The Poetical Works of Addison | Page 5

sent home letters to his friends in England--to Montague, Colonel Froude, Congreve, and others[1]--which contain sentences of exquisite humour. Thus, describing the famous gallery at Versailles, with the paintings of Louis' victories, he says: "The history of the present King till the sixteenth year of his reign is painted on the roof by Le Brun, so that his Majesty has actions enough by him to furnish another gallery much longer than the first. He is represented with all the terror and majesty that you can imagine in every part of the picture, and see his young face as perfectly drawn in the roof as his present one in the side. The painter has represented His Most Christian Majesty under the figure of Jupiter throwing thunderbolts all about the ceiling, and striking terror into the Danube and Rhine, that lie astonished and blasted with lightning a little above the cornice."
This is Addison all over; and quite as good is his picture of the general character of the French: "'Tis not in the power of want or slavery to make them miserable. There is nothing to be met with in the country but mirth and poverty. Every one sings, laughs, and starves. Their conversation is generally agreeable, for if they have any wit or sense, they are sure to shew it. Their women are perfect mistresses in the art of shewing themselves to the best advantage. They are always gay and sprightly, and set off the worst faces in Europe with the best airs. Every one knows how to give herself as charming a look and posture as Sir Godfrey Kneller could draw her in."
From Blois he returned to Paris, and was now better qualified, from his knowledge of the language, to mingle with its philosophers, savants, and poets. He had some interesting talk with Malebranche and Boileau, the former of whom "very much praised Mr Newton's mathematics; shook his head at the name of Hobbes, and told me he thought him a pauvre esprit." Here follows a genuine Addisonianism: "His book is now reprinted with many additions, among which he shewed me a very pretty hypothesis of colours, which is different from that of Cartesius or Newton, though they may all three be true." Boileau, now sixty-four, deaf as a post, and full of the "sweltered venom" of ill-natured criticism, nevertheless received Addison kindly; and when presented by him with his "Mus? Anglican?," is said from that time to have conceived an opinion of the English genius for poetry. Addison says that Boileau "hated an ill poet." Unfortunately, however, for his judgment, it is notorious that he slighted Shakspeare, Milton, and Corneille, and that, next to Homer and Virgil, his great idols were Arnaud and Racine.
In December 1700, tired of French manners, which had lost even their power of moving him to smiles, and it may be apprehensive of the war connected with the Spanish succession, which was about to inflame all Europe, Addison embarked from Marseilles for Italy. After a narrow escape from one of those sudden Mediterranean storms, in which poor Shelley perished, he landed at Savona, and proceeded, through wild mountain paths, to Genoa. He afterwards commemorated his deliverance in the pleasing lines published in the _Spectator_, beginning with--
"How are Thy servants blest, O Lord,"
one verse in which was wont to awaken the enthusiasm of the boy Burns,
"What though in dreadful whirls we hung, High on the broken wave," &c.
The survivor of a shipwreck is, or should be, ever afterwards a sadder and a wiser man. And Addison continued long to feel subdued and thankful, and could hardly have been more so though he had outlived that shipwreck which bears now the relation to all recent wrecks which "the storm" of November 1703, as we shall see, bore to all inferior tempests--the loss of the _Royal Charter_,--the stately and gold-laden bark, which, on Wednesday the 26th October 1859, when on the verge of the haven which the passengers so much desired to see, was lifted up by the blast as by the hand of God, and dashed into ten thousand pieces,--hundreds of men, women, and, alas! alas! children, drowned, mutilated, crushed by falling machinery, and that, too, at a moment when they had just been assured that there was no immediate danger, and when hope was beginning to sparkle in the eyes that were sinking into despair,--sovereigns, spray, and the mangled fragments of human bodies massed together as if in the anarchy of hell, and hurled upon the rocks. Addison, no more than one of the escaped from that saloon of horror and sea of death, could forget the special Providence by which he was saved; and the hymn above referred to, and that other still finer, commencing--
"When all Thy mercies, O my God! My rising soul surveys,"
seem