of Blenheim, with immediate earnest of payment for it in the office of a
Commissioner of Appeal in the Excise worth £200 a year. For this
substantial reason Addison wrote the 'Campaign'; and upon its success,
he obtained the further reward of an Irish Under-secretaryship.

The 'Campaign' is not a great poem. Reams of 'Campaigns' would not have
made Addison's name, what it now is, a household word among his
countrymen. The 'Remarks on several Parts of Italy, &c.,' in which
Addison followed up the success of his 'Campaign' with notes of foreign
travel, represent him visiting Italy as 'Virgil's Italy,' the land of
the great writers in Latin, and finding scenery or customs of the people
eloquent of them at every turn. He crammed his pages with quotation from
Virgil and Horace, Ovid and Tibullus, Propertius, Lucan, Juvenal and
Martial, Lucretius, Statius, Claudian, Silius Italicus, Ausonius,
Seneca, Phædrus, and gave even to his 'understanding age' an overdose of
its own physic for all ills of literature. He could not see a pyramid of
jugglers standing on each other's shoulders, without observing how it
explained a passage in Claudian which shows that the Venetians were not
the inventors of this trick. But Addison's short original accounts of
cities and states that he saw are pleasant as well as sensible, and here
and there, as in the space he gives to a report of St. Anthony's sermon
to the fishes, or his short account of a visit to the opera at Venice,
there are indications of the humour that was veiled, not crushed, under
a sense of classical propriety. In his account of the political state of
Naples and in other passages, there is mild suggestion also of the love
of liberty, a part of the fine nature of Addison which had been slightly
warmed by contact with the generous enthusiasm of Steele. In his
poetical letter to Halifax written during his travels Addison gave the
sum of his prose volume when he told how he felt himself