Addison, though less open to the onslaughts of the conventional moralist, was a less lovable personality.

Constitutionally endowed with little vitality, he suffered mentally as well as bodily from languor and lassitude.

His lack of enthusiasm, his cold-blooded formalism, caused comment even in an age which prided itself in self-command and decorum.
His very malevolence proceeded from a flaccidity which meanly envied the activities and enthusiasms of other men.

As a writer he was superficial; he had not the requisite energy for forming a clear or profound judgment on any question of difficulty; Johnson's comment, "He thinks justly but he thinks faintly" sums up the truth about him.

His good qualities were of a slighter kind than Swift's; he was a quiet and accurate observer of manners and fashions in life and conversation, and he had the gift of a style--what Johnson calls "The Middle Style"-- very exactly suited to the kind of work on which he was habitually engaged, "always equable, always easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences" but polished, lucid, and urbane.
Steele and Addison were conscious moralists as well as literary men.
They desired to purge society from Restoration licences; to their efforts we must credit the alteration in morality which _The School for Scandal_ shows over _The Way of the World_.