Excerpt from Macaulay's Essay on Addison IN this famous Essay a great English man of letters gives us his help towards the study of one of his predecessors. He places at our service his wonderful memory, his power of marshalling facts and details in array, his skill in story-telling, his own never-failing interest in the story he has to tell. The Essay is well worth reading because it was Macaulay that wrote it. It is also worthy of study because it is about Addison - the dear parson in the tye-wig, as Thackeray called him, because, without assuming the dress of a clergyman, he became, in his gentle humorous way, a preacher of morals to his age - one of the most loveable characters among literary men, and one of the greatest writers of English prose. Again, it deserves to be studied because it tells us so much about a most interesting period, the age of Queen Anne, the age of the famous London coffee-houses, when English politics and English literature were more closely connected than they have ever been before or Since. But the best way of appreciating Macaulay's Essay and understanding his enthusiasm for Addison is to read some of Addison's own essays and especially the delight ful Coverley papers in the Spectator. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.