of; perhaps he admired the other for the very warmth which contrasted with his own feelings, and perhaps he felt in some degree the pleasure of being a protector to one in a lower position. At any rate Steele was conscious of being friendless, and thus susceptible of kindness; this Addison bestowed, and with permission from his father the Dean of Lichfield, took his friend home with him for the holidays. This friendship did not end with boyhood. In 1687 Addison went to Queen's College, Oxford, and then as a demy to Magdalen College. In 1689 Steele followed by exhibition to Christ Church, Oxford, and we can picture the pleasure with which the youths again found themselves together.

In Oxford we have our first glimpse of Steele as a verse-maker. He wrote The Procession on the death of Queen Mary, and made William III. into a hero, because he was the expression of the principles of the Revolution. There are passages in this poem which show an intense sympathy with human nature, and a strong appreciation of the beauty of domestic life, and these were the germs of those principles which in after life he laboured so strenuously to advocate.

In those days two paths were open for literary men-the path of patronage, and the more honourable one of self-dependence. Steele chose the latter. At Oxford he burnt his first comedy when a fellowstudent failed to see its merits, and he cut short his college life when politics assumed their sway over him, and with a vague idea of helping on the cause of the Revolution he enlisted as a private in the Coldstream Guards. Lord Cutts, the colonel of the regiment, was a literary man, and soon recognised kindred tastes in the recruit: he made him his secretary, and got him his commission, and eventually Steele rose to a captaincy in Lord Lucas's regiment of Fusiliers. When he was an ensign, his love of society and his natural adaptability to it, threw him into great temptations in the guard-room, and to some of these he yielded; but with him repentance dogged the steps of sin, and he tried to pull himself up, and for this very purpose then wrote The Christian Hero, with a view of thus by private meditation putting a check upon himself, but not finding private meditation sufficient, he published the little book.

The Christian Hero, or No Principles but those of Religion sufficient to make a Great Man, is not a book of texts and prayers; the preface notes how power over the world is divided between the men of wit

and the men of business, and that much the larger share is held by the former, and how great is their mistake when they disregard religion and morality. Speaking of the influence of the man of wit Steele says: "He bestows upon his hearers, by an apt representation of his thoughts, all the happiness and pleasure of being such as he is, and quickens our heavier life into joys we should never of ourselves have tasted." He handles Scripture, not, as the schoolmen do, theologically, but as the inheritance of all Christian men. The Sermon on the Mount to his mind contained the one thing needful; he says he found in it "the whole heart of man discovered by Him that made it, and all our secret impulses to ill and false appearances of good, exposed and detected." This sermon is, in fact, the essential thought of a book which holds up a higher standard of honour than that of the world, and to the Scripture truths which Steele embodied in it, he felt he must himself cling when he was slipping. With regard to another aspect of Christianity he says: "It has that in it which makes men pity, not scorn the wicked, and by a beautiful kind of ignorance of themselves think those wretches their equals." Steele had evidently drunk in the full meaning of St. Paul's words, "In lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than themselves," when he penned this; and when he speaks of being "always a benefactor with the mien of a receiver," he must surely have experienced how much more blessed it is to give than to receive. Some critics say that the publication of The Christian Hero only made the author ridiculous; but this we doubt, both because Steele was such an universal favourite from his bonhomie and charming manners, over which was no shade of Pharisaism, and also because the book reached five editions in ten years, which argues a certain amount of popularity.

We well know how generally defective in tone were the comedies of that day, but The Funeral, or Grief à la mode, which Steele brought out after the date of his captaincy, is entirely free from all blame. It is pervaded by the spirit of The Christian Hero, and the same high standard of life is in it upheld, and as a comedy it deals with abuses which are not yet entirely reformed, but against which the tide of public feeling has set in so strongly, that we are justified in hoping they are doomed to destruction at no distant date. An extract from the preface to the play may be quoted as a specimen of Steele's

humour: "The subject of this play will be acceptable to all lovers of mankind, since the ridicule is partly levelled at a set of people who live in impatient hopes to see us out of the world,—a flock of ravens that attend this numerous city for their carcases."

In 1703 Steele's second comedy, The Tender Husband, came out: Addison, who was then lodging in the Haymarket, was with him when he put the finishing strokes to it. It was then that Steele said there was nothing he so ardently wished as that they might some time or other publish a work written by them both, which should bear the name of 'The Monument' in memory of their friendship.

In 1704 the third comedy appeared, The Lying Lover. This was an adaptation of Le Menteur, of Corneille; but Steele was too much in earnest in his hatred of romancing to be able to deal with the subject in the style of light comedy, so, as he wished to teach that the vice of lying led men into trouble, he landed his hero in Newgate. There was no fun in this, and therefore, to speak in theatrical phrase, the play was damned. Steele remarked it was the first play of the time which had been so for its piety!

Steele's Whig politics led to patronage from the Whig Minister in 1707, and they bestowed upon him the office of Gazetteer, with a salary of £300 per annum. He was also made a gentleman-usher to Prince George of Denmark, a post worth another hundred a year. Previously to this he had married a West Indian heiress, with an encumbered estate of £600 a year; but she died within the year, and he married for a second time, in 1707, her friend Mary Scurlock, the sole heiress of Jonathan Scurlock, of Llangunnor Park, in Carmarthenshire. This second wife is the "dear Prue" of Steele's letters, the woman upon whom have been made so many disparaging remarks, as if she had been a hard-hearted termagant, ruling her husband with a rod of iron; so far from that, she was one of those women who, having gained her husband's heart, had the power to retain it wholly. Possibly she might be too exacting in her love and too impatient of his attentions to her; yet she never lost her hold over his affections, but through a long married life' she retained the lover in the husband. They began their life together without any secrets; she was able to understand the mixed character of the man she had married, and could make allowances for those parts of it of which her finer sense must have disapproved. He told

her of a daughter he had, for whom he was doing all that was right in the way of education; she at once insisted upon being taken to the school where the girl was placed, and of thence removing her home, to be there as a friend under her eye. No woman of a coarse nature could have done this of her own accord; many, perhaps, would accede to it as a request, but in this case the suggestion was Mrs. Steele's own. In later years, when Steele was in difficulties, his careless expenditure must have sorely tried her : the very pet name of "Prue" was his contraction of prudence, a virtue she was probably very often preaching up to him and which he was as ever often neglecting to attain.

He was a man of wonderful consideration for others, and it is touching to see how in his daily life his wife was the undercurrent of his thoughts. To her he was constantly writing little notes; if he was detained when out (as was the case on December 22nd, 1707), he wrote to prevent her waiting dinner for him; if he found during the day that he could spare time for a drive with her (as on March 19th, 1708), he would send her word to come, and "let my best periwig be put in the coach-box, and my new shoes, for it is a comfort to be well dressed in agreeable company." How different to the thought that any old thing is good enough to wear at home! We have quoted from letters written during the first year of marriage, but one bearing the date of November 17th, 1716, shows no ebb in the tide of his affection: "Pray take care of yourself; I love you to distraction, for I cannot be angry at anything you do, let it be ever so odd and unexpected to the tenderest of husbands." Every scrap "dear Prue" had ever received from him was carefully treasured up, and never meant for the public eye; we feel even now rather treacherous in looking at them; but in spite of the prohibition which accompanied them, they were published by the antiquary by whom they were found. In doing so he opened the cupboard in Steele's house, into which the whole world may peer and find therein no skeleton; all it can see is the record of a man and a woman who were true to each other, and whose love can bear the test of their letters being read by indifferent and coldly critical eyes.

Steele had always been interested in De Foe's Review, which had been going on since 1704, and its success gave him the idea of publishing a paper which should not only give the earliest informa

tion of events, which his office of Gazetteer would enable him to supply, but should also help on his main object-the humanising of society. The position of woman in the household was very near his heart, that of the wife was especially so; he desired to place marriage on the right footing, and to elevate the sex intellectually, in order that woman might fulfil the intention of God when he formed her to be the helpmeet for man.

Without telling his friend Addison of his plans, Steele began the issue of The Tatler as a penny paper, three days a week, on the 12th April, 1709. In an after dedication to the first volume, he explains that "the general purpose of this paper is to pull off the disguises of cunning, vanity, and affectation, and to recommend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse, and our behaviour." Addison detected his friend in the sixth paper, through an allusion to a classical criticism they had had together, and when the eightieth number was reached, he associated himself distinctly with its publication.

Steele had always opposed duelling; he deemed it murder, and did not hesitate to say so; he argued the matter when among the young soldiers, and when forced to accept a challenge acted only on the defensive. He once accidentally ran his opponent through the body and this deepened his opinion of the sin, and he probably at that time wrote the paper which, two years afterwards, he printed as the twenty-fifth number of The Tatler. A passage out of The Christian Hero will show Steele's estimate of true courage: "A coward has often fought, a coward has often conquered, but a coward never forgave. The power of doing that flows from a strength of soul conscious of its own force, whence it draws a certain safety, which its enemy is not of consideration enough to interrupt; for it is peculiar in the make of a brave man to have his friends seem much above him, his enemies much below him."

Steele and Addison together continued The Tatler until January 2nd, 1711, then it was closed; and two months afterwards a new series, under the new name of The Spectator, was begun. They started it as a daily penny paper, with a distinct aim of softening the manners of the time. This in some way or other was absolutely necessary to be done. The atmosphere left by the period of the Restoration must be cleared. It is true that society in the reign of Queen Anne was not so corrupt as in that of Charles II. ; yet there was still