life had been singularly peaceful; but his last years were shadowed by quarrels, first with Pope, then with Swift, and finally with his lifelong friend Steele.  The first quarrel was on literary grounds, and was largely the result of Pope’s jealousy.  The latter’s venomous caricature of Addison as Atticus shows how he took his petty revenge on a great and good man who had been his friend.  The other quarrels with Swift, and especially with his old friend Steele, were the unfortunate result of political differences, and show how impossible it is to mingle literary ideals with party politics.  He died serenely in 1719.  A brief description from Thackeray’s English Humorists is his best epitaph: 

A life prosperous and beautiful, a calm death; an immense fame and affection afterwards for his happy and spotless name.

WORKS OF ADDISON.  The most enduring of Addison’s works are his famous Essays, collected from the Tatler and Spectator. We have spoken of him as a master of the art of gentle living, and these essays are a perpetual inducement to others to know and to practice the same fine art.  To an age of fundamental coarseness and artificiality he came with a wholesome message of refinement and simplicity, much as Ruskin and Arnold spoke to a later age of materialism; only Addison’s success was greater than theirs because of his greater knowledge of life and his greater faith in men.  He attacks all the little vanities and all the big vices of his time, not in Swift’s terrible way, which makes us feel hopeless of humanity, but with a kindly ridicule and gentle humor which takes speedy improvement for granted.  To read Swift’s brutal “Letters to a Young Lady,” and then to read Addison’s “Dissection of a Beau’s Head” and his “Dissection of a Coquette’s Heart,” is to know at once the secret of the latter’s more enduring influence.

Three other results of these delightful essays are worthy of attention:  first, they are the best picture we possess of the new social life of England, with its many new interests; second, they advanced the art of literary criticism to a much higher stage than it had ever before reached, and however much we differ from their judgment and their interpretation of such a man as Milton, they certainly led Englishmen to a better knowledge and appreciation of their own literature; and finally, in Ned Softly the literary dabbler, Will Wimble the poor relation, Sir Andrew Freeport the merchant, Will Honeycomb the fop, and Sir Roger the country gentleman, they give us characters that live forever as part of that goodly company which extends from Chaucer’s country parson to Kipling’s Mulvaney.  Addison and Steele not only introduced the modern essay, but in such characters as these they herald the dawn of the modern novel.  Of all his essays the best known and loved are those which introduce us to Sir Roger de Coverley, the genial dictator of life and manners in the quiet English country.