In 1687 Addison entered Queen's College, Oxford; but sometime after,
(Macaulay says "not many months," Johnson "a year," and Miss Aiken "two
years,") Dr Lancaster, of Magdalene College, having accidentally seen
some Latin verses from his pen, exerted himself to procure their author
admission to the benefits of a foundation, then the wealthiest in Europe.
Our poet was first elected Demy, then Probationary Fellow in 1697, and
in the year following, Actual Fellow. During the ten years he resided
at Oxford, he was a general favourite, remarkable for his diligence in
study, for the purity and tenderness of his feelings, for his bashful and
retiring manners, for the excellence of his Latin compositions, and for
his solitary walks, pursued in a path they still point out below the elms
which skirt a meadow on the banks of the Cherwell,--a river, we need
scarcely say, which there weds the Isis. It was in such lonely evening or
Saturday strolls that he probably acquired the habit of pensive reverie
to which we owe many of the finest of his speculations in after days,
such as that in _Spectator_, No. 565, beginning, "I was yesterday, about
sunset, walking in the open fields, when insensibly the night fell upon
me," &c.

Prose English essays, however, were as yet strangers to his pen. His
ambition was to be a poet, and while still under twenty-two, he produced
and printed some complimentary verses to Dryden, then declining in years,
and fallen into comparative neglect. The old poet was pleased with the
homage of the young aspirant, which was as graceful in expression as it
was generous in purpose. For instance, alluding to Dryden's projected
translation of "Ovid," he says, that "Ovid," thus transformed, shall
"reveal"

"A nobler change than he himself can tell."