The two great authors
make a striking contrast. Swift, misanthropic, miserable, bitter;
Addison, happy, loving mankind, admired alike by ally and opponent,
Swift, dying mad; Addison, calm, conscious, employing his last moments
to ask pardon of one he had offended. The same contrast is in their
works. Swift dwelt and gloated on the evil about him, exposed it in
more than its own deformity, and left his reader to reflect on his own
degradation. Addison, to whom that evil was almost equally apparent,
but who turned from its contemplation with horror, exerted all his
talents to correct it. "The great and only end of these speculations,"
he tells the reader of the _Spectator_, "is to banish vice and
ignorance out of the territories of Great Britain."
With solemn reproof and delicate raillery, Addison urged women to lay
aside coarseness and folly, and preached against the licentiousness,
swearing, gambling, duelling, and drunkenness of the men. He attacked
with both argument and ridicule the idea so prevalent since the
Restoration, that vice was necessarily associated with pleasure and
elegance, virtue with Puritanism and vulgarity. To teach people to be
witty without being indecent, gay without being vicious, such was the
object of Addison. As M. Taine says, he made morality fashionable.
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