Sir Richard Steele.

Steele (1672-1729) has described himself as 'an Englishman born in Dublin,' and his biographers, after some balancing of contradictory authorities, have established the date of his birth in the month of March 1672. Of his parentage little is known. His mother is said to have been Irish, of a Wexford family; his father appears to have been a lawyer, probably an attorney, in Dublin. What is essential in the facts of his origin is that, like Swift, Goldsmith, Sterne, Burke, and Sheridan, he was one of that brilliant band of AngloIrish writers to whom English literature in the eighteenth century owed so much.

In 1694 the martial atmosphere of the times, charged with glory and gunpowder from the Boyne and Steinkirk and Landen, seems to have fired Steele's brain, for, like Coleridge a century afterwards, he disappeared from college and enlisted as a private soldier in the Life Guards. It was as 'a gentleman of the army' that he next year published a set of verses on the death of Queen Mary, entitled The Procession-a frigid effusion of fervid loyalty, but notable in the

and sent him to school and college in England. In 1684, through the Duke's nomination, Steele was admitted to the Charterhouse, where, as he himself tells us, he 'suffered very much for two or three false concords,' after the Spartan manner of the place and time. A more notable and profitable experience was the beginning of his almost lifelong friendship with Addison, which may probably be fixed in the years when the two were schoolboys together in cloisters which Thackeray has glorified as 'Greyfriars.' After five years at the Charterhouse, Steele went up to Oxford as an exhibitioner, matriculating there at Christ Church in the beginning of 1690, but removing from that college to Merton in the following year. The sole noteworthy incident of his Oxford days was the composition of a comedy, which, on the advice of a critical fellow-student, was (no doubt wisely) committed to the flames.

way of biography and bibliography as his first volume, and also as the first utterance of that sturdy Whiggism which was his lifelong political creed. Good fortune followed the dedication of the poem to Lord Cutts, the 'Salamander' of Namur fame, who almost immediately took the author into his service as secretary, and ere long got him a pair of colours in the Coldstream Guards. There is no evidence that Steele ever saw active military service, in Flanders or elsewhere; but some time before the end of the century he had risen from the rank of ensign to that of captain in Lord

He must have

Lucas's regiment of Fusiliers. become also one of the recognised wits of Will's Coffee-house, for in 1700 we find him, along with Vanbrugh, Garth, and others, replying to a ponderous satire of Sir Richard Blackmore's, and addressing himself particularly to the defence of his friend Addison.

In the year 1701 appeared his Christian Here, a tract of some eighty or ninety pages, essaying to prove that no principles but those of religion are sufficient to make a great man.' It was written, he tells us, at first for his own private use, 'to fix upon his own mind a strong impression of virtue and religion in opposition to a stronger propensity towards unwarrantable pleasures,' encouraged by the temptations incident to his position as 'an Ensign of the Guards,' a way of life exposed to much irregularity. Practically, it is a

somewhat crude rehearsal of the moralisings of the Tatler and Spectator, illustrated by 'a view of some eminent heathen, by a distant admiration of the life of our Saviour, and a near examination of that of His Apostle St Paul,' and concluding with a kind of topical parallel, or rather contrast, between Louis XIV. and William III. Naturally there was much satirical criticism of the discrepancy between this preaching and the preacher's own conduct— a conduct of which the imperfection was habitually only too frankly owned by Steele himself. 'Everybody,' he says, speaking of himself in the third person, 'measured the least levity in his words and actions with the character of a Christian Hero, while one or two of his acquaintance thought fit to misuse him and try their valour upon him.' Perhaps it was this 'misuse' that brought about his only recorded duel-an occurrence of rather uncertain date, but apparently belonging, by a most awkward coincidence, to this very time. In justice to the fallible Christian Hero,' however, it must be remembered that the only version of this rather vague story represents him as drawn into the quarrel with great reluctance, as accepting his adversary's challenge most unwillingly, and running him through in a well-meant effort to disarm him. It has to be added that in after-years, in the Tatler and the Spectator, Steele was incessant in his ridicule and denunciation of the duel. The same year which saw the publication of the Christian Hero witnessed the appearance-on the stage at all events-of Steele's first play, The Funeral; or, Grief à la Mode. This was followed in 1703 by The Lying Lover, in 1705 by The Tender Husband, and in 1722 by The Conscious Lovers. These four comedies, though they do not give Steele a high place among our dramatic authors, render him an important figure in the history of the English stage. In 1697 Jeremy Collier's famous diatribe had given utterance to the general disgust at the indecencies of Wycherley and Congreve; and in the first year of the new century a very salutary reaction— salutary at least so far as concerned the morals of the drama-began to set in. In this reaction Steele was a principal agent, and he became, indeed, the founder of that 'Sentimental Comedy' which, in the early Georgian times, supplanted the Restoration comedy of wit and intrigue. It is true that from the modern standpoint of manners and morals his plays seem anything but faultless, containing, as they do, not only frequent examples of coarseness in language, but also some dubious situations and scenes. These, however, are but superficial defects, which no way impair the essential soundness of the morality inculcated by the author or diminish the force of the contrast which his comedies present to their immediate predecessors. With Steele the patient or deluded husband is no longer the butt of ridicule, nor do breaches of the marriage tie furnish the material of his plots. On the contrary, his theme is the

honourable and faithful love of youths and maidens his heroines, whether sentimental or worldly, are never immodest; his heroes at the worst are only foolish and reckless young sparks, while at the best they tend to be priggish.

It is noteworthy that in every one of the four plays the dénouement involves the foiling of some mercenary matrimonial design and the substitution of a true-love match in its stead, and that in two of them the evils of the duel are exposed. The moral purpose is, indeed, only too apparent, and it is not surprising that the Lying Lover was 'damned,' as Steele himself confesses, 'for its piety.' The comic vein is seen mainly in such minor characters as Humphrey Gubbin, a kind of earlier Tony Lumpkin, and Biddy Tipkin, in whom there is a clear suggestion of Sheridan's Lydia Languish.

There are but scanty notices of Steele's life during the time when the first three of his plays were written. He himself asserted that his name in 1702 was down in King William's last 'tablebook' for promotion; but the king's death deferred any such advancement for some years. Chemical experiments in search of the philosopher's stone seemed to have consumed some of his time and money, and he is believed to have been one of the earliest members of the Kit-Cat Club. In 1705 he married a Mrs Margaret Stretch, a widow with some West Indian property, who, however, died not long after the marriage. In 1706 the office of Gentleman Waiter to Prince George of Denmark, the consort of Queen Anne, was bestowed upon him; and in May of the next year he obtained the then important post of Gazetteer, or editor of the London Gazette. In September 1707 he was married again, this time to a Welsh lady of some fortune, named Mary Scurlock, who plays rather an important part in his biography thenceforth. She was evidently a somewhat peevish and capricious beauty, who delighted in finding fault with her not impeccable husband; and Steele seems to have led very much the same kind of life with his 'dear Prue,' as he called her, as his hero, the great Duke of Marlborough, had with the termagant Duchess. A collection of his letters, written to her both before and after marriage, which was published by Nichols the antiquary in 1787, gives a very intimate revelation of his character. It shows him the most affectionate and generous of men, guilty of too frequent convivial excesses, after the manner of the time, 'hopelessly sanguine, restless, and impulsive,' and well-nigh as great a spendthrift as Sheridan or Goldsmith. In spite of what must have been a fairly good income, he was always in debt, and sometimes in the hands of the bailiffs; but it would seem that Macaulay's picture of him 'dicing himself into a spunging-house and drinking himself into a fever' is somewhat of an exaggeration.

It was doubtless partly the journalistic opportunities possessed by Steele in his character of

Gazetteer that suggested to him the project of The Tatler, with which the periodical literature of England takes its rise. English journalism, of course, is older than the Tatler by more than halfa-century, beginning, as it practically does (for one need hardly go back to Nathaniel Butters), with the 'Mercuries'-Mercurius Aulicus, Politicus Britannicus, Anti-Britannicus, Pragmaticus, and so on-that came forth in shoals at the outbreak of the great Civil War. In the reign of Queen Anne there were in London plenty of newspapers, or rather meagre news-sheets, in addition to the official Gazetteer, which endeavoured to report the politics-and especially the foreign politics-of the day. The crazed upholsterer, for example, whom Addison sketched in some of the later issues of the Tatler had his poor brain turned by much speculation on the movements of Marlborough and Prince Eugene and the King of Sweden, as reported in the Postman, the Post-Boy, the Daily Courant, the Supplement, and the English Post. Besides these there was Defoe's Review, started in 1704, which may be described as the first of our organs of opinion on politics, giving, as it did, political criticism in addition to bare news. And, lastly, the obliging sheets which undertook, after the example of John Dunton's Athenian Mercury (1690-97), to resolve all the most nice and curious questions proposed by the ingenious of either sex,' had started that line of journalistic development which is still continued in the answers to correspondents' in provincial weekly newspapers.

The Tatler, however, was altogether different from these, and represented a departure which in the end was to issue, not in the modern newspaper, but in the magazine. Its descent from the news-sheets is shown by the scraps of political tidings which Steele borrowed from the Gazette for its earlier numbers; but its essential purpose from the first was the description and criticism of polite society in London. In the notice prefixed to the opening numbers, Steele describes himself as writing 'for the use of politic persons, who are so publick spirited as to neglect their own affairs to look into transactions of state.' Something is to be offered whereby 'such worthy and well-affected members of the commonwealth may be instructed, after their reading, what to think;' and there is to be something also 'which may be of entertainment to the fair sex,' in honour of whom the title of the paper is declared to be invented. The contents of the numbers are dated, according to their subjects, from the various social resorts about town. 'All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment,' for example, are 'under the article of White's Chocolate-House; Poetry under that of Will's Coffee-House; Learning under the title of Grecian; Foreign and Domestick News from St James's Coffee-House.' This last kind of intelligence was inserted to

give sober ballast and actuality to the paper; but, being evidently found superfluous, it was gradually excluded, and the Tatler became entirely a description and criticism of the manners and morals of the day.

.

The first number a double-columned folio sheet-appeared on the 12th of April 1709, and its successors came out regularly three times a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, at the price of a penny, until the 2nd of January 1711. They were written in the character of an imaginary Isaac Bickerstaff, a benevolent old bachelor, whose name, in the preceding year, had been made famous by Swift's employment of it in his mystification of the astrologer Partridge. Steele was now on terms of friendship with Swift, who for about eighteen months had been in London on ecclesiastical business, and a few of the papers in the Tatler are from the Vicar's caustic pen. A far more important contributor was Addison, whose assistance was acknowledged by Steele with characteristic and exaggerated generosity. The forty-two papers known or believed to have been written by him contain, doubtless, some of the finest thoughts and most finished writing in the Tatler; yet Steele spoke rather as a friend than a critic when he said, 'I fared like a distressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid: I was undone by my auxiliary; when I had once called him in I could not subsist without dependence on him.' Other contributors-but only to a very trifling extent were Congreve, Hughes, Ambrose Philips, and Harrison. Of the two hundred and seventyone numbers, Steele wrote about one hundred and eighty-eight himself, and twenty-five in cooperation with Addison; and he was editorially responsible, as we should now say, for the whole.

The contents of the Tatler, which were immediately republished in successive volumes as The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., are as various as the aspects of the life it professed to describe and criticise. In its numbers a dramatic criticism is followed by an imaginary character-sketch of a pair of beauties; a pathetic love-story or scene of domestic life is found alongside a gentle satire on fopperies in dress and conversation; a serious discourse on the evils of gaming and duelling is relieved by a picture of some odd frequenter of the coffee-houses or the Mall. In his self-imposed rôle of observer and censor of polite society, Mr Bickerstaff takes note of every social foible and vice and humour from the 'nice conduct of a clouded cane' or the exorbitant circumference of a hooped petticoat to the evils of loveless marriages for an establishment, and from the insipid affectations of the visitingday and the noisy utterance of responses in church to the arts of the well-bred cheat and the brutality of the bully. The treatment of these subjects is, as a rule, much less formal and elaborate than in the Spectator, where every paper

is a substantive essay, usually on a set theme. In its later days, indeed, the Tatler assumed this form; but its earlier numbers each dealt with three or four subjects, which of course were lightly and never exhaustively handled. As a consequence, while the Spectator has a more solid literary value, the Tatler gives us perhaps the more lively picture of the varied life of the period. Turning over its pages, one can see Betterton in Love for Love, and Wilkes as Sir Harry Wildair, and watch Tom Modely and Will Courtly tapping their snuff-boxes at White's or ogling Chloe and Clarinda in Pall Mall. The ladies, patched and powdered, trip to and from their sedan-chairs and coaches; the preacher at St Paul's or St Clement Dane's holds forth for or against Dr Sacheverell; at the Grecian the Templars discuss tragedy and epic according to the rules of Aristotle and Bossu; the Mohocks scour the ill-lit streets at night. The bluff country squire amuses the coffee-house by calling for a morning draught of ale and Dyer's newsletter; at the rich man's table the poor parson rises ruefully before the dessert, and in the long stage-coach journey to Bristol or Exeter the travellers are bored and jolted into a state of sullen ennui mitigated only by dread of the highwayman's pistol. Through it all, too, there comes an echo of the great events of the time-the tramp of the armies of Marlborough and Vendôme, and the distant thunder of the cannon of Malplaquet and Pultowa.

Steele's share in the Tatler is so marked and preponderant as to have caused the general association of the paper with his name, and without any disparagement of the invaluable aid given by Addison, it must be owned that the scope and main features of the venture were determined by Steele. To him, for one thing, its strong moral purpose was due. Steele was essentially a preacher, ever bent on the reformation of society, and in the Tatler he set himself not only with energy, but also with much tactical skill, to make assault on the many flagrant corruptions of the age. Conspicuous among his attacks were those on gaming and duelling, of which he says himself, with justifiable complaisance, 'that in spight of all the force of fashion and prejudice, in the face of all the world, I alone bewailed the condition of an English gentleman, whose fortune and life are at this day precarious, while his estate is liable to the demands of gamesters through a false sense of justice, and his life to the demands of duellists through a false sense of honour.'

But his best service to morality was rendered in his persistent efforts to raise the general estimate of women and the level of feminine culture and self-respect. Steele's chivalrous regard for women was one of the finest points in his character, and prompted perhaps his best and most famous sentence in eulogy of Aspasia (Lady Elizabeth Hastings), of whom he said in the 49th Tatler

that to love her was 'a liberal education.' In striving to rectify the position of what he called 'the fair sex,' he struck deep and straight at the worst evils of the day, for undoubtedly the frivolity of fashionable women in the late Stuart period was both cause and effect of the profligacy and brutality of the Rochesters and Sedleys and Mohuns. From the first, Steele made his appeal to women equally with men, and throughout he was never weary of urging on them the duty of acquiring mental culture, of taking a sensible view of life, and acquiring a proper conception of the seriousness and sanctity of marriage. His 'message' on this head is well summarised in a few sentences of the admirable 248th Tatler:

'It is with great indignation that I see such crowds of the female world lost to human society, and condemned to a laziness which makes life pass away with less relish than in the hardest labour. . . . Those who are in the quality of gentlewomen should propose to themselves some suitable method of passing away their time. This would furnish them with reflections and sentiments proper for the companions of reasonable men, and prevent the unnatural marriages which happen every day between the most accomplish'd women and the veriest oafs, the Were worthiest men and the most insignificant females. the general turn of women's education of another kind than it is at present, we should want one another for more reasons than we do as the world now goes.'

It was natural that a man who wrote thus should glorify all cleanly and kindly sentiments, as they are glorified in the Tatler. Sometimes indeed, in pathetic pictures of true lovers' woes like the stories of Philander and Chloe (No. 94), the sentiment is a trifle maudlin; but in the charming domestic pictures as a rule-in such masterpieces as the account of his father's death (No. 181), the description of the family where Mr Bickerstaff visits as an old friend (Nos. 95 and 114), and the relation of the little matrimonial jars of Tranquillus and Jenny (No. 85)-the pathos and tenderness of Steele are unerring. No man has written more simply and beautifully of the love of husband and wife and parents and children, and of the innocent joys of home.

Of the other features of Steele's work in the Tatler one need only notice the uniform kindliness of satire (it was Steele's creed that every satirist should be a good-natured man); the humour, broader and less refined than Addison's; the negligently easy style so free from sententiousness despite the moral burden of the content; and the justice of the literary and dramatic criticism. Steele, it is true, seldom or never analyses his judgments, and shows nothing that can be called a critical theory; but his judgments themselves are sound; his taste is good. He frankly admires what is admirable, and transcribes it generously for the reader's benefit. Hardly any one of our writers quotes Shakespeare so often.

Two months after the Tatler, to the great regret of the town, had been discontinued, there

appeared (1st March 1711) the more famous Spectator, which ran until the 6th of December in the next year. It came out every week-day, and, like its predecessor, cost a penny until the Stamp Act passed by Harley's Government caused its price to be doubled. It was a signal proof of the paper's popularity that it continued to exist, though with a diminished circulation, in spite of a tax which killed most of the journals of the day. Its highest circulation seems to have been 14,000 copies, and even after the half-penny tax had been laid on, 10,000 copies of it were sold on an average every day. The honours of the Spectator have fallen mainly to Addison; yet Steele's part in it was far from unimportant. Of the 555 numbers, 236 (signed with the letter R. or T.) were written by him, as against Addison's 274. Among the other contributors were Ambrose Philips (who signs X.), Pope (whose Messiah appeared in No. 378), Hughes, Tickell, Parnell, and Eusden. Steele, it should be added, had no hand in Addison's brief revival of the Spectator in June 1714.

The idea of the Spectator's Club, which is described in the second number, was Steele's invention, and from him consequently came not only the pictures of Sir Andrew Freeport, Will Honeycomb, and Captain Sentry, but also the first sketch of Sir Roger de Coverley, which was afterwards developed in the immortal series of papers forming Addison's masterpiece. To Steele also belong one or two of the most pleasing papers ordinarily reckoned in that series, containing (Nos. 113 and 118) the account of Sir Roger's hopeless passion for the widow; and to him, according to the best critical opinion, must not be attributed the degradation of the knight's character by showing him in an adventure with a woman of the town. The well-known tale of Inkle and Yarico, one of the oftenest-quoted examples of Steele's pathos, is to be found in the Spectator (No. 11); and there also, as first-rate specimens of his humour, criticism, and satire, we may instance the amusing narrative of the stage-coach journey with the Quaker and the brisk captain (No. 132), the account of Raphael's cartoons (Nos. 226 and 244), and the peculiarly vigorous and plain-spoken attack (No. 51) on the grossness of the stage. The steady moral purpose which had guided the Tatler is maintained in numerous papers on the evils of profaneness, profligacy, female frivolity, and even the blessedness of keeping out of debt. Poor Steele always preached much better than he practised, and it can well be believed that there was some truth in the ingenuous confession with which he closed the Tatler, that as 'severity of manners was absolutely necessary for him who would censure others,' the purpose of the paper was 'wholly lost' by his 'being so long understood as the author.'

To the Spectator, on the 12th of March 1713, succeeded the comparatively short-lived Guardian, the last of the three great periodicals of Queen Anne's reign. It also appeared daily at the price

of a penny, running till the 1st of October in the same year. Nearly half the papers were by Steele, rather less than a third by Addison, and most of the rest by Dr George (afterwards Bishop) Berkeley. The place of Isaac Bickerstaff and Mr Spectator is here taken by an equally imaginary Nestor Ironside, and the reader at the outset is informed that his chief entertainment will arise from what passes at the tea-table of My Lady Lizard, to whose family Mr Ironside stands in loco parentis. Briefly, the Guardian may be described as showing, with an inevitable lack of freshness, the same kind of contents and qualities as had made the fortune of its predecessor. The introduction of party politics spoiled it for its own day and for posterity. Always a very militant Whig, Steele had allowed hits at the Tories even in the Tatler; and Swift, when ratting to the side of Harley and St John in 1712, grumbled that he had been 'mighty impertinent of late in his Spectators. The greatly intensified rage of faction in the last years of Queen Anne had its effect on the Guardian, which was often little better than a party pamphlet.

In politics, indeed, Steele had become ever more and more deeply engaged during those stormy years which saw the downfall of Godolphin and Marlborough, the administration of Oxford and Bolingbroke, and the ending of the great war by the Peace of Utrecht. The dismissal of the Whigs had deprived him of his post of Gazetteer, but not of the commissionership of stamps which had been bestowed on him in 1710, and which he retained till 1713. His gradual breach with Swift, who in the former of these years had turned pamphleteer on the Tory side, is traceable in the Journal to Stella, which contains some graphic and caustic notices of his character and habits. He is governed by his wife,' we read, 'most abominably. I never saw her since I came, nor has he ever made me an invitation; either he does not, or is such a thoughtless Tisdall fellow that he never minds it. So what care I for his wit? for he is the worst company in the world till he has a bottle of wine in his head.' 'Once, when he was to have made one of a tavern party,' we are told that he 'came not, nor never did twice, since I knew him, to any appointment.' In 1713 the Guardian brought the two into open paper-warfare, Swift attacking Steele in the Examiner and also in a tract called The Importance of the Guardian considered. When the Guardian came to an end, Steele carried on his campaign against the Government in its successor, The Englishman (October 1713-February 1714), memorable only because its twenty-sixth number contains the account of Alexander Selkirk which is supposed to have given Defoe the hint for Robinson Crusoe. In January 1714 Steele published the pamphlet entitled The Crisis, and followed it up with The Lover and The Reader, two polemical periodicals which had the very shortest life. The climax was reached in his election to the Parliament of 1714,