It is proper, however, to remark that Miss Aikin has committed the error, very pardonable in a lady, of overrating Addison's classical attainments.In one department of learning, indeed, his proficiency was such as it is hardly possible to overrate.His knowledge of the Latin poets, from Lucretius and Catullus down to Claudian and Prudentius, was singularly exact and profound.He understood them thoroughly, entered into their spirit, and had the finest and most discriminating perception of all their peculiarities of style and melody; nay, he copied their manner with admirable skill, and surpassed, we think, all their British imitators who had preceded him, Buchanan and Milton alone excepted.This is high praise; and beyond this we cannot with justice go.It is clear that Addison's serious attention during his residence at the university, was almost entirely concentrated on Latin poetry, and that, if he did not wholly neglect other provinces of ancient literature, he vouchsafed to them only a cursory glance.He does not appear to have attained more than an ordinary acquaintance with the political and moral writers of Rome; nor was his own Latin prose by any means equal to his Latin Verse.His knowledge of Greek, though doubtless such as was, in his time, thought respectable at Oxford, was evidently less than that which many lads now carry away every year from Eton and Rugby.A minute examination of his works, if we had time to make such an examination, would fully bear out these remarks.We will briefly advert to a few of the facts on which our judgment is grounded.
Great praise is due to the Notes which Addison appended to his version of the second and third books of the Metamorphoses.Yet those notes, while they show him to have been, in his own domain, an accomplished scholar, show also how confined that domain was.
They are rich in apposite references to Virgil, Statius, and Claudian; but they contain not a single illustration drawn from the Greek poets.Now, if, in the whole compass of Latin literature, there be a passage which stands in need of illustration drawn from the Greek poets, it is the story of Pentheus in the third book of the Metamorphoses.Ovid was indebted for that story to Euripides and Theocritus, both of whom he has sometimes followed minutely.But neither to Euripides nor to Theocritus does Addison make the faintest allusion; and we, therefore, believe that we do not wrong him by supposing that he had little or no knowledge of their works.
His travels in Italy, again, abound with classical quotations happily introduced; but scarcely one of those quotations is in prose.He draws more illustrations from Ausonius and Manilius than from Cicero.Even his notions of the political and military affairs of the Romans seem to be derived from poets and poetasters.Spots made memorable by events which have changed the destinies of the world, and which have been worthily recorded by great historians, bring to his mind only scraps of some ancient versifier.In the gorge of the Apennines he naturally remembers the hardships which Hannibal's army endured, and proceeds to cite, not the authentic narrative of Polybius, not the picturesque narrative of Livy, but the languid hexameters of Silius Italicus.On the banks of the Rubicon he never thinks of Plutarch's lively description, or of the stern conciseness of the Commentaries, or of those letters to Atticus which so forcibly express the alternations of hope and fear in a sensitive mind at a great crisis.His only authority for the events of the civil war is Lucan.
All the best ancient works of art at Rome and Florence are Greek.
Addison saw them, however, without recalling one single verse of Pindar, of Callimachus, or of the Attic dramatists; but they brought to his recollection innumerable passages of Horace, Juvenal, Statius, and Ovid.
The same may be said of the Treatise on Medals.In that pleasing work we find about three hundred passages extracted with great judgment from the Roman poets; but we do not recollect a single passage taken from any Roman orator or historian; and we are confident that not a line is quoted from any Greek writer.No person, who had derived all his information on the subject of medals from Addison, would suspect that the Greek coins were in historical interest equal, and in beauty of execution far superior to those of Rome.
If it were necessary to find any further proof that Addison's classical knowledge was confined within narrow limits, that proof would be furnished by his Essay on the Evidences of Christianity.
The Roman poets throw little or no light on the literary and historical questions which he is under the necessity of examining in that Essay.He is, therefore, left completely in the dark; and it is melancholy to see how helplessly he gropes his way from blunder to blunder.He assigns, as grounds for his religious belief, stories as absurd as that of the Cock-Lane ghost, and forgeries as rank as Ireland's Vortigern, puts faith in the lie about the Thundering Legion, is convinced that Tiberius moved the senate to admit Jesus among the gods, and pronounces the letter of Abgarus King of Edessa to be a record of great authority.Nor were these errors the effects of superstition; for to superstition Addison was by no means prone.The truth is that he was writing about what he did not understand.