would have been left destitute if Mr. Joseph Williamson had not given him a living of L120 a-year at Milston in Wiltshire.  Upon this Lancelot Addison married Jane Gulstone, who was the daughter of a Doctor of Divinity, and whose brother became Bishop of Bristol.  In the little Wiltshire parsonage Joseph Addison and his younger brothers and sisters were born.  The essayist was named Joseph after his father’s patron, afterwards Sir Joseph Williamson, a friend high in office.  While the children grew, the father worked.  He showed his ability and loyalty in books on West Barbary, and Mahomet, and the State of the Jews; and he became one of the King’s chaplains in ordinary at a time when his patron Joseph Williamson was Secretary of State.  Joseph Addison was then but three years old.  Soon afterwards the busy father became Archdeacon of Salisbury, and he was made Dean of Lichfield in 1683, when his boy Joseph had reached the age of 11.  When Archdeacon of Salisbury, the Rev. Lancelot Addison sent Joseph to school at Salisbury; and when his father became Dean of Lichfield, Joseph was sent to school at Lichfield, as before said, in the years 1683-4-5.  And then he was sent as a private pupil to the Charterhouse.  The friendship he there formed with Steele was ratified by the approval of the Dean.  The desolate boy with the warm heart, bright intellect, and noble aspirations, was carried home by his friend, at holiday times, into the Lichfield Deanery, where, Steele wrote afterwards to Congreve in a Dedication of the ‘Drummer’,

’were things of this nature to be exposed to public view, I could show under the Dean’s own hand, in the warmest terms, his blessing on the friendship between his son and me; nor had he a child who did not prefer me in the first place of kindness and esteem, as their father loved me like one of them.’

Addison had two brothers, of whom one traded and became Governor of Fort George in India, and the other became, like himself, a Fellow of Magdalene College, Oxford.  Of his three sisters two died young, the other married twice, her first husband being a French refugee minister who became a Prebendary of Westminster.  Of this sister of Addison’s, Swift said she was ‘a sort of wit, very like him.  I was not fond of her.’

In the latter years of the seventeenth century, when Steele and Addison were students at Oxford, most English writers were submissive to the new strength of the critical genius of France.  But the English nation had then newly accomplished the great Revolution that secured its liberties, was thinking for itself, and calling forth the energies of writers who spoke for the people and looked to the people for approval and support.  A new period was then opening, of popular influence on English literature.  They were the young days of the influence now full grown, then slowly getting strength and winning the best minds away from an imported Latin style adapted to the taste of patrons