Still, I could have told the Spectator who was anxious
to make money, where he might have been sure of a distant sale, though
returns would have been slow, viz., at Oxford and Cambridge. We know from
Milton that old Hobson delivered his parcels pretty regularly eighty years
before 1710. And, one generation before _that_, it is plain, by the
interesting (though somewhat Jacobinical) letters [5] of Joseph Mede, the
commenter on the Apocalypse, that news and politics of one kind or other
(and scandal of _every_ kind) found out for themselves a sort of
contraband lungs to breathe through between London and Cambridge; not
quite so regular in their _systole_ and _diastole_ as the tides of ebb and
flood, but better than nothing. If you consigned a packet into the proper
hands on the 1st of May, 'as sure as death' to speak _Scottice_, it would
be delivered within sixty miles of the capital before mid-summer. Still
there were delays; and these forced a man into carving his world out of
London. That excuses the word _town_.
Inexcusable, however, were many other forms of expression in those days,
which argued cowardly feelings. One would like to see a searching
investigation into the state of society in Anne's days--its extreme
artificiality, its sheepish reserve upon all the impassioned grandeurs,
its shameless outrages upon all the decencies of human nature. Certain it
is, that Addison (because everybody) was in that meanest of conditions
which blushes at any expression of sympathy with the lovely, the noble, or
the impassioned.
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