[Illustration:  JOSEPH ADDISON.]

Born in the rectory at Milston, Wiltshire, on May Day, 1672, it was Addison’s fortune to take up the profession of Letters at the very moment when it was becoming a recognized profession, with a field of its own, and with emoluments sufficient in kind to make decency of living possible, and so related to a man’s work that their acceptance involved loss neither of dignity nor of independence.  He was contemporary with the first English publisher, Jacob Tonson.  He was also contemporary with the notable reorganization of English prose which freed it from exaggeration, complexity, and obscurity; and he contributed not a little to the flexibility, charm, balance, and ease which have since characterized its best examples.  He saw the rise of polite society in its modern sense; the development of the social resources of the city; the enlargement of what is called “the reading class” to embrace all classes in the community and all orders in the nation.  And he was one of the first, following the logic of a free press, an organized business for the sale of books, and the appearance of popular interest in literature, to undertake that work of translating the best thought, feeling, sentiment, and knowledge of his time, and of all times, into the language of the drawing-room, the club, and the street, which has done so much to humanize and civilize the modern world.

To recognize these various opportunities, to feel intuitively the drift of sentiment and conviction, and so to adjust the uses of art to life as to exalt the one, and enrich and refine the other, involved not only the possession of gifts of a high order, but that training which puts a man in command of himself and of his materials.  Addison was fortunate in that incomparably important education which assails a child through every sense, and above all through the imagination—­in the atmosphere of a home, frugal in its service to the body, but prodigal in its ministry to the spirit.  His father was a man of generous culture:  an Oxford scholar, who had stood frankly for the Monarchy and Episcopacy in Puritan times; a voluminous and agreeable writer; of whom Steele says that he bred his five children “with all the care imaginable in a liberal and generous way.”  From this most influential of schools Addison passed on to other masters:  from the Grammar School at Lichfield, to the well-known Charter House; and thence to Oxford, where he first entered Queen’s College, and later, became a member of Magdalen, to the beauty of whose architecture and natural situation the tradition of his walks and personality adds no small charm.  He was a close student, shy in manner, given to late hours of work.  His literary tastes and appetite were early disclosed, and in his twenty-second year he was already known in London, had written an ‘Account of the Greatest English Poets,’ and had addressed some complimentary verses to Dryden, then the recognized head of English Letters.