religious meditation,--all first-rate in quality, and all suggesting the
idea that his resources are boundless, and that the half has not been
told. His criticisms have been ridiculed as shallow; but while his
lucubrations on Milton were useful in their day as plain finger-posts,
quietly pointing up to the stupendous sublimities of the theme,
his essays on Wit are subtle, and his papers on the "Pleasures of
Imagination" throw on the beautiful topic a light like that of a red
evening west, giving and receiving glory from the autumnal landscape.

In the end of 1712 the _Spectator_, which had circulated at one time to
the extent of 4000 copies a-day, was discontinued, and in a few weeks the
_Guardian_ supplied its place. It was two months ere Addison began to
write, and during that time it was flippantly dull; but when he appeared
its character changed, and his contributions to the new periodical were
quite as good as the best of his _Spectators_.

In April 1713 his "Cato" was acted with immense success, and in
circumstances so well known that they need not be detailed at length.
Pope wrote the prologue; Booth enacted the hero; Steele packed the house;
peers, both Tory and Whig, crowded the boxes; claps of applause were
echoed back from High Churchmen to the members of the "Kit-Cat Club;"
Bolingbroke sent fifty guineas, during the progress of the play, to
Booth for defending the cause of liberty against a perpetual dictator,
(Marlborough;) and with the exception of growling Dennis, everybody was
in raptures. The play has long found its level. It has passages of
power and thoughts of beauty, but it has one radical fault--formality.
Mandeville described Addison as a parson in a tie-wig. "Cato" is a parson
without the tie-wig; an intolerable mixture of the patriot and the
pedant. Few would now give one of the _Spectator's_ little papers about
Sir Roger de Coverley for a century of Catos.