to the poor, or hospitality among his neighbours? ”

“ I might here observe how admirably this precept of morality—which derives the malignity of hatred from the passion itself, and not from its object—answers to that great rule which was dictated to the world {5} about an hundred years before this philosopher wrote; but instead of that, I shall only take notice, with a real grief of heart, that the minds of many good men among us appear soured with party principles, and alienated from one another in such a manner as seems to me altogether {10} inconsistent with the dictates either of reason or religion. ”

“ And yet this is done with so much art and humour that Sir Roger is one of the most living persons in our literature. He is as immortal as Hamlet or Julius Cæsar. We know him as well as we know our nearest neighbour; and we like him quite as well as we like most of our neighbours. ”

“ There cannot a greater judgment befall a country than such a dreadful spirit of division as rends a government into two distinct people, and makes them greater strangers and more averse to one another than if they were actually two different nations. ”

“ Will Honeycomb, who looks upon love as his particular province, interrupting our friend with a jaunty laugh, "I thought, knight," says he, "thou hadst lived long enough in the world not to pin thy happiness upon one that is a {15} woman and a widow. I think that without vanity I may pretend to know as much of the female world as any man in Great Britain, though the chief of my knowledge consists in this,—that they are not to be known." ”

“ This certainly ought to be the purpose of every man who {10} appears in public; and whoever does not proceed upon that foundation, injures his country as fast as he succeeds in his studies. When modesty ceases to be the chief ornament of one sex and integrity of the other, society is upon a wrong basis, and we shall be ever after without {15} rules to guide our judgment in what is really becoming and ornamental. Nature and reason direct one thing, passion and humour another. To follow the dictates of the two latter, is going into a road that is both endless and intricate ”

“ After nightfall, lighted only by flickering oil lamps, they were the haunt of footpads who terrorized the watchmen, and of bands of roistering young blades who headed up women in barrels and rolled them down hill for diversion, or chased the unwary stranger into a corner and made him dance by pricking him with their sword points. Public morals were very low. Drunkenness and license confronted the decent citizen on every hand, and, in public gardens like Vauxhall, often held high carnival. ”

“ I have been the more particular in this account because I hear there is scarce a village in England that has not a Moll White in it. When an old woman begins to dote, {5} and grow chargeable to a parish, she is generally turned into a witch, and fills the whole country with extravagant fancies, imaginary distempers, and terrifying dreams. In the mean time the poor wretch that is the innocent occasion of so many evils begins to be frighted at herself, and {10} sometimes confesses secret commerce and familiarities that her imagination forms in a delirious old age. ”

“ One might, on this occasion, recount the sense that great persons in all ages have had of the merit of their dependants, and the heroic services which men have done their masters in the extremity of their fortunes, and shown to their undone patrons that fortune was all the difference {25} between them; but as I design this my speculation only as a gentle admonition to thankless masters, I shall not go out of the occurrences of common life, but assert it, as [Pg 84] a general observation, that I never saw, but in Sir Roger's family and one or two more, good servants treated as they ought to be. ”

“ Thus he endures the torment of poverty, to avoid the name of being less rich. If you {15} go to his house you see great plenty, but served in a manner that shows it is all unnatural, and that the master's mind is not at home. There is a certain waste and carelessness in the air of everything, and the whole appears but a covered indigence, a magnificent poverty. {20} That neatness and cheerfulness which attends the table of him who lives within compass, is wanting, and exchanged for a libertine way of service in all about him. ”

“ Captain Sentry observed Sir Andrew very diligent in {20} hearing Sir Roger, and had a mind to turn the discourse, by taking notice, in general, from the highest to the lowest parts of human society, there was "a secret though unjust way among men of indulging the seeds of ill-nature and envy by comparing their own state of life to that of {25} another, and grudging the approach of their neighbour to their own happiness: and on the other side, he who is the less at his ease, repines at the other who, he thinks, has unjustly the advantage over him. ”

“ A country life abounds in both these kinds of labour, and for that reason gives a man a greater stock of health, and consequently a more perfect enjoyment of himself, than any other way of life. I consider the body as a system of tubes and glands, or, to use a more rustic phrase, {5} a bundle of pipes and strainers, fitted to one another after so wonderful a manner as to make a proper engine for the soul to work with. ”

“ This infamous piece of good breeding which reigns {15} among the coxcombs of the town has not yet made its way into the country; and as it is impossible for such an irrational way of conversation to last long among a people that make any profession of religion, or show of modesty, if the country gentlemen get into it they will {20} certainly be left in the lurch. Their good breeding will come too late to them, and they will be thought a parcel of lewd clowns, while they fancy themselves talking together like men of wit and pleasure. ”

“ As I was walking in this solitude, where the dusk of the evening conspired with so many other occasions of terror, I observed a cow grazing not far from me, which an imagination that is apt to startle might easily have construed into a black horse without an head ”