Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/482

476 impart the fact of her fathers leaving her in charge of his young henchman. To the memory of her father she clung, and so far faithfully that even now, when Malcolm had begun to occasion her a feeling of awe and rebuke, she did not the less confidently regard him as her good genius that he was in danger of becoming an unpleasant one.

 

 From The Church Quarterly Review.

literature appears to have been an original English growth. What the Hôtel de Rambouillet had done, half a century before, for France, that "The Spectator" did for England, and it was characteristic of the two nations that the agent in the one should be a salon, in the other a paper. Both raised, refined, and purified the public taste at a time when storms had subsided, and left a good deal of mud behind them, and both did so only by a certain stiff fastidiousness which made Frenchwomen précieuses, and Englishmen prigs.

One Dr. Drake, in 1818, collected much curious information respecting these early periodicals, showing that the first idea sprang from Steele, and the practical execution is due to Addison, whose invention of the club of "The Spectator" gave a dramatic variety to the letters and essays, and scope for the employment of many different hands. It is plain that an immense effect was produced on the turbid waters. Dr. Drake quotes from contemporary pamphlets evidence that the whole, current of thought was affected: —


 * All the pulpit discourses of a year scarce produce half the good that flowed from "The Spectator" of a day. . .&nbsp. These writings have set all our wits and men of letters on a new way of thinking, of which they had but little to no notion before. Every one of them writes and thinks much more justly than they did some time since.

The circulation amounted to twenty thousand a day, and reached even to the Highlands (and this in the days of roads "before they were made"), and were read with the news of the week by grave politicians, who met on Sunday evenings "to arrange the affairs of the nation."

Indeed, the Saturday papers in "The Spectator" are meant to be directly religious treatises. To us they look very flat, dry, and "fusionless," just fit for the age that had driven out the Non-jurors, but they were written in all sincerity, and did their work in keeping up the recognition of religion among the "wits," who gave their tone to the thought of the country. Nor must we forget that we owe to Addison the resuscitation of some of the most beautiful hymns of a more earnest and gifted generation than his own. Many persons are amazed to find that "The spacious firmament on high," and "When all thy mercies, O my God," are not Addison's, but Andrew Marvell's. There was wholesome training, too, in the contemplation of the model Old English gentleman, Sir Roger de Coverlev, so faithfully attending his village church, and making the responses sonorously, even though he rebuked the idle in an equally loud voice, and was himself the chooser of the printed sermons from which the parson was to preach. And as we know, Addison so loved Sir Roger, that, as Cervantes did by Don Quixote, he slew him with his own hand to save him from being murdered by others.

Tt was "The Spectator," too, that made Milton the fashion, and, by disinterring "Chevy Chase," began that delight in ballad lore which Johnson in vain ridiculed, and which bred our chief romantic literature and antiquarianism.

The correspondence afforded a ready lash for the many follies, foibles, and impertinences of the day. Letters on assumptions in manners and dress, complaints of my lady's caprices from my lady's own woman, pictures of life with the masculine lady of the time, or the gentleman too much devoted to the arts of the kitchen, cannot fail to amuse anyone who dips into the long rows of little brown volumes which range along the uppermost shelves of old libraries, by showing how unlike our own were the manners, how like the natures of our forefathers and foremothers.

France, Germany, and Holland had soon "Spectators" of their own, and at home Dr. Drake enumerates no less than thirty of the like papers before the era of "The Rambler." It is curious to find that one of these was called "The Free Thinker," not by any means in the present sense of the word, at least, so we hope, for it numbered an Archbishop of Armagh and a Bishop of Rochester among the 