genius. Milton, the austere and awful, was born in the silent and gloomy
month of December. Shakspeare, the most versatile of all writers, was
born in April, that month of changeful skies, of sudden sunshine, and
sudden showers. Burns and Byron, those stormy spirits, both appeared in
the fierce January; and of the former, he himself says,

"'Twas then a blast o' Januar-win'
Blew welcome in on Robin."

Scott, the broad sunny being, visited us in August, and in the same month
the warm genius of Shelley came, as Hunt used to tell him, "from the
planet Mercury" to our earth. Coleridge and Keats, with whose song a deep
bar of sorrow was to mingle, like the music of falling leaves, or of
winds wailing for the departure of summer, arrived in October,--that
month, the beauty of which is the child of blasting, and its glory the
flush of decay. And it seems somehow fitting that Addison, the mild, the
quietly-joyous, the sanguine and serene, should come, with the daisy and
the sweet summer-tide, on the 1st of May, which Buchanan thus hails--

"Salve fugacis gloria saeculi,
Salve secunda digna dies nota,
Salve vetustae vitae imago,
Et specimen venientis aevi."

"Hail, glory of the fleeting year!
Hail, day, the fairest, happiest here!
Image of time for ever by,
Pledge of a bright eternity."

Dr Lancelot Addison, himself a man of no mean note, was the father of