Meditation in Westminster Abbey by Joseph Addison (Summary)

 

Meditation

in Westminster Abbey

by Joseph Addison

(Summary)

  

Joseph Addison was the essayist of ‘the age of Pope’. The general characteristics of the age are:

·      The rise of political parties

·      Clubs and coffee houses

·      New publishing houses

·      The rise of middle class and

·      The new morality

The literary characteristics of the age are:

·      An age of prose and reason

·      Satire

·      Classic age and

·      The literature of the town.

Joseph Addison has contributed to the English essay very much. In his essays there is a kind of social criticism and satire. He is a humorist but his humor is impartial and noble. He is an essayist, moralist, philosopher and a critic.

In this essay he wants to express that he can improve himself with those objects, which others consider with terror.

In the essay he says, that he passes his time by digging the graves, when he is in serious mood. When he looks at the graves of two dates on them – the date of birth and of death, he considers the grave as the satire on the departed person. He says, that the soldiers are given sounding names in the heroic poems only because they may be killed.

When the essayist wonders in the Westminster Abbey, he finds, that how men and women, friends and enemies and other people of opposite groups are lying together in the same common mass. He finds, that some of the epitaphs are extravagant while the others are so modest, that they are written either in Greek or in Hebrew, and are not understood once in the 12 months. According to the essayist, a foreigner is very apt to conceive an idea of the ignorance or the politeness of a nation, form the turn of their public monuments. The essayist considers Dutch people far more superior to the English people in the field of building monuments.

Addison says, that inscriptions are answerable to the monuments. The inscriptions should be submitted to the perusal of learned people before they are put in execution. The essayist knows that wondering in the graveyard may raise dark and dismal thoughts in timorous minds but he can improve himself, because while reading the different epitaphs, emotions of envy and of inordinate desires goes out from him and he considers the great day when all the people will be contemporaries.