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After the first year the daily issue amounted to fourteen thousand copies. Addison introduced the “Answers to Correspondents” scheme.

He has had many imitators along this line, some of whom yet endure, but they are not Addisons.

An imitation of the “Spectator” was started as a daily in New York in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-eight. In one week it ran short on phosphorus and was obliged to quit. It took two years for Steele and Addison to write themselves out, and rather than let the quality of the periodical decline they discontinued its publication, quitting like the wise men they were at the height of their success.

* * * * *

When Addison’s tragedy of “Cato” was produced in Seventeen Hundred Thirteen, he occupied the first place in English letters. The play was a dazzling success; and it is a great play yet. It lives as literature among the best things men have ever done–a masterpiece!

Addison still continued in the service of the State, and wrote more or less in a political way. The strain of carrying on the “Spectator” and the stress of political affairs had tired the man. The spring had gone out of his intellect, and he began to talk of some quiet retreat in the country. In Seventeen Hundred Sixteen, in his forty-fourth year, he married the Countess of Warwick, a widow of fifteen years’ standing. We have reason to believe that the worthy widow did the courting and literally took our good man captive. He was depressed and worn, and longed for rest and gentle, sympathetic companionship. She promised all these–the buxom creature–and married him, taking him to her home at Holland House. Yes, it would be unjust to blame her; doubtless she wished to do for the man what was best; and so report has it that she exercised a discipline over his hours of work and recreation and curtailed a little there and issued orders here, until the poor patient rebelled and fled to the coffeehouses. There he found the rollicking society that he so despised–and loved, for there was comradeship in it, and comradeship was what he prayed for. His wife did not comprehend that delicate, spiritual quality of his heart: that craving for sympathy which came after he had given out so much. He wanted peace, quiet and rest; but she wished to take him forth and exhibit him to the throng. Yet all of her admonitions that he “brace up” were in vain. His work was done. He foresaw the end, and grew impatient that it did not come. Placid, resigned, sane to the last hour, he passed away at Holland House, June Seventeenth, Seventeen Hundred Nineteen, aged forty-seven. His body, lying in state, was viewed by more than ten thousand people, and then it was laid to rest in the Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.