When all your mercies, O my God

As a hymnwriter, Joseph Addison has a higher ‘success-rate’ than almost anyone (except possibly the author of 391); he wrote few texts, but all have been widely appreciated, published and sung. He became famous as a contributor to The Spectator, and this text concluded an essay on gratitude in 453, for 9 Aug 1712, when Watts’ early work (which he admired) was scarcely established: ‘There is not a more pleasing Exercise of the Mind than Gratitude … If gratitude is due from Man to Man, how much more from Man to his Maker! Every blessing we enjoy, by what means soever it may be derived upon us, is the gift of him who is the great Author of good and Father of mercies’. The original had 13 stzs; John Wesley was probably the first editor to recognise, abbreviate and alter it, in his 1737 Collection in Charlestown; even those preferring strict Scripture paraphrase made an exception for this hymn. In this case, the drawback of shortening what was written as a poem is that we inevitably lose its systematic plan. Most editors now agree on selecting 5 or 6 stzs; Praise! selects the original 1, 5, 10, 11 and 13. Those beginning ‘When in the slippery paths of youth’ and ‘When worn with sickness …’ are omitted here; so is ‘Through hidden dangers, toils and deaths [cf Amazing grace, 772!]/ it gently clear’d my way;/ and through the pleasing snares of vice,/ more to be feared than they’. 5.3 is borrowed from George Herbert’s King of glory, King of peace (from 1633); 1.3–4, in turn, are used by Wesley for the end of Love divine (714, from 1747). Changes adopted from ‘Jubilate’ include ‘blessings’ for ‘comforts’ (stz 2), and the new 4.1 for ‘Through every period of my life’. But in stz 1, Praise! prefers ‘enraptured’ to Jubilate’s ‘uplifted’ or Addison’s ‘transported’, and retains ‘my rising soul’, as also the ‘O!’ of the penultimate line. All in all, gratitude is the mark of a Christian, who distinguishes ‘only between those occasions when [it] is a simple pleasure, and when it is a fortifying discipline’—Routley.

CONTEMPLATION, though composed over a century later, seems the tune for which the text was waiting; cf 247, 260 etc. Frederick Ouseley composed it for these words, with which it appeared in the 1889 A&M Supplement in the year of his death. The name reflects the mood, notably of stz 1.

b Milston, nr Amesbury, Wilts 1672, d Kensington, Middx (W London) 1719. Charterhouse Sch; Queen’s and Magdalen Coll Oxford (BA/MA, later Fellow of Magdalen). He was a classical scholar whose Lat poems attracted Dryden’s attention. From 1699 to 1703 he travelled widely in Europe. As a son of the Dean of Lichfield he was intended originally for ordination, but devoted himself instead to law and politics, and later to journalism and literature, with success in each case. An MP from 1708 onwards, he became an Under-Sec of State; Sec to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1710; Chief Sec of State for Ireland, 1711. That year saw the first number of the Spectator magazine which he founded and promoted with his former school friend Richard Steele; he also wrote for The Tatler, The Guardian and The Freeholder. As a minor dramatist he wrote a successful political tragedy Cato and a failed comedy. Renowned more for his prose than for his verse, he gained the famous approbation of Dr Johnson in 1781 (Lives of the Poets): ‘Whoever wishes to attain an English style familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison’. To a lady who complained of his sparse conversation, he said, ‘Madam, I have but ninepence in ready money, but I can draw for a thousand pounds’; this is one of many references to him in Boswell’s 1791 classic The Life of Samuel Johnson.

But he gains a place in the latest Oxford Book of English Verse (1999) with his version of part of Ps 19 which appears in many traditional hymn-books (some two dozen of those currently available), The spacious firmament on high. The 5 hymns attributed to Addison all appeared in the Spectator between July and Oct 1712; one is a ‘Travellers’ Psalm’ with the lines, ‘In foreign realms and lands remote,/ supported by thy care,/ through burning climes they pass unhurt,/ and breathe in tainted air’. Julian gives much space to defending his genuine authorship. Addison also helped to re-instate respect for the popular traditional ballad, and he so opposed any signs of coarseness in public taste that he has been anachronistically dubbed ‘the first Victorian’. He retired from public office in 1718. Montgomery said of his hymns what is not said of many, that ‘It is only to be regretted that they are not more in number’. But qualifying his ‘only’, he then added, ‘and that the God of grace, as well as the God of providence, is not more distinctly recognised in them’. No.263.