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9 unusual facts about Joseph Addison


Addison, Maine

Addison was named by the first settlers along the Pleasant River, after British essayist and poet Joseph Addison, who lived from 1672 to 1719.

Barring out

Dr. Samuel Johnson reports a story that Joseph Addison, when a schoolboy, was the ringleader of a barring out at his school.

Bilton Hall

The house was generally occupied by junior members of the Boughton family and was sold by Edward Boughton in 1711 to the essayist and poet Joseph Addison, who wrote his book Evidences of Christianity while living there.

Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot

The poem includes character sketches of "Atticus" (Joseph Addison) and "Sporus" (John Hervey).

Joy to Great Caesar

D'Urfey's friend Joseph Addison later claimed that the success of the song so damaged the political prospects of the Whigs that they never recovered during the reign of Charles II, and that by using the music of the Catholic composer Farinelli for his anti-Catholic lyrics, D'Urfey had turned a considerable part of the Pope's music against himself.

Paragraph

For example, the following excerpt from Dr. Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, the first sentence is the main idea: that Joseph Addison is a skilled "describer of life and manners".

Princess Elizabeth of Great Britain

I saw her act in "Cato" at eight years old, (when she could not stand alone, but was forced to lean against the side-scene,) better than any of her brothers and sisters.

Sirenum scopuli

"The Sirenum Scopuli are sharp rocks that stand about a stone's throw from the south side of the island" of Capri, was Joseph Addison's confident identification.

The Pleasures of the Imagination

The ideas were largely borrowed from Joseph Addison's essays on the imagination in the Spectator and from Lord Shaftesbury.


Luigi Cornaro

They are written, says Joseph Addison, in the early eighteenth-century periodical The Spectator (No. 195), "with such a spirit of cheerfulness, religion and good sense, as are the natural concomitants of temperance and sobriety." He died at Padua at age 98.

Pakington family

Their grandson, Sir John, the 4th baronet (1671–1727) was a pronounced high Tory and was very prominent in political life; for long he was regarded as the original of Joseph Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley, but the reasons for this supposition are now regarded as inadequate.

The History of Henry Esmond

Esmond meets many of the celebrated English writers of the day, such as Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.


see also