From “English Humorists.”

SHORTLY before the Boyne was fought, and young Swift had begun to make acquaintance with English court manners and English servitude, in Sir William Temple’s family, another Irish youth was brought to learn his humanities at the old school of Charterhouse, near Smithfield; to which foundation he had been appointed by James, Duke of Ormond, a governor of the House, and a patron of the lad’s family. The boy was an orphan, and described, twenty years after, with a sweet pathos and simplicity, some of the earliest recollections of a life which was destined to be checkered by a strange variety of good and evil fortune.

  I am afraid no good report could be given by his masters and ushers of that thick-set, square-faced, black-eyed, soft-hearted little Irish boy. He was very idle. He was whipped deservedly a great number of times. Though he had very good parts of his own, he got other boys to do his lessons for him, and only took just as much trouble as should enable him to scuffle through his exercises, and by good fortune escape the flogging block. One hundred and fifty years after, I have myself inspected, but only as an amateur, that instrument of righteous torture still existing, and in occasional use, in a secluded private apartment of the old Charterhouse School; and have no doubt it is the very counterpart, if not the ancient and interesting machine itself, at which poor Dick Steele submitted himself to the tormentors.

  Besides being very kind, lazy, and good-natured, this boy went invariably into debt with the tart woman; ran out of bounds, and entered into pecuniary, or rather promissory engagements with the neighboring lollipop vendors and pie men—exhibited an early fondness and capacity for drinking mum and sack, and borrowed from all his comrades who had money to lend. I have no sort of authority for the statements here made of Steele’s early life; but if the child is father of the man, the father of young Steele of Merton, who left Oxford without taking a degree, and entered the Life Guards—the father of Capt. Steele of Lucas’s Fusiliers, who got his company through the patronage of my Lord Cutts—the father of Mr. Steele, the Commissioner of Stamps, the editor of the Gazette, the Tatler, and Spectator, the expelled Member of Parliament, and the author of “The Tender Husband” and “The Conscious Lovers”; if man and boy resembled each other, Dick Steele the schoolboy must have been one of the most generous, good-for-nothing, amiable little creatures that ever conjugated the verb tupto, I beat; tuptomai, I am whipped, in any school in Great Britain.

  Almost every gentleman who does me the honor to hear me will remember that the very greatest character which he has seen in the course of his life, and the person to whom he has looked up with the greatest wonder and reverence, was the head boy at his school. The schoolmaster himself hardly inspires such an awe. The head boy construes as well as the schoolmaster himself. When he begins to speak the hall is hushed, and every little boy listens. He writes off copies of Latin verses as melodiously as Virgil. He is good-natured, and, his own masterpieces achieved, pours out other copies of verses for other boys with an astonishing ease and fluency; the idle ones only trembling lest they should be discovered on giving in their exercises, and whipped because their poems were too good. I have seen great men in my time, but never such a great one as that head boy of my childhood; we all thought he must be Prime Minister, and I was disappointed on meeting him in after-life to find he was no more than six feet high.

  Dick Steele, the Charterhouse-gown boy, contracted such an admiration in the years of his childhood, and retained it faithfully through his life. Through the school and through the world, whithersoever his strange fortune led this erring, wayward, affectionate creature, Joseph Addison was always his head boy. Addison wrote his exercises. Addison did his best themes. He ran on Addison’s messages, fagged for him and blacked his shoes: to be in Joe’s company was Dick’s greatest pleasure; and he took a sermon or a caning from his monitor with the most boundless reverence, acquiescence, and affection.