This elegant writer, to whom the world owes so many obligations, was born at Milton near Ambrosbury in the county of Wilts (of which place his father, Mr. Lancelot Addison, was then rector) on the 6th of May 1672; and being not thought likely to live, was baptized on the same day, as appears from the church register.  When he grew up to an age fit for going to school, he was put under the care of the rev.  Mr. Naish at Ambrosbury.  He afterwards removed to a school at Salisbury, taught by the rev.  Mr. Taylor, thence to the Charter-house, where he was under the tuition of the learned Dr. Ellis, and where he contracted an intimacy with Mr. Steel, afterwards Sir Richard, which continued as long as Mr. Addison lived.  He was not above fifteen years old when he was entered of Queen’s College, Oxford, in which his father had been placed:  where he applied himself so closely to the study of classical learning, that in a very short time he became master of a very elegant Latin stile, even before he arrived at that age when ordinary scholars begin to write good English.

In the year 1687 a copy of his verses in that tongue fell into the hands of Dr. Lancaster dean of Magdalen College, who was so pleased with them, that he immediately procured their author’s election into that house [1]; where he took the degrees of bachelor, and matter of arts.  In the course of a few years his Latin poetry was justly admired at both the universities, and procured him great reputation there, before his name was so much as known in London.  When he was in the 22d year of his age, he published a copy of verses addressed to Mr. Dryden, which soon procured him the notice of some of the poetical judges in that age.  The verses are not without their elegance, but if they are much removed above common rhimes, they fall infinitely short of the character Mr. Addison’s friends bestowed upon them.  Some little space intervening, he sent into the world a translation of the 4th Georgic of Virgil, of which we need not say any more, than that it was commended by Mr. Dryden.  He wrote also that discourse on the Georgics, prefixed to them by way of preface in Mr. Dryden’s translation, and chose to withhold his name from that judicious composition, because it contained an untried strain of criticism, which bore hard upon the old professors of that art, and therefore was not so fit for a young man to take upon himself; and Mr. Dryden, who was above the meanness of fathering any one’s work, owns the Essay on the Georgics to have come from a friend, whose name is not mentioned, because he desired to have it concealed.