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During the session of Parliament which commenced in November 1709, and which the impeachment of Sacheverell has made memorable, Addison appears to have resided in London, The Tatler was now more popular than any periodical paper had ever been; and his connection with it was generally known. It was not known, however, that almost everything good in the Tatler was his.

The Commons made other endeavours to carry the Act in a modified form, and with milder penalties; a somewhat unscrupulous minority made an attempt to tack it to a money bill, and so effect their purpose by a manoeuvre. The Sacheverell episode fanned the strange excitement that prevailed.

In the first, Johnson is represented as hardly more than a baby, bestriding an old man's shoulders, resting his chin on the bald head which he embraces with his little arms, and listening earnestly to the High-Church eloquence of Dr. Sacheverell. In the second tablet, he is seen riding to school on the shoulders of two of his comrades, while another boy supports him in the rear.

Sacheverell. Nor has the book lived merely by its gorgeous rhetoric and high emotions, though these have been contributing elements.

It will be readily understood that the theory of absolute obedience, preached by Sacheverell and adopted by certain Tories, was more consonant with the Queen's taste than the maxims of the Whigs, who asserted the dogma of the sovereignty of nations and recognised their right of insurrection against royalty.

He still remembered with bitterness the unreasonable and vindictive conduct of the Convention Parliament at the close of 1689 and the beginning of 1690; and he shrank from the thought of being entirely in the hands of the men who had obstructed the Bill of Indemnity, who had voted for the Sacheverell clause, who had tried to prevent him from taking the command of his army in Ireland, and who had called him an ungrateful tyrant merely because he would not be their slave and their hangman.

Sacheverell, as what he foresaw was likely to end in their ruin; that he blamed the rough demeanour of some persons to the Queen, as a great failure in prudence; and that, when it appeared Her Majesty was firmly resolved upon a treaty of peace, he advised his friends not to oppose it in its progress, but find fault with it after it was made; which would be a copy of the like usage themselves had met with, after the treaty of Ryswick; and the safest, as well as the most probable, way of disgracing the promoters and advisers.

He begins his speech by a reference to the opinion of his fellow-managers, which he hoped had put beyond all doubt the limits and qualifications that the Commons had placed to their doctrines concerning the Revolution; yet, not satisfied with this general reference, after condemning the principle of non-resistance, which is asserted in the sermon without any exception, and stating, that, under the specious pretence of preaching a peaceable doctrine, Sacheverell and the Jacobites meant, in reality, to excite a rebellion in favor of the Pretender, he explicitly limits his ideas of resistance with the boundaries laid down by his colleagues, and by Mr.

The speeches for the prosecution in the trial of Sacheverell were almost wholesale adaptations of his teaching; and even the accused counsel admitted the legality of James' deposition in his speech for the defence. More valuable testimony is not wanting. In the Spectator, on six separate occasions, Addison speaks of him as one whose possession is a national glory.

Sacheverell having insinuated that a great and essential alteration in the Constitution had been wrought by the Revolution, Sir Joseph Jekyl is so strong on this point, that he takes fire even at the insinuation of his being of such an opinion. Sir Joseph Jekyl.