who sought credit for nice critical discrimination.  In 1690 Addison had been three years, Steele one year, at Oxford.  Boileau was then living, fifty-four years old; and Western Europe was submissive to his sway as the great monarch of literary criticism.  Boileau was still living when Steele published his ‘Tatler’, and died in the year of the establishment of the ‘Spectator’.  Boileau, a true-hearted man, of genius and sense, advanced his countrymen from the nice weighing of words by the Precieuses and the grammarians, and by the French Academy, child of the intercourse between those ladies and gentlemen.  He brought ridicule on the inane politeness of a style then in its decrepitude, and bade the writers of his time find models in the Latin writers who, like Virgil and Horace, had brought natural thought and speech to their perfection.  In the preceding labour for the rectifying of the language, preference had been given to French words of Latin origin.  French being one of those languages in which Latin is the chief constituent, this was but a fair following of the desire to make it run pure from its source.

If the English critics who, in Charles the Second’s time, submitted to French law, had seen its spirit, instead of paying blind obedience to the letter, they also would have looked back to the chief source of their language.  Finding this to be not Latin but Saxon, they would have sought to give it strength and harmony, by doing then what, in the course of nature, we have learnt again to do, now that the patronage of literature has gone from the cultivated noble who appreciates in much accordance with the fashion of his time, and passed into the holding of the English people.  Addison and Steele lived in the transition time between these periods.  They were born into one of them and—­Steele immediately, Addison through Steele’s influence upon him—­they were trusty guides into the other.  Thus the ‘Spectator’ is not merely the best example of their skill.  It represents also, perhaps best represents, a wholesome Revolution in our Literature.  The essential character of English Literature was no more changed than characters of Englishmen were altered by the Declaration of Right which Prince William of Orange had accepted with the English Crown, when Addison had lately left and Steele was leaving Charterhouse for Oxford.  Yet change there was, and Steele saw to the heart of it, even in his College days.

Oxford, in times not long past, had inclined to faith in divine right of kings.  Addison’s father, a church dignitary who had been a Royalist during the Civil War, laid stress upon obedience to authority in Church and State.  When modern literature was discussed or studied at Oxford there would be the strongest disposition to maintain the commonly accepted authority of French critics, who were really men of great ability, correcting bad taste in their predecessors, and conciliating scholars by their own devout acceptance