Critical Appreciations V: Joseph Addison, Pax Gulielmi Auspiciis Europae Reddita, 1697, Lines 96–132 and 167–End

Abstract

The following text and translation is extracted from Joseph Addison's Pax Gulielmi Auspiciis Europae Reddita, 1697 (lines 96–132 and 167–end). The poem celebrates the peace of Ryswick in which William III and his continental allies had halted the territorial ambitions of Louis XIV, and France had recognized William as King of England. The poem describes, in general terms, William's unification of the allied forces against France, the siege warfare which distinguished the campaigns, and the coming again of agricultural prosperity to war-ravaged Europe. The first extract begins with William's return to England. The omitted lines describe the young William, Dukeof Gloucester, the eldest son of the future Queen Anne, and a firework display in London. The Duke of Gloucester shortly died, and the death of the King himself in 1702 coincided with the outbreak of even fiercer war to prevent the potential unification of the thrones of France and Spain (the War of the Spanish Succession) in which Louis XIV returnedto the support of Jacobite claims to the English crown.

Addison's Forgotten Poetic Response to Paradise Lost: “Milton's Stile Imitated, in a Translation of a Story out of the Third Aeneid” (1704): an Edited Text with Annotation and Commentary

“…Addison availed himself of this license in his neo‐Latin poems which re‐appropriate the Georgics and the Aeneid in particular in an “exuberant” and often “parodic” or “mock‐heroic” fashion, as “the medium for modern descriptions of fireworks displays, or puppet‐shows in late seventeenth‐century London, or the mechanics of such inventions as the barometer, or … the toy soldiers with which a young prince William plays as though in imitation of his father's real military exploits” (Haan 11‐14). In a superb account of two passages from Pax Gulielmi Auspiciis Europae Reddita, 1697 , R. D. Williams and Malcolm Kelsall celebrate Addison's “ability to use passages from Latin literature for his own purposes,” noting his habit of “recalling the contexts of his sources” for boldly transformative ends, his occasionally “extraordinary and perverse way of alluding” (51, 56).…”