Born, in Dublin, March 1672. Early education at Charterhouse, Nov. 1684 to Nov. 1689. Matric., Ch. Ch., Oxford, 13 March 1690; Postmaster Merton Coll., 1691. Left Oxford, 1694. Took no degree. Entered the army, 1695. Priv. Sec. to Lord Cutts, 1696–97. Commission in the Guards, 1697. Play, “The Funeral,” produced at Drury Lane, Dec. 1701; “The Lying Lover,” Dec. 1703; “The Tender Husband,” April 1705. Married (i) Mrs. Margaret Stretch, 1705. Gentleman-Waiter to Prince George of Denmark, Aug. 1706 to Oct. 1708. Wife died, Dec. 1706. Gazetteer, May 1707 to Oct. 1710. Married (ii) Mary Scurlock, Sept. 1707. Contrib. to “The Muses Mercury,” 1707; to “Spectator,” March 1711 to Dec. 1714; to “Guardian,” March to Oct. 1713; to “The Englishman,” Oct. 1713 to Nov. 1715. Commissioner of Stamp Office, Jan. 1710 to June 1713. M.P. for Stockbridge, 1713; expelled from House of Commons on account of passages in writings, 1714. Surveyor of Royal Stables at Hampton Court, 1714. Lieutenant for County of Middlesex, and J.P., 1714. Governor of Royal Company of Comedians, 1715–20. Knighted, 1715. M.P. for Boroughbridge, 1715. Commissioner of Forfeited Estates in Scotland, 1715. Edited “The Theatre” (under pseud. “Sir John Edgar”), Jan. to April 1720. M.P. for Wendover, March 1722. Comedy, “The Conscious Lovers,” produced at Drury Lane, Nov. 1722. Later years spent in retirement, mainly in Wales. Died at Carmarthen, 1 Sept. 1729. Works: “The Procession” (anon.), 1695; “The Christian Hero,” 1701; “The Funeral,” 1702; “The Lying Lover,” 1704; “The Tender Husband,” 1705; “Letter to Dr. Sacheverell” (under pseud. “Isaac Bickerstaff”), 1709; “The Tatler” (under pseud. “Isaac Bickerstaff,” 4 vols.), 1709–11; Contributions to “The Spectator,” 1711–14; to “The Guardian,” 1713; to “The Englishman,” 1713–15; “The Importance of Dunkirk Considered,” 1713; “The Englishman’s Thanks to the Duke of Marlborough” (anon.), 1712; “The Crisis,” 1713; “Letter to the Tongue-loosed Doctor” (under pseud. “Isaac Bickerstaff”), 1713; “Speech on the proposal of Sir T. Hanmer for Speaker,” 1714; “Letter to a Member of Parliament,” 1714; “Apology for Himself and his Writings,” 1714; “A Defence for drinking to the pious memory of K. Charles I.,” 1714; “Romish Ecclesiastical History of Late Years,” 1714; “Letter from the Earl of Mar to the King,” 1715; “The Lover; to which is added, the Reader,” 1715; “Political Writings,” 1715; “Town-Talk” (9 nos.), 1715–16; “Chit-Chat” (under pseud. “Humphrey Philroye”), 1716; “The British Subjects’ Answer to the Pretender’s Declaration,” 1716; “Speech for Repealing of the Triennial Act,” 1716; “The Tea Table,” 1716; “An Account of the Fish-Pool” (with J. Gilmore), 1718; “Letter to the Earl of O——d,” 1719; “The Spinster,” 1719; “The Antidote” (2 nos.; anon.), 1719; “Inquiry into the Manner of Creating Peers” (anon.), 1719; “The Plebeian” (anon.), 1719; “The Theatre” (under pseud. “Sir John Edgar”), 1720; “The Crisis of Poverty,” 1720; “A Nation a Family,” 1720; “The D——n of W——r still the same” (anon.), 1720; “State of the Case between the Lord Chamberlain, etc.,” 1720; “The Conscious Lovers,” 1723; “Dramatick Works, 1723; “Woods’ Melancholly Complaint” (anon.), 1725. Posthumous: “Epistolary Correspondence,” ed. by J. Nichols, 1787. He translated: Cerri’s “Account of the State of the Roman Catholic Religion,” 1715; and edited: “Poetical Miscellanies,” 1714; “The Ladies’ Library,” 1714. Life: by G. A. Aitken, 1889.

Personal

  On Sunday night last, Captain Keely and one Mr. Steele, an officer of the Guards, fought a duel in Hide-Park, in which the latter was mortally wounded, and some say he is since Dead.

  After the first Bottle he is no disagreeable Companion. I never knew him taxed with Ill-nature, which hath made me wonder how Ingratitude came to be his prevailing Vice; and I am apt to think it proceeds more from some unaccountable sort of Instinct, than Premeditation. Being the most imprudent Man alive, he never follows the Advice of his Friends, but is wholly at the mercy of Fools or Knaves, or hurried away by his own Caprice; by which he hath committed more Absurdities in Oeconomy, Friendship, Love, Duty, good Manners, Politics, Religion and Writing, than ever fell to one Man’s share.

  D’ye see that black beau (stuck up in a pert chariot), thickset, his eyes in his head with hanging eyebrows, broad face, and tallow complexion…. I long to inform myself if that coach be his own…. He is called M. L’Ingrate…. Though he’s a most incorrect writer, he pleases in spight of his faults…. I remember him almost t’other day but a wretched common trooper. He had the luck to write a small poem, and dedicated it to a person he never saw…. His morals were loose.

  Richard Steel, esq., member of parliament, was on Thursday last, about 12 o’clock at night, expelled the house of commons for a roguish pamphlett called “The Crisis,” and for several other pamphletts, in which he hath abused the queen, &c. This Steel was formerly of Christ Church in Oxford, and afterwards of Merton college. He was a rakish, wild, drunken spark; but he got a good reputation by publishing a paper that came out daily, called “The Tatler,” and by another called “The Spectator;” but the most ingenious of these papers were written by Mr. Addison, and Dr. Swift, as ’tis reported. And when these two had left him, he appeared to be a mean, heavy, weak writer, as is sufficiently demonstrated in his papers called “The Guardian,” “The Englishman,” and “The Lover.” He now writes for bread, being involved in debt.

  Sir John Edgar is of a middle stature, broad shoulders, thick legs, a shape like the picture of somebody over a farmer’s chimney—a short chin, a short nose, a short forehead, a broad flat face, and a dusky countenance. Yet with such a face and such a shape, he discovered at sixty that he took himself for a beauty, and appeared to be more mortified at being told that he was ugly, than he was by any reflection made upon his honour or understanding…. He is a gentleman born, witness himself, of very honourable family; certainly of a very ancient one, for his ancestors flourished in Tipperary long before the English ever set foot in Ireland. He has testimony of this more authentic than the Herald’s Office or any human testimony. For God has marked him more abundantly than he did Cain, and stamped his native country on his face, his understanding, his writings, his actions, his passions, and, above all, his vanity. The Hibernian brogue is still upon all these, though long habit and length of days have worn it off his tongue.

  -Sir Richard Steele was a very good-natured man.

  Sir Richard Steele having one day invited to his house a great number of persons of the first quality, they were surprised at the number of liveries which surrounded the table; and after dinner, when wine and mirth had set them free from the observations of a rigid ceremony, one of them inquired of Sir Richard how such an expensive train of domesticks could be consistent with his fortune. Sir Richard very frankly confessed that they were fellows of whom he would willingly be rid. And then, being asked why he did not discharge them, declared that they were bailiffs, who had introduced themselves with an execution, and whom, since he could not send them away, he had thought it convenient to embellish with liveries, that they might do him credit while they staid.

  Our author was a man of the highest benevolence; he celebrates a generous action with a warmth that is only peculiar to a good heart; and however he may be blamed for want of œconomy, &c., yet was he the most agreeable, and if we may be allowed the expression, the most innocent rake that ever trod the rounds of indulgence.

  There was a great similitude between his [Fielding] character and that of Sir Richard Steele. He had the advantage both in learning, and, in my opinion, genius: they both agreed in wanting money in spite of all their friends, and would have wanted it, if their hereditary lands had been as extensive as their imagination.

  I was told he retained his cheerful sweetness of temper to the last; and would often be carried out in a summer’s evening, when the country lads and lasses were assembled at their rural sports, and with his pencil give an order on his agent, the mercer, for a new gown to the best dancer.

  He was one of those whose hearts are the dupes of their imaginations, and who are hurried through life by the most despotic volition. He always preferred his caprices to his interests; or, according to his own notion, very ingenious, but not a little absurd, “he was always of the humour of preferring the state of his mind to that of his fortune.”

  The privilege [expulsion from Parliament] was far more unwarrantably exerted by the opposite party in 1714, against sir Richard Steele, expelled the house for writing “The Crisis,” a pamphlet reflecting on the ministry. This was, perhaps, the first instance wherein the house of commons so identified itself with the executive administration, independently of the sovereign’s person, as to consider itself libelled by those who impugned its measures.

  Steele is said to have behaved to Addison in society with a marked deference, very uncommon and striking between old comrades, equal in age, and nearly so in all things excepting genius and conduct. In private, however, there can be little doubt that they associated together on terms of great familiarity and confidence, and were frequent depositaries of the literary projects of each other.

  He was one of those people whom it is impossible either to hate or to respect. His temper was sweet, his affections warm, his spirits lively, his passions strong, and his principles weak. His life was spent in sinning and repenting, in inculcating what was right, and doing what was wrong. In speculation, he was a man of piety and honour; in practice, he was much of the rake and a little of the swindler. He was, however, so good-natured that it was not easy to be seriously angry with him, and that even rigid moralists felt more inclined to pity than to blame him, when he diced himself into a sponging-house, or drank himself into a fever.

  If there were no worse men in the world than Steele, what a planet we should have of it? Steele knew his own foibles as well as any man. He regretted, and made amends for them, and left posterity a name for which they have reason to thank and love him.

  He had survived much, but neither his cheerful temper nor his kind philosophy. He would be carried out in a summer’s evening, where the country lads and lasses were at their rural sports, and with his pencil give an order on his agent for a new gown to the best dancer. That was the last thing seen of Richard Steele. And the youths and maidens who saw him in his invalid-chair, enfeebled and dying, saw him still as the wits and fine ladies and gentlemen had seen him in his gaiety and youth, when he sat in the chair of Mr. Bickerstaff, creating pleasure for himself by the communication of pleasure to others, and in proportion to the happiness he distributed increasing his own.

  Who has not heard of Sir Richard Steele? Wordsworth says of one of his characters—

	“She was known to every star,
	And every wind that blows.”

Poor Dick was known to every sponging-house, and to every bailiff that, blowing in pursuit, walked the London streets. A fine-hearted, warm-blooded character, without any atom of prudence, self-control, reticence, or forethought; quite as destitute of malice or envy; perpetually sinning and perpetually repenting; never positively irreligious, even when drunk; and often excessively pious when recovering sobriety,—Steele reeled his way through life, and died with the reputation of being an orthodox Christian and a (nearly) habitual drunkard; the most affectionate and most faithless of husbands; a brave soldier, and in many points an arrant fool; a violent politician, and the best natured of men; a writer extremely lively, for this, among other reasons, that he wrote generally on his legs, flying or meditating flight from his creditors; and who embodied in himself the titles of his three principal works—“The Christian Hero,” “The Tender Husband,” and the “Tatler;”—being a “Christian Hero,” in intention, one of those intentions with which a certain place is paved; a “Tender Husband,” if not a true one, to his two ladies; and a “Tatler” to all persons, in all circumstances and at all times.

  From the time of his leaving college without a degree, to the day of his death on the banks of the Towy, at the age of 58, an old man before his time, he was the victim of his own temperament. He was completely incapable of restraining himself. He was genial, good-natured to excess, fond of good society, and, to use the words of Lady Mary W. Montagu, like Fielding, so made for happiness, that it is a pity he was not immortal. But happiness never came. In politics and in the business of life he was equally unsuccessful. Even in affairs of the heart, in which, as might be supposed, he had his share, he does not seem to have prospered. The “perverse” widow (widows, as De Coverley and more of us have experienced, are too often “perverse”) left a wound in his heart that, we suspect, was never quite healed. Indeed, as Charter-house boy, collegian, soldier, lover, pamphleteer, gazetteer, Parliament man, patentee, inventor of fish machines, and father of a family, poor Sir Richard failed to reach the personal success he promised himself. He was a brave adventurer, but he never had the luck to secure a great prize; or, having secured it, he was unable to retain it. And the reason is plain. He failed, as all others have failed who attempted to eat the grape and drink the wine.

  Was it not in this age that loose Dick Steele paid his wife the finest compliment ever paid to woman, when he said “that to love her was a liberal education?”

  That bundle of failings and weaknesses…. It was surface wickedness with Steele entirely: His heart was tender, and his character simple as a child’s.

  He had two wives, whom he loved dearly and treated badly. He hired grand houses, and bought fine horses for which he could never pay. He was often religious, but more often drunk. As a man of letters, other men of letters who followed him, such as Thackeray, could not be very proud of him. But everybody loved him; and he seems to have been the inventor of that flying literature which, with many changes in form and manner, has done so much for the amusement and edification of readers ever since his time.

  Dick Steele may have had many weaknesses and some vices, but we could forgive a good deal of both to a man who could write so tenderly to a woman as he writes to his “dear Prue.”… After marriage Steele’s gayety, his conviviality, and his recklessness about getting into debt; must often have made trouble for Mrs. Steele, and she must have had much cause to reproach him. Yet he almost disarms censure by his penitent acknowledgement of his faults and by his constant affection.

  I am confident that the result of the fuller study of his life, which is now rendered practicable, will be the conviction that, in spite of weaknesses, which are among the most apparent of all those to which mortals are liable, Steele’s character is more attractive and essentially nobler than, perhaps that of any of the greatest of his contemporaries in the world of letters.

  We have a characteristic glimpse of him in his later years—for he lived far down into the days of the Georges (one of whom gave him his knighthood and title)—when he is palsied, at his charming country home in Wales, and totters out to see the village girls dance upon the green, and insists upon sending off to buy a new gown for the best dancer; this was so like him! And it would have been like him to carry his palsied steps straight thereafter to the grave where his Prue and the memory of all his married joys and hopes lay sleeping.

  That Steele was an undetected hypocrite and a sentimental debauchee is now no longer maintained, although it cannot be denied that his will was often weaker than his purpose; that he was constitutionally improvident and impecunious; and that, like many of his contemporaries in that hard-drinking century, he was far too easily seduced by his compliant good-fellowship into excess in wine. “I shall not carry my humility so far as to call myself a vicious man,” he wrote in “Tatler” No. 271, “but must confess my life is at best but pardonable.” When so much is admitted, it is needless to charge the picture, though it may be added that, with all his faults, allowed and imputed, there is abundant evidence to prove that he was not only a doting husband and an affectionate father, but also a loyal friend and an earnest and unselfish patriot.

  Steele was not cast in the heroic mould. He was a man of many weaknesses, inconsistencies—careless, improvident, foolishly sanguine; and easy prey to the temptations of conviviality; often reckless in word and deed. But his personality is none the less a singularly attractive one. He was full of the milk of human kindness. With the defects of his Irish blood, he had its good qualities as well—its warmth, sympathy, buoyant courage. Often as he fell short of his own ideals, he honestly loved what was true, pure, and good. He was a loyal friend and a devoted husband and father. But nowhere is his thorough manliness exhibited more fully than in his chivalrous treatment of women. In that age of coarseness and frivolity, he spoke of them always with genuine admiration and respect; and were there no reason for it but this, we ought to hold his name in kindly remembrance. Other men of his time may make larger claims upon our attention; for none do we conceive so deep an affection. Perhaps our feeling toward him is best illustrated by the fact that, despite the dignity of knighthood bestowed upon him by George I., we still find ourselves constantly thinking and speaking of him as “Dick” Steele.

	Dick Steele, who did so love his wife and friend,
	Who gave to Addison of praise no end,
	And wrote his Prue such tender letters daily
	I like and love. What though he took life gaily
	And sometimes did strict laws of right offend?
	His sins are free from guile. His deeds portend
	No serpent’s craft: he crawls not, is not scaly.
	No faults of his could land him in Old Bailey.
	High spirits and warm heart; a wit as sweet
	As it was shining; courage as high as any;
	And civic virtue, giving to his seat
	In Parliament a fortress for the many—
	Say, are not these a character complete,
	And need we care for wasted pound or penny?

  Steele himself was no model of propriety like Addison. Indeed, he resembled Hogarth’s “bad apprentice” in comparison. He had been a shuttlecock on the battledore of chance. He had dabbled in lotteries, in the philosopher’s stone, in political intrigue, in what you will. He was fond of pleasure and display; he was indiscreet; he was ever falling, and always repenting. Debt, and even dissipation, were his concomitants. But nevertheless he loved his home and humbly adored his God. He was human to the core, in frailty as in generous aspiration. Politics drummed him out of his office, as his patron, Mainwaring, had drummed him in. He was no politician, and in this sphere merely a mouthpiece. He was intemperate in his quarrels, especially with Swift. He lacked self-control. But he was irrepressible and inexhaustible.

The Christian Hero, 1701

  Steele began his career as a writer, with a poem, his “Christian Heroes,” which justified no great expectations. This poem could have little of soul or of nature in it, because the contents stood in a most surprising contradiction with Steele’s scandalous and dissolute course of life.

  Breathes the very spirit of piety.

  One would hardly have looked to him for any early talk about the life of a true Christian Hero. But he did write a book so entitled, in those wild young days, as a sort of kedge anchor, he says, whereby he might haul out from the shoals of the wicked town, and indulge in a sort of contemplative piety. It was and is a very good little book, but it did not hold a bit, as an anchor.

  A manual of ethics; pious, but dull.

  It differs considerably both in style and teaching from the ordinary devotional manual, and without much straining may be said to exhibit definite indications of that faculty for essay-writing which was to be so signally developed in the “Spectator,” in which indeed certain portions of it were afterwards embodied.

The Funeral, 1702

  Nothing can establish a better proof of the admirable merit of this play … than the diligence with which the critics have attempted, to no purpose, to discover that it is not genuine; for the plot and the style are unquestionably the author’s own, and the last is so peculiar, which is indeed the characteristic of Steele’s writings, that nothing can be more difficult to get by heart; but when attached to the memory, nothing can be more easy to retain…. Every thing is perfectly in nature, and the moral is complete.

  Very sprightly and pleasant throughout, it was full of telling hits at lawyers and undertakers, and, with a great many laughable incidents, and no laugh raised at the expense of virtue or decency, it had one character (the widow on whom the artifice of her husband’s supposed death is played off) which is a masterpiece of comedy.

  His sense of humour enlivens some of the scenes, and is, perhaps, chiefly visible in “The Funeral;” but for the most part dulness is in the ascendant, and the sentiment is frequently mawkish.

The Tender Husband, 1705

  In the “Tender Husband” he seems to have contented himself with the more modest aim of being harmless, instead of didactic,—in other words, he tried to be simply amusing.

  In this play he gave unmistakable evidence of his happy genius for conceiving and embodying humorous types of character, putting on the stage the parents or the grandparents of Squire Western, Tony Lumpkin, and Lydia Languish.

  The “Tender Husband,” though not so good as the “Funeral,” contains a great deal of genuine comedy. The weakness of the play lies in the “moral” scenes in which Clerimont, senior, makes trial of his wife by means of Fainlove. This part of the story, together with Fainlove’s marriage with Humphery Gubbin, is far-fetched and out of place.

  The appropriateness of the title is a little open to question. The pair of innocents, the romantic heiress Biddy Tipkin and the clumsy heir Humphrey Gubbin, are really diverting, and in the first case to no small extent original; while they have furnished hints to no less successors than Fielding, Goldsmith, Sheridan, and Miss Austen. The lawyer and the gallant are also distinctly good, and the aunt has again furnished hints for Mrs. Malaprop, as Biddy has for Lydia. Steele, who always confessed, and probably as a rule exaggerated, his debts to Addison, acknowledges them here; and there is a certain Addisonian tone about some of the humours, though Steele, was quite able to have supplied them.

The Tatler, 1709–11

  But hitherto your Miscellanies have safely run the gauntlet, through all the coffee-houses; which are now entertained with a whimsical new newspaper, called the “Tatler,” which I suppose you have seen. This is the newest thing I can tell you of.

  I really have acted in these cases with honesty, and am concerned it should be thought otherwise: For wit, if a man had it, unless it be directed to some useful end, is but a wanton, frivolous quality; all that one should value himself upon in this kind is, that he has some honourable intention in it.

  It must, indeed, be confessed that never man threw up his pen under stronger temptations to have employed it longer; his reputation was at a greater height than, I believe, ever any living author’s was before him…. There is this noble difference between him and all the rest of our polite and gallant authors: the latter have endeavoured to please the age by falling in with them, and encouraging them in their fashionable vices and false notions of things. It would have been a jest some time since, for a man to have asserted that anything witty could be said in praise of a married state; or that devotion and virtue were anyway necessary to the character of a fine gentleman…. It is incredible to conceive the effect his writings have had on the town; how many thousand follies they have either quite banished, or given a very great check to; how much countenance they have added to virtue and religion; how many people they have rendered happy, by showing them it was their own fault if they were not so; and, lastly, how entirely they have convinced our fops and young fellows of the value and advantages of learning.

  Steele appears to have begun the paper without any concert, or hope of other assistance than what come spontaneously. His chief dependence was on his intelligence, which gave him a superiority over his contemporaries, who were merely news-writers, and had never discovered that a periodical paper might furnish instruction of a better and more lasting kind. In the other parts of the “Tatler,” he was at first less careful; his style had a familiar vulgarity not unlike that of the journalists of the age, which he adopted either in compliance with the prevailing manner, or by way of disguise. In one paper he acknowledges “incorrectness of style,” and writing “in an air of common speech.” All this however became a Tatler, and for some time he aimed at no higher character. But when associated with Addison, he assumed a tone more natural to a polished and elegant mind, and dispersed his coarser familiarity among his characteristic correspondents. If he did not introduce, he was the first who successfully employed the harmless fiction of writing letters to himself, and by that gave a variety of amusement and information to his paper, which would have been impracticable had he always appeared in his own character. All succeeding Essayists have endeavoured to avail themselves of a privilege so essential to this species of composition, but it requires a mimicry of style and sentiment which few have been able to combine.

  I have … always preferred the “Tatler” to the “Spectator.” Whether it is owing to my having been earlier or better acquainted with the one than the other, my pleasure in reading these two admirable works is not at all in proportion to their comparative reputation. The “Tatler” contains only half the number of volumes, and, I will venture to say, at least an equal quantity of sterling wit and sense. “The first sprightly runnings” are there—it has more of the original spirit, more of the freshness and stamp of nature. The indications of character and strokes of humour are more true and frequent; the reflections that suggest themselves arise more from the occasion, and are less spun out into regular dissertations. They are more like the remarks which occur in sensible conversation, and less like a lecture. Something is left to the understanding of the reader. Steele seems to have gone into his closet chiefly to set down what he observed out of doors. Addison seems to have spent most of his time in his study, and to have spun out and wire-drawn the hints, which he borrowed from Steele, or took from nature, to the utmost. I am far from wishing to depreciate Addison’s talents, but I am anxious to do justice to Steele, who was, I think, upon the whole, a less artificial and more original writer. The humorous descriptions of Steele resemble loose sketches, or fragments of a comedy; those of Addison are rather comments, or ingenious paraphrases, on the genuine text.

  This paper was written for ladies,… no flash of genius, no kindling fire, no kernel, no strength.

  Why, as we turn over the papers preceding that number 81 which must be said to have begun the regular contributions of Addison, there is hardly a trait that does not flash upon us of the bright wit, the cordial humour, the sly satire, the subtle yet kindly criticism, the good-nature and humanity, which have endeared this delightful book to successive generations of readers. There is, indeed, not less prominent at the outset than it continued to the close, the love of theatrical representations, and no doubt actors are criticised and preachers too; but we require no better proof than the very way in which this is done, of the new and original spirit that entered with it into periodical literature…. At a time in no way remarkable for refinement, Steele’s gallantry to women, thus incessantly expressed in “The Tatler” to the last, was that of a Sir Tristan or Sir Calidore; and in not a small degree, to every household into which it carried such unaccustomed language, this was a ground of its extraordinary success. Inseparable always from his passion is the exalted admiration he feels; and his love is the very flower of his respect.

  It is fortunately not necessary nowadays to argue as to the comparative merits of the papers by Steele and Addison, and such a discussion would be the last thing that Steele would wish; but this may be said, that Steele was the originator of nearly every new departure in the periodicals which the two friends produced; and if Steele had not furnished Addison with the opportunity for displaying his special power, Addison would in all probability have been known to us only as an accomplished scholar and poet of no great power. The world owes Addison to Steele…. It is just because the “Tatler” is more thoroughly imbued with Steele’s spirit than the “Spectator,” that many competent judges have confessed that they found greater pleasure in the earlier periodical than in its more finished and more famous successor.

  He paints as a social humourist the whole age of Queen Anne—the political and literary disputes, the fine gentlemen and ladies, the characters of men, the humours of society, the new book, the new play; we live in the very streets and drawing-rooms of old London.

  Steele has the merit of having been the first to feel the new intellectual cravings of his day and to furnish what proved to be the means of meeting them. His “Tatler” was a periodical of pamphlet form, in which news was to be varied by short essays of criticism and gossip. But his grasp of the new literature was a feeble grasp. His sense of the fitting form for it, of its fitting tone, of the range and choice of its subjects, were alike inadequate. He seized indeed by a happy instinct on letter-writing and conversation as the two molds to which the essay must adapt itself; he seized with the same happy instinct on humour as the pervading temper of his work and on “manners” as its destined sphere. But his notion of “manners” was limited not only to the external aspects of life and society, but to those aspects as they present themselves in towns; while his humor remained pert and superficial. The “Tatler,” however, had hardly been started when it was taken in hand by a greater than Steele.

  The “Tatler”—Swift’s own suggestion to Steele—is full of happy illustration and communication of ideas. Dated from coffee-houses, it was the first paper to unite the record of news with the portrayal of manners, to disseminate at once fact and fiction, to publish Whig principles and puff friendly authors. How good is his description of the “Club!” Sir Geofrey Notch, who appropriates the “right-hand” chair, and “calls every thriving man a pitiful upstart;” Major Matchlock, who “has all the battles by heart … and brags every night of his having been knockt off his horse at the rising of the London apprentices.” Dick Reptile, the “good-natured indolent man, who speaks little himself, but laughs at our jokes;” the Bencher, who is “the greatest wit next to myself,” and “shakes his head at the dullness of the present age.” They meet at six and disperse at ten. The maid comes with a lantern “to light me home.” Literature for the first time descends to the people. Not without reason does Swift, under the nom de plume of Humphry Wagstaffe, boast that the Staffian style is “to describe things exactly as they happen.” Realism made its bow to the world; and, then, too, for the first time women claimed the lion’s share of attention, and button-holed mankind. Steele’s letters from flirts and prudes, scolds and shrews, languishers and rebels, are the lineal precursors of the “Spectator.” Children, too, win an audience. That really wonderful essay (which Thackeray has mentioned), where Steele records the impressions of his early fatherlessness, abounds in pathetic touches—the same that soften us in his “Spectator” paper about the poor Anonyma in the Piazza of Covent Garden. Does not the sentence of his “delight in stealing from the crowd” reveal the whole nature of the sensitive lad? There is a sob in the style. To Steele and Prior belong the domain of childhood.

The Spectator, 1711–14

  Memorandum, That there is a daily paper comes out, called “The Spectator,” written, as is supposed, by the same hand that writ the “Tatler,” viz. Captain Steel. In one of the last of these papers is a letter from Oxon at four o’clock in the morning, and subscribed Abraham Froth. It ridicules our hebdomadal meetings. The Abraham Froth is designed for Dr. Arthur Charlett, an empty, frothy man, and indeed the letter personates him incomparably well, being written, as he uses to do, upon great variety of things, and yet about nothing of moment. It brings in his cronys, George Clarke, of All Souls, Dr. William Lancaster, provost of Queen’s, and Dr. Gardiner, warden of All Souls. Dr. Lancaster is called in it Sly-Boots, and Dr. Gardiner is called in it Dominick. Queen’s people are angry at it, and the common-room say there, ’tis silly, dull stuff, and they are seconded by some that have been of the same college. But men that are indifferent commend it highly, as it deserves.

  The “Guardian” had but scant success. Its characters were ill-drawn and feebly supported, and the decline of the publication was decided ere Addison’s help arrived. Only by party aid and by a larger infusion of party spirit did it carry into the autumn months its lingering existence. It was seen that the “Spectator” could not be rivalled—not even by the writers of the “Spectator” themselves. Still less was it rivalled in the ensuing age, even although the great genius of Dr. Johnson produced “The Rambler,” and a whole cluster of wits combined to illustrate “the World.”

  There is scarcely a department of essay-writing developed in the “Spectator” which does not trace its origin to Steele. It is Steele who first ventures to raise his voice against the prevailing dramatic taste of the age on behalf of the superior morality and art of Shakespeare’s plays…. Steele, too, it was who attacked, with all the vigor of which he was capable, the fashionable vice of gambling…. The practice of duelling, also, which had hitherto passed unreproved, was censured by Steele…. The sketches of character studied from life, and the letters from fictitious correspondents,… appear roughly, but yet distinctly, drafted in the “Tatler.” Even the papers of literary criticism, afterward so fully elaborated by Addison, are anticipated by his friend, who may fairly claim the honor to have been the first to speak with adequate respect of the genius of Milton. In a word, whatever was perfected by Addison was begun by Steele.

  I happen to be the owner of a very old edition of these latter essays, in whose “Table of Contents” some staid critic of the last generation has written his (or her) comments on the various topics discussed; and I find against the papers of Addison, such notes as—“instructive, sound, judicious;” and against those of Steele, I am sorry to say, such words as “flighty, light, witty, graceful, worthless;” and I am inclined to think the criticisms are pretty well borne out by the papers: but if flighty and light, he was not unwholesome; and he did not always carry the rollicking ways of the tavern into the little piquant journalism, where the grave and excellent Mr. Addison presided with him.

The Guardian, 1713

  The character of Guardian was too narrow and too serious: it might properly enough admit both the duties and the decencies of life, but seemed not to include literary speculations, and was in some degree violated by merriment and burlesque. What had the Guardian of the Lizards to do with clubs of tall or of little men, with nests of ants, or with Strada’s prolusions? Of this paper nothing is necessary to be said, but that it found many contributors, and that it was a continuation of the Spectator, with the same elegance, and the same variety, till some unlucky sparkle from a Tory paper set Steele’s politicks on fire, and wit at once blazed into faction. He was soon too hot for neutral topicks, and quitted the “Guardian” to write the “Englishman.”

Conscious Lovers, 1723

  Parson Adams—“I never heard of any plays fit for a Christian to read but ‘Cato’ and the ‘Conscious Lovers,’ and I must own in the latter there are some things almost solemn enough for a sermon.”

  In the year 1722, he brought his “Conscious Lovers” on the stage, with prodigious success. This is the last and most finished of all Sir Richard’s Comedies, and ’tis doubtful if there is upon the stage, any more instructing; that tends to convey a finer moral, or is better conducted in its design. We have already observed, that it is impossible to witness the tender scenes of this Comedy without emotion; that is, no man of feeling and humanity, who has experienced the delicate solicitudes of love and affection, can do it.

  Steele’s “Conscious Lovers” is the first comedy which can be called moral.

  Steele had all the brilliancy, and many of the failings, of his gifted countrymen. That his mind was never debased by the irregular pursuits and dissolute society to which he gave his time, is apparent from the beautiful sentiments which pervade that exquisite comedy, the “Conscious Lovers,” one of the most elegant delineations of that species of love which borders on romance, in the range of our dramatic literature.

  Nor can it be doubted that it was with Steele the unlucky notion began, of setting comedy to reform the morals, instead of imitating the manners, of the age. Fielding slily glances at this when he makes Parson Adams declare the “Conscious Lovers” to be the only play fit for a Christian to see, and as good as a sermon; and in so witty and fine a writer as Steele, so great a mistake is only to be explained by the intolerable grossness into which the theatre had fallen in his day.

Letters

  These Letters manifest throughout, with irresistible conviction, the very many excellent and amiable qualities, which greatly endeared this public Benefactor to society; and, in proof of their authenticity, we see in them with regret, indubitable marks of “that imprudence of generosity, or vanity of profusion, which kept Steele always incurably necessitous,” and shaded his fine character. Considering the constant vexation and serious inconveniences of which it was the cause or the occasion, to himself and his family, nothing can be said to excuse Steele’s inattention to œconomy; it was however more pardonable, and the less reproachable, as in the end he did ample justice to his creditors. Our regret on every instance which these Letters afford of this indiscretion, is very greatly augmented, by our admiration and love of that extensive and indefatigable philanthropy, to which we are principally indebted for a long series of well-written papers, fraught with valuable lessons of morality and good-breeding, which have doubtless contributed very much to the intellectual improvement, and moral refinement, of both sexes, in this country. Excepting however what refers in these Letters to the lamentable failure of conduct above mentioned, too well ascertained before; no publication of Steele redounds more to his honour as a man, than the present. It shews him to have been a firm and conscientious patriot; a faithful affectionate husband; a fond, indulgent parent; and, even at this period, if it does not illustrate, it very much enhances the value of his writings, both moral and political, to know with certainty, that the salutary instructions and sublime precepts, so much admired, and so well received, from the fictitious Isaac Bickerstaff, esq., were no other than the genuine sentiments, and habitual practice, of the real Sir Richard Steele.

  The earliest letters we have from Steele to Miss Scurlock are supposed to have been written in August 1707, and the marriage seems to have taken place on the 9th September following. Steele’s wife treasured up the letters and notes she received from her husband, and for the next eleven years we have a record of events, passing troubles, successes, hopes and fears, such as cannot be paralleled in all literature. Swift’s “Journal” is to some extent a similar unfolding of private thoughts and feelings, but Steele was entirely exempt from the limitations imposed upon Swift by his relations towards his correspondents. In judging of these letters it must be remembered that they were meant only for a wife’s eye. In one of the earliest in the series Steele said expressly: “I beg of you to show my letters to no one living, but let us be contented with one another’s thoughts upon our words and actions without the intervention of other people, who cannot judge of so delicate a circumstance as the commerce between man and wife.” But, notwithstanding this, the whole series of 400 notes was published in 1787, without any suppressions, by John Nichols, who purchased the originals from Mr. Scurlock, next of kin to Steele’s daughter, Lady Trevor, who had received them from her mother. Steele himself, it should be remembered, published some of these letters in the “Tatler” (No. 35) and “Spectator” (No. 142). Few men’s character and innermost life have been exposed to anything approaching such a searching scrutiny, and very few could have passed through the ordeal with the honour that attaches to Steele. The marriage was one of affection, and it remained so on both sides until the end. There were, of course, defects of character in each; it would be absurd to contend that Steele was not faulty in many ways, and the faults were such as are seen most easily, especially by those who read to prove to their own satisfaction that the noblest of men fall short even as they; but the great fact remains that during all the years of married life Steele retained the affection of his wife unimpaired. At the end she was still his “dear Prue” and “dear Wife.”

  The “fond fool of a husband,” writing while his ragged boy tumbles on the floor, or the “brats his girls” stand on either side of the table, presents a picture which one would not exchange for all the immaculate primness of Joseph Addison. The letters to “Prue” should be read side by side with the “Journal to Stella.” Both have the supreme merit of perfect sincerity, simplicity and devotion. The difference between them is the difference between the strongly contrasted natures of the two writers. No one can doubt which was the more lovable, any more than which was the greater man.

General

  He’s a poet too, and was very favourably received by the Town especially in his first performance, where, if you’ll take my opinion, he exhausted most of his stock; for what he has since produced seem but faint copies of that agreeable original. Tho’ he’s a most incorrect writer, he pleases in spite of the faults we see and own. Whether application might not burnish the defect, or if those very defects were brightened, whether the genuine spirit would fly off? are queries not so easily resolved.

  To take the height of his Learning, you are to suppose a Lad just fit for the University, and sent early from thence into the wide World, where he followed every way of Life that might least improve, or preserve the Rudiments he had got. He hath no Invention, nor is Master of a tolerable Style; his chief Talent is Humor, which he sometimes discovers both in Writing and Discourse.

  Steele, who in his comedies successfully engrafted modern characters on the ancient dramas.

  Though Sir Richard Steele’s reputation as a public writer was owing to his connexions with Mr. Addison, yet, after their intimacy was formed, Steele sunk in his merit as an author. This was not owing so much to the evident superiority on the part of Addison, as to the unnatural efforts which Steele made to equal or eclipse him. This emulation destroyed that genuine flow of diction which is discoverable in all his former compositions.

  There is great regularity in the fable of all his plays, and the characters are well sketched and preserved; but in the dialogue he is sometimes tedious. He wants the quick repartee of Congreve; and though possessed of humour, falls into the style rather of an essay than a drama. Much of that point which appears in his Tatlers may be discovered in his Comedies.

  Steele will be found in purity and simplicity inferior to Tillotson; to Temple in elegance and harmony; to Dryden in richness, mellowness, and variety. To the two former, however, he is equal in correctness; to the latter in vivacity; and with all he is nearly on a level as to ease and perspicuity. Steele’s great misfortune has ever been the comparison, so perpetually drawn with regard to style, between himself and Addison. The proximity of their productions have naturally led to the consideration of their respective merits in point of composition; and though it must be allowed that from the best manner of Addison Steele stands widely apart, yet are there several papers which, having been written by Sir Richard with more than usual care, and with evident marks of emulation, appear to have imbibed a portion of Addisonian grace.

  I question if his works, detached from those of his illustrious coadjutor, would find many purchasers. His “Christian Hero” is more talked of than read.

  The utmost sweetness and love breathe through his moral speculations. How tender his remembrance of affecting scenes and incidents in his childhood. How lively his sense of the beauty of a sound, honest heart; of the dignity and benign power of woman, in her several relations and proper sphere; of the claims, confidence, and rewards of friendship; of the deference we owe to others in the smallest things. We are drawn near to him, and breathe the air of benevolence and courtesy, and love him the more that he is not perfect, if only for sympathy…. Steele never writes as if he had a literary character to support, or indeed any character but that of the good old gentleman who has taken our morals into keeping…. If we have read Steele much, and turn to him yet again, every new reading seems more like an act of meditation or memory than receiving another’s thoughts. We have no surprises, no admiration. We do not need them. We do not feel that we are engaged with a memorable work of literature, which we are to compare with others. We do not say a word to ourselves about its merit. All that we are conscious of is, a succession of familiar, agreeable images which we begin to value as part of ourselves; an easy, natural humor which never quite runs over and never loses its charm, and an early companion, who is so visible and intelligible in every word, that he is at our side and talking with us.

  He knew the town, and had paid dear for his knowledge. He had read much more than the dissipated men of that time were in the habit of reading. He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes. His style was easy and not incorrect; and though his wit and humour were of no higher order, his gay animal spirits imparted to his compositions an air of vivacity which ordinary readers could hardly distinguish from comic genius. His writings have been well compared to those light wines, which, though deficient in body and flavour, are yet a pleasant small drink, if not kept too long, or carried too far.

  For, though a man of greater intellectual activity than Addison, he had immeasurably less of genius.

  I must own that I prefer open-hearted Steele with all his faults, to Addison with all his essays.

  The great charm of Steele’s writing is its naturalness. He wrote so quickly and carelessly, that he was forced to make the reader his confidant, and had not the time to deceive him. He had a small share of book-learning, but a vast acquaintance with the world. He had known men and taverns. He had lived with gownsmen, with troopers, with gentlemen ushers of the Court, with men and women of fashion; with authors and wits, with the inmates of the spunging houses, and with the frequenters of all the clubs and coffee houses in the town. He was liked in all company because he liked it; and you like to see his enjoyment as you like to see the glee of a box full of children at the pantomime. He was not one of those lonely ones of the earth whose greatness obliged them to be solitary; on the contrary, he admired, I think, more than any man who ever wrote; and full of hearty applause and sympathy, wins upon you by calling you to share his delight and good humour. His laugh rings through the whole house. He must have been invaluable at a tragedy, and have cried as much as the most tender young lady in the boxes. He has a relish for beauty and goodness wherever he meets it.

  I would rather have written what is here quoted from Steele than all the criticisms and philosophy of all the Edinburgh Reviewers. What a good critic he was! I doubt if he has ever been surpassed. Somehow I cannot but connect Steele and Goldsmith, as I do Cowper and Southey. Of all our literary men, they interest me the most…. Dear good faulty Steele!

  We have already called Steele’s wit fresh and natural. It came with no stinted flow. He wrote as he lived, freely and carelessly, scattering the coinage of his brain, as he did his guineas, with an unsparing hand. All who read his papers, or his letters to Prue, cannot help seeing the good heart of the rattle-brain shining out in every line. We can forgive, or at least forget, his tippling in taverns and his unthinking extravagance, bad as these were, in consideration of the loving touch with which he handles the foibles of his neighbours, and the mirth without bitterness that flows from his gentle pen.

  To him perhaps much can be traced that we find in Sterne, Fielding, Richardson, Thackeray, Dickens, and many of our humorous novelists.

  In opposition to his imprudences and irregularities, a noble catalogue of virtues can be recorded to Steele’s honour. Through all his writings he appears always to have entertained the purest and most transparent principles of religion and morals…. Steele possessed a high sense of propriety in language, too, as well as in conduct, and he appears to have had an absolute aversion to gross vices, as compromising the temporal if not the eternal welfare of man. He strenuously opposed—and, it is said, not without personal risk—the insane and wicked practice of duelling, that was so prevalent in his day. Upon this topic he wrote with bitterness, because he himself, in endeavouring to disarm an opponent who had forced him into a contest, wounded his adversary to death…. Steele was also constantly and uniformly vehement in his denunciations of gambling, and of women gamesters in particular. His sentiments, also, upon the passion of love are pure, generous, ardent, and graceful, and few writers have given vent to more cordial thoughts upon the blessings of a real love-marriage. There is a plainness, a sort of brotherly confidence, in his manner upon this question—particularly towards the women—that never can be mistaken for the lip-deep mouthing of the mere essayist.

  He was a genial critic. His exuberant wit and humor reproved without wounding; he was not severe enough to be a public censor, nor pedantic enough to be the pedagogue of an age which often needed the lash rather than the gentle reproof, and upon which a merciful clemency lost its end if not its praises. He deserves credit for an attempt, however feeble, to reward virtue upon the stage, after the wholesale rewards which vice had reaped in the age of Charles II. Steele has been overshadowed, in his connection with Addison, by the more dignified and consistent career, the greater social respectability, and the more elegant and scholarly style of his friend; and yet in much that they jointly accomplished, the merit of Steele is really as great, and conduces much to the reputation of Addison. The one husbanded and cherished his fame; the other flung it away or lavished it upon his colleagues. As contributors to history, they claim an equal share of our gratitude and praise.

  His intellect was of a rougher cast than his friend’s. It is the emotional character of the man that renders him interesting, and entitles him to a good secondary place among our great writers of prose. Probably a large fraction of his energy was spent in the rollicking enjoyment of existence; otherwise his rank would have been higher than it is. His contributions to the “Spectator” and allied periodicals take their distinction from his prevailing tenderness of heart and wide acquaintance with human life. To him these papers owe their pathos, their humour, and their extraordinary variety of characters…. In command of words he is not equal to Addison; his choice is much less felicitous. His sentence composition is irregular and careless, often ungrammatical: writing in the character of a Tatler, he thought it incumbent to assume “incorrectness of style, and an air of common speech”—a style very agreeable to his own inclinations. He has not the polished and felicitous melody of Addison. His language and sentiments are much more glowing and extravagant; his papers may be distinguished by this feature alone…. Steele is one of the most touching of our writers. Himself of a nature the reverse of melancholy, he yet at certain seasons “resolved to be, sorrowful;” and when the sorrowful mood was upon him, the incidents that he recalled or imagined were of the most heartrending character. The kind of pathos that we find in him would not be pathetic at all, in a poetic sense, to the more delicate order of sensibilities: it would be a pain, and not an æsthetic pleasure.

  The cardinal quality of these papers is their good sense; this never forsakes them. Their philosophy presents it in a penetrative, their humor in a pungent, form. Their criticisms on society are as just as they are amiable. Their analysis is correct and practical, their moral reflections, impressive and natural. This good sense was most effective in securing uniform success. It gave a restraint and proportion to what was said that made it difficult to be resisted, and impossible to be controverted. Whatever the object of satire, the pedantry of learning, the conceit of rank, the foppishness of dress, the frivolity of etiquette, the prejudice of partisanship, the same sober, sound opinion underlay and sustained the attack. Moderation was even more worthy of commendation then than now. The art of achieving a true success is found very much in tempering zeal to a just moderation. Steel that is too hard is fractured at every blow; draw the temper too much and it becomes iron. The Damascus blade, with its tough and steady edge clings to that nice line that divides excess and deficiency. From this middle region, Steele seems to have been inclined to range upward, and Addison downward. He complains of Addison, that “he blew a lute when he should sound a trumpet;” yet the lute notes of the one went farther than the trumpet tones of the other.

  In pursuing the moral and social aims of which, to his enduring honour, he never allowed himself to lose sight, Steele as a dramatist came to mistake the true means and methods of the comic drama. His own comic genius lacked the sustained vigour which is required by the stage; and his artistic sense was too keen altogether to have left him unconscious of his inability to satisfy his moral purpose by holding up to ridicule with unflagging persistence those human vices and follies which are the proper subjects of comedy. He therefore called in sentiment to the aid of humour. Availing himself of the reaction against the grosser methods of provoking laughter and amusement which had set in as part of the general reaction against the licence of the Restoration age, he took a hint from Colley Cibber, who so carefully watched the currents of the public taste, and became the real founder of that Sentimental Comedy which during a period lying beyond the range of these volumes exercised so strong and, on the whole, so far from salutary an influence upon the progress of our dramatic literature. There is no reason for attributing Steele’s innovation to any foreign literary influence; on the other hand it would be unjust to hold his tentative beginnings responsible for the futility of successors who, being altogether deficient in any kind of comic power, in the end came to abandon even the semblance of true comic intention. In so far however as their aberrations followed the lines into which he was the first to cause English comedy consciously to deviate, Steele must be held to have contributed to the decline of the English drama, and in particular to the sinking of the sap in that branch of it to which his plays both nominally and in their general design belong.

  For the sake of his reputation, Steele is unfortunate in having constantly to be contrasted with Addison. His motives in writing for the “Tatler” and “Spectator” were identical with Addison’s; both wished to improve the manners and morals of the day; and though Steele’s papers do not always compare favorably with those of Addison, there are some of them which Addison could scarcely excel. Unlike his partner, he was without a settled literary style; but in whatever manner he wrote, he never neglected to display a great amount of spirit and excellent taste.

  Steele’s hearty interest in men and women gave life to his essays. He approached even literature on the side of human fellowship; talked of plays with strong personal regard for the players; and had, like Addison, depths of religious earnestness that gave a high aim to his work. He sought to turn the current of opinion against duelling. Some of his lightest papers were in accordance with his constant endeavor to correct the false tone of society that made it fashionable to speak with contempt of marriage. No man laboured more seriously to establish the true influence of woman in society.

  What ruled writer and reader alike was the new-found pleasure of talk. The use of coffee had only come in at the close of the civil wars; but already London and the bigger towns were crowded with coffee-houses. The popularity of the coffee-house sprang not from its coffee, but from the new pleasure which men found in their chat over the coffee-cup. And from the coffee-house sprang the Essay. The talk of Addison and Steele is the brightest and easiest talk that was ever put in print: but its literary charm lies in this, that it is strictly talk. The essayist is a gentleman who chats to a world of gentlemen, and whose chat is shaped and coloured by a sense of what he owes to his company. He must interest and entertain, he may not bore them; and so his form must be short; essay or sketch, or tale or letter. So too his style must be simple, the sentences clear and quotable, good sense ready packed for carriage. Strength of phrase, intricacy of structure, height of tone were all necessarily banished from such prose as we banish them from ordinary conversation. There was no room for pedantry, for the ostentatious display of learning, for pompousness, for affectation. The essayist had to think, as a talker should think, more of good taste than of imaginative excellence, of propriety of expression than of grandeur of phrase. The deeper themes of the world or man were denied to him; if he touches them it is superficially, with a decorous dulness, or on their more humorous side with a gentle irony that shows how faint their hold is on him.

  However wild his conduct may have occasionally been, in his writings he never swerved from upholding the cause of purity and goodness; and in many respects his moral precepts were of a less conventional kind, and reached a higher spiritual level than Addison’s.

  He excelled as a satirist, a humorist, and a storyteller, who must, like the poet, be born. He had a knowledge of the world, and a dramatic skill by which the serials profited largely. Some of his papers equal anything Addison ever wrote. Occupying a more elevated plane than many of his contemporaries, he is paled in his powers by the overshadowing presence of his illustrious friend. His writings have been compared to those light wines which, though deficient in body and flavor, are yet a pleasant small drink, if not kept too long or carried too far…. While his purpose (more or less vaguely realized) was reformatory and corrective, his service was chiefly indirect, in calling to the support and development of his enterprises Addison, to whom it was reserved to make the periodical a true revolutionary power in literature and society. What shall we expect of a man who forever gathers the pleasures that lie on the border-land of evil, tearfully casts them away, then recklessly gathers them again?

  Steele’s humour is that of a full and impulsive nature, careless and frank, and too warm-hearted to be very satirical. It comes with the extemporaneous freshness of the man’s character. It seems even sincerer from its want of polish; and though the writer touches off human weaknessess, he never forgets that he is only human himself.

  He ranks first among English humourists for geniality without boisterousness, and sentiment without gush.

  What strikes us first in his writing is its spontaneity. He wrote because he had something to say, and could not help saying it. He had seen much, and reflected much, though he had read little; and there were few subjects to the discussion of which he could not contribute something valuable from his stores of thought or observation. His exceeding naturalness is a characteristic remark by Thackeray; but at least as conspicuous is his sympathetic temper. He does not look upon his fellow-creatures with the austere gaze of the philosopher; but with the kindly eyes of a friendly onlooker, who knows that he is one of themselves, and not wholly free from the failings and foibles which he so good-naturedly chastises. It is no whip of scorpions that “Sir Richard” handles; the lash is of silk, and the touch light though smart.

  His style presents less material for study than that of Addison, because it is itself unstudied. When Addison was so delicately weighing and polishing his sentences, Steele was pouring out what he saw or what he felt. He is very incorrect, sometimes downright ungrammatical. When he preaches, as he is very apt to do, we fall to nodding in his face. But we wake again when he returns to the subject he knows best, the shifting pictures of human life, with its hopes and disappointments, its laughter and its tears. When he talks to us about the beauty of virtuous women, the loneliness of orphan children, the innocent conversation of old men, any of the single human topics which literature had so long time thought below her dignity, we are fascinated and bewitched; his style takes fire, “the motion doth dilate the flame,” and Steele becomes a great writer.

  The writings of Steele have never lost their interest for students of English literature. During the eighteenth century his works were constantly passing through new editions. One marked difference between the periodicals of the present day and those of the early eighteenth century is, that whereas the former are readily consigned to dealers in waste paper, the latter were carefully treasured and so continually sought after that new editions were a profitable investment for publishers. The “Tatler” and the “Spectator” appeared again and again in new dress. During the present century it may be that the writings of Steele have gone a little out of fashion; but it cannot for a moment he said with any truth that their author has been forgotten.

  The best work of Steele is in his “Essays,” and his chief praise is in the elevating tone of his teaching. He brought back decency to the comic drama, and in his periodicals he set himself the task of improving the morals and manners of society. His style is natural and lively, less graceful than Addison’s, and his taste is less refined; but he is his equal in inventiveness and in knowledge of the world.

  Sir Richard’s pathetic touches and artless turns of expression come from the heart. He is the most natural of writers, but does not seem to be aware that nature, in order to be converted into good literature, needs a little clothing. His essays have often a looseness or negligence of aim unpardonable in a man who can write so well.

  Yet when everything is allowed to Addison that can reasonably be conceded to him, and when everything has been said, that can be said, of Steele’s slapdash method, impulsive judgment, and careless style, it must be admitted that Steele brought some gifts to his work for which one may seek in vain in the work of his coadjutor. If he was less literary, he was more earnest; if he was more hasty, he was sometimes more happy. The very energy of his indignation, pity, or enthusiasm frequently taught him those short cuts to his reader’s sympathy, which neither art nor artifice can teach; and he often becomes eloquent by the sheer force and sincerity of his emotion. Like Addison, he is occasionally hortatory and didactic; but his sermons, though at times excellent, are not his best work. His true school is human nature. As a genial and kindly commentator upon the men and women about him; as a humane and an indulgent interpreter of their frailties; as a generous and an ungrudging sympathiser with their feeblest better impulse—he belongs to the great race of English humourists.

  Phrases such as “Addison’s Spectator” or “Addison’s Sir Roger” are entirely question-begging phrases, and do a manifest injustice to the originality of Steele. If Addison be allowed to have been the more brilliant contributor, yet to Steele must be given all the credit of having been the projector and editor; and, whatever his literary deficiencies, it is his name that must rank the higher, if regard be had merely to the development of the English essay. In Steele there was a strange blending of a cute enterprise and boyish thoughtlessness, and it is the fate of all authors who have a special place in their readers’ affections that the latter side of their character should be unduly emphasized. A claim to pity, even if it be a loving pity, is a dangerous attribute for an author to possess, and it has militated against Steele’s purely literary reputation that he is thought of as being, like his friend Gay, “in wit a man, simplicity a child.” So enamoured of Addison’s “elegance” were his earlier editors that they rather grudged Steele any share of his fame, and it is unfortunate that some of the absurdities of Hurd should have been endorsed by the eloquence of Macaulay. Nor are some of Steele’s sincerest admirers free from blame. Perhaps there is no more stimulating introduction to the literature of last century than Thackeray’s lectures—or “Esmond;” but it is well in approaching Steele’s writings to recognize that Thackeray’s lovable Dick Steele is not altogether the same man as the founder of the English Essay.

  The manly tenderness of Steele.

  The so-called Essay which Steele launched in the “Tatler,” which was taken up and perfected in the “Spectator,” which had numerous immediate followers, and a succession of the greatest importance at intervals throughout the century, and which at once expressed and influenced the tone and thought of that century after a fashion rarely paralleled, was not originally started in quite the form which it soon assumed, and never, for the greater part of a hundred years, wholly lost…. Steele, always zealous and always generous, but a little wanting in criticism, not infrequently diverged into sentimentality. Addison’s tendency, though he, too, was unflinchingly on virtue’s side, was rather towards a very mellow and not unindulgent but still distinctly cynical cynicism—a smile too demure ever to be a grin, but sometimes, except on religious subjects, faintly and distantly approaching a sneer. This appears even in the most elaborate and kindly of the imaginative creations of the double series, Sir Roger de Coverley, whom Steele indeed seems to have invented, but whom Addison adopted, perfected, and (some, perhaps without reason, say) even killed out of kindness, lest a less delicate touch should take the bloom off him. This great creation, which comes nearer than anything out of prose fiction or drama to the masterpieces of the novelists and dramatists, is accompanied by others hardly less masterly; while Addison constantly, and Steele not seldom, has sketches or touches as perfect in their way, though less elaborate. It is scarcely too much to say that these papers, and especially the “Spectator,” taught the eighteenth century how it should, and especially how it should not, behave in public places, from churches to theatres; what books it should like, and how it should like them; how it should treat its lovers, mistresses, husbands, wives, parents, and friends; that it might politely sneer at operas, and must not take any art except literature too seriously; that a moderate and refined devotion to the Protestant religion and the Hanoverian succession was the duty, though not the whole duty, of a gentleman. It is still a little astonishing to find with what docility the century obeyed and learnt its lesson…. Steele, though he has some rarer flights than his friend, is much less correct, and much less polished; while, though he had started with equal chances, his rambling life had stored him with far less learning than Addison possessed.

  In this [“The Conscious Lovers”], as in his former plays, he broke entirely away from the profligate traditions of the restoration drama, and kept close to what he conceived to be the high moral purpose of the stage. But in his earnestness he too often forgot that the first object of comedy is to amuse and not to preach; and his plays, though occasionally enlivened with humour, are on the whole dull and insipid.

  Everybody liked him, and even to this day it is natural to speak of him as “Dick” Steele. Without him it is doubtful if Addison would have developed his talent in the society essay. Like Addison he earned political preferment by his pen though the offices he held were of inferior dignity.

  Steele’s writings have not the polish or delicate humor of Addison’s, but they have more strength and pathos. From the neglect of Steele and the enduring interest in Addison, the student should learn the valuable lesson that artistic finish, as well as excellence of subject matter, has become almost a necessity for a prose writer who would not be soon neglected.