Addison by Virginia Woolf

In July, 1843, Lord Macaulay pronounced the opinion that Joseph Addison / had enriched our literature with compositions "that will live as long as / the English language". But when Lord Macaulay pronounced an opinion it / was not merely an opinion. Even now, at a distance of seventy-six years, / the words seem to issue from the mouth of the chosen representative of / the people. There is an authority about them, a sonority, a sense of / responsibility, which put us in mind of a Prime Minister making a / proclamation on behalf of a great empire rather than of a journalist / writing about a deceased man of letters for a magazine. The article upon / Addison is, indeed, one of the most vigorous of the famous essays. / Florid, and at the same time extremely solid, the phrases seem to build / up a monument, at once square and lavishly festooned with ornament, / which should serve Addison for shelter so long as one stone of / Westminster Abbey stands upon another. Yet, though we may have read and / admired this particular essay times out of number (as we say when we / have read anything three times over), it has never occurred to us, / strangely enough, to believe that it is true. That is apt to happen to / the admiring reader of Macaulay's essays. While delighting in their / richness, force, and variety, and finding every judgement, however / emphatic, proper in its place, it seldom occurs to us to connect these / sweeping assertions and undeniable convictions with anything so minute / as a human being.[7]

So it is with Addison. "If we wish", Macaulay writes, / "to find anything more vivid than Addison's best portraits, we must go / either to Shakespeare or to Cervantes". "We have not the least doubt / that if Addison had written a novel on an extensive plan it would have / been superior to any that we possess. " His essays, again, "fully entitle / him to the rank of a great poet"; and, to complete the edifice, we have / Voltaire proclaimed "the prince of buffoons", and together with Swift / forced to stoop so low that Addison takes rank above them both as a / humorist.