Magdalene College, Oxford. Of his three sisters two died young, the
other married twice, her first husband being a French refugee minister
who became a Prebendary of Westminster. Of this sister of Addison's,
Swift said she was 'a sort of wit, very like him. I was not fond of her.'


In the latter years of the seventeenth century, when Steele and Addison
were students at Oxford, most English writers were submissive to the new
strength of the critical genius of France. But the English nation had
then newly accomplished the great Revolution that secured its liberties,
was thinking for itself, and calling forth the energies of writers who
spoke for the people and looked to the people for approval and support.
A new period was then opening, of popular influence on English
literature. They were the young days of the influence now full grown,
then slowly getting strength and winning the best minds away from an
imported Latin style adapted to the taste of patrons who sought credit
for nice critical discrimination. In 1690 Addison had been three years,
Steele one year, at Oxford. Boileau was then living, fifty-four years
old; and Western Europe was submissive to his sway as the great monarch
of literary criticism. Boileau was still living when Steele published
his 'Tatler', and died in the year of the establishment of the
'Spectator'. Boileau, a true-hearted man, of genius and sense, advanced
his countrymen from the nice weighing of words by the Precieuses and the
grammarians, and by the French Academy, child of the intercourse between
those ladies and gentlemen. He brought ridicule on the inane politeness
of a style then in its decrepitude, and bade the writers of his time
find models in the Latin writers who, like Virgil and Horace, had
brought natural thought and speech to their perfection. In the preceding
labour for the rectifying of the language, preference had been given to
French words of Latin origin. French being one of those languages in