Addison’s prose has been highly praised by one critic after another. Dr. Johnson emphasizes the different elements in Addison’s prose. It has the ease and genial intimacy of conversation so necessary for a journalist. It has the personal note and easy familiarity of Lamb or Hazlitt, Out it is singularly free from all that is vulgar, colloquial or slang.
It is familiar, but not coarse. It is refined, polished, elegant, and finely chiseled, but it is not Latinized, involved and heavily ornamented, like the prose of his predecessors. It steers a middle course between the two extremes and is perfectly suited as a medium of social communication. Addison’s style is light, direct, simple and clear-virtues which his predecessors lacked, despite their superior eloquence and higher flights.