1719 On his deathbed, literary legend has it, Joseph Addison summoned his dissolute stepson, Warwick, to witness how ‘a Christian can die’. The cause of death was asthma, complicated by dropsy. He was 47 years old. The setting was comfortable and dignified – Holland House, Kensington.
Addison had, his biographer records, ‘studied attentively the deaths of Augustus, Socrates, Petronius Arbiter, Seneca, Cato and Sir Thomas More’. In various essays he had defined the ideal exit as a dignified combination of classical stoicism and Christian humility, and like the ‘winding up of a well-written play’. Addison has the hero declare, in his excessively well-written play, Cato (1712):
How beautiful is death, when earn’d by virtue!
Who would not be that youth? What pity is it
That we can die but once to serve our country!
Alexander Pope professed to find Addison’s ostentatiously vaunted ‘virtue’, and his life- (and death-) long habit of gathering acolytes around him to admire that Addisonian quality, stomach-turning (nor did he much like that pompous Cato play). He duly satirised the other writer as ‘Atticus’ in the ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, as a prig on a self-erected throne, who would,
Like Cato, give his little senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause;
It was typical that Addison would want applause as he breathed his last, expiring to the sound of sycophantic, but decently muted, clapping from his faithful claque.
The anecdote about deathbeds and dissolute stepsons is wholly Addisonian (or Atticus-like, if one is feeling catty) but, alas, ‘of dubious authority’, as beautiful literary anecdotes most often are. According to the sardonic Horace Walpole: ‘unluckily Addison died of brandy – nothing makes a Christian die in peace like being maudlin.’
Addison’s body, after lying in state, was interred in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.
Thomas Tickell (whose career in politics and poetry had benefited from Addison’s patronage) felt the poetic community had been somewhat remiss in not showering Addison’s passing with elegiac verse, and wrote a poem delicately censorious of his fellow versifiers:
To the Earl of Warwick, on the Death of Mr. Addison
If, dumb too long, the drooping Muse hath stay’d,
And left her debt to Addison unpaid;
Blame not her silence, Warwick, but bemoan,
And judge, oh judge, my bosom by your own.
What mourner ever felt poetic fires!
Slow comes the verse that real woe inspires:
Grief unaffected suits but ill with art,
Or flowing numbers with a bleeding heart.
Pope, who disliked Tickell as much as he did Addison, was not moved to elegise.