to find a witty passage in Dickens or Thackeray with a double entendre in it; it would puzzle any man to find a funny passage in Smollett without one.

Sir Roger is peculiarly the creation of Steele, though greatly developed by Addison; they worked on him almost alternately, Steele writing one-third of the papers and Addison nearly two-thirds; Budgell and Tickell wrote three or four. The unfortunate paper, No. 410, must either have been written by Steele at a time when he could write to his wife this rather singular letter,

"DEAR PRUE,-Sober or not, I am ever yours,

"Feb. 16, 1716"

"RICHARD STEELE."

or by Tickell; we are unlikely to find out the truth now, but we are almost afraid that we must father it on Steele.

Possibly a short account of Sir Richard Steele himself claims our first attention. For one who knows the real life of Sir Richard Steele a dozen know the imaginary life of Sir Roger de Coverley; a vague impression which seems to prevail in the cheap literature of twenty years ago is, that Steele was a trooper in the Life Guards, perniciously given to drink, who by some mysterious means got into the House of Commons and was promptly expelled. The cheap literature of the present day, written as it is by scholars and gentlemen, is somehow scarcely fair to him; let us try to be so, never omitting to mention his faults, or on the other hand, to sneer at his virtues, though the temptation to do the latter is strong at times. He was particularly connected with many great men, literary and other: standing as he does between two of our greatest heroes of literature, he is in an unenviable position. From all that we can gather, he was as virtuous regarding women as Swift himself, though he had neither a Stella nor a Vanessa; with regard to liquor, he found himself in excellent company, including Addison, and at one time Johnson. It was a drinking age, and he drank. Steele's drinking, on examination, seems to have been tolerably harmless, as far as such a vice can be harmless; it only led to an illimitable and almost inconceivable muddle of his pecuniary affairs. Yet he left the world when the world was in his debt, and the worst vices he exhibited were those of silly profusion in private matters, and a habit of pig-headed stupid honesty in public ones. Steele was an Irishman. It is no use disguising the fact, but he was as much an Irishman as Swift, Curran, Grattan, Wellington, Palmerston, or O'Connell. It is perfectly idle to write at the end of your advertisements "No Irish need apply;" the Irish always do apply; and so persistently that they generally get listened to, after the manner of the importunate widow; once put an Irishman

into a place, however, and you find that he is about the most diligent and conscientious man you can get; shrewd, mobile, and dependent, he will do your work as well as any Englishman or Scotchman. When he has to originate work for himself the genius of his nation is apt to lead him into flights of fancy, which are not easily followed by pigheaded English or Scotch; though even the other two nations have done some rather alarming things in the financial way with other people's money. Steele was an Irishman, so he was always looking for support elsewhere; and an Irishman again in his habit of indomitable pluck. No insult or disappointments troubled him long; he was up again to his work as soon as he was out of the last trouble. In another point, that about women, he was the true Irishman; he pinned his faith and love on one woman, and he tenderly courted her to the day of his death. She was very stupid and very ill-tempered at times, but made no difference to him: she certainly had, like the late Mrs. Pecksniff," a little property," but it is hard to believe that it had much influence with him. If he had been the reckless fellow which some have tried to make him, he would have shaken himself free from her, instead of always praying her to stay with him and merely keep her temper; it is not much for a man to ask, but we are afraid that he asked it in vain sometimes.

He was born, as some say, in 1671, at Dublin, the son of a barrister of good family. His mother was a Gascoigne, of whom we know very little. He lost his father very early-a loss which has produced possibly one of the most perfect pieces of writing known: it is familiar to most, but so exquisite that we must ask our readers to allow us to write it down again:

"The first sorrow I ever knew was upon the death of my father, at which time I was not quite five years of age; but was rather amazed at what all the house meant, than possessed with a real understanding why nobody was willing to play with me. I remember I went into the room where the body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a beating the coffin, and calling 'Papa!' for, I know not how, I had some slight idea that he was locked up there. My mother catched me in her arms-almost smothered me in her embraces-and told me in a flood of tears, 'Papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under ground, whence he could never come to us again."

Enough. "Shall I go on ?" says Sterne, in his death of Le Fevre, "No." We quite agree with Mr. Sterne; Le Fevre is pathetic, and the dead donkey is tolerable, but Mr. Sterne never wrote anything comparable to this story of the battledore and the coffin, for the simple reason that he had not got it in him.

Steele went to the Charterhouse, now removed into the Surrey

hills to name the wonderful men who have come from Charterhouse would require quite as large a volume as that which is required to give the school roll of Harrow or Eton. On comparing notes, one discovers that a vast number of the scholars of all the great public schools have succeeded in making a considerable mess in the councils of the nation; Sir Richard Steele did his best in this respect, but only succeeded in making a rather tolerable mess of his own affairs, the nation being left comparatively uninjured. Here he made the acquaintance of Addison, and formed a life-long friendship, that is, until they fell out late in life and used extremely strong language to one another. Doctor Johnson, by a (for him) rather foolish mistake, makes Addison speak of Steele as "little Dicky;" the fact being that the "little Dicky" spoken of by Addison was a dwarfish actor, who played Gomez in Dryden's 'Spanish Friar.' This long friendship between Steele and Addison lasted nearly through everything; they were not enemies at Addison's death, though Steele had tried his gentle temper rather sorely at one time; he borrowed a thousand pounds of him, and that he paid; he then borrowed a hundred pounds, and the use he made of it exasperated Addison so that he recovered it by law. Still the friendship went on. Lord Macaulay, in accounting for this action of Addison's, finds no excuse for it in his own mind, and so creates what he confesses to be a purely imaginary story; his lordship need not have written a scene from a novel to account for it. The simple fact is that Addison, who was very poor, thought that Steele could pay him, but would not; he therefore gave Steele a very proper lesson, though we are of opinion that he forced Steele to rob Peter in order to pay Paul. Steele and Mr. Micawber have a great deal in common as regards their monetary transactions; the difference between them is that Steele always had some money, and Mr. Micawber never had any.

From the Charterhouse Steele went to Oxford, and like his more famous schoolfellow, Thackeray, left Oxford, as Thackeray did Cambridge, without taking a degree. He wrote a comedy at Oxford, and some verses of his are dated 1695, which would be certainly damned for the Newdegate in any ordinary year. They are certainly incomparably inferior to Heber's Palestine,' or Mr. Edwin Arnold's Belshazzar.' We doubt if the theatre at Oxford, with all its loyalty, would stand the following lines, even about Queen Victoria:

"I see her yet, nature and fortune's pride.

A sceptre graced her hand, a king her side;
Celestial youth and beauty did impart
Ecstatic visions to the coldest heart."

Steele was not a poet; he thought that he would like to be a soldier, and he went as cadet in the Horse Guards. His position was prac

tically that of a trooper until he had thoroughly learned his duty; but then his next move out of the ranks would have been not corporal or non-commissioned officer, but ensign, or commissioned officer; therefore it is somewhat incorrect to say that Sir Richard Steele, M.P., was ever a trooper; he had to do stable, guard, and such duties with troopers, but it is very doubtful if he ever messed with them: any man who has been in certain services knows, as well as we do ourselves, the vast difference between a cadet and a trooper; the one is received in the drawing-room, the other never passes the kitchen; what were the rules of the service in Steele's time we do not know. Likewise, from comparing various biographies of him, we remain completely puzzled as to the various regiments in which he served. He certainly enlisted as a volunteer in the Life Guards, which consists of cavalry. Then we find him in the Coldstreams, which is now a foot regiment, under Lord Cutts. Then he was ensign, and afterwards captain, in the Fusiliers, under Lord Lucas, at which time he was secretary to Lord Cutts, "the vainest old fool alive," says Swift. Did Lord Cutts or his secretary write

"Only tell her that I love,

Leave the rest to her and fate;
Some kind planet from above
May perhaps her pity move.

Lovers on their stars must wait.

Only tell her that I love.

"Why, oh, why should I despair?
Mercy's pictured in her eye.
If she once vouchsafes to hear,
Welcome hope and welcome fear.
She's too good to let me die;

Why, oh, why should I despair?"

We suspect that this very pretty balderdash is straight from the noble hand of Lord Cutts. Steele, when, like Silas Wegg, he "dropped into poetry," never wrote such extremely pretty verses or such illimitable

nonsense.

At this time Steele seems to have been divided between his extreme satisfaction at the enjoyment of the pleasures of this wicked world, and a very strong opinion that there was a next one. He was very much dissatisfied with himself: he was very fond of eating, drinking and sleeping, but he felt that there was something higher and nobler than the mere discharge of physical functions in a way which produced the contentment of a fattening hog, in clean straw, in a warm sty. When men get into this state of mind they mostly seek a formula, by which to express, to themselves firstly, and to God afterwards, their desire of a higher life. Men generally seize the first

formula which comes to their hand-a fact by no means unknown to our friends the Jesuits or to our friends the Methodists; the former would lead a man into slavery as dark as that of Comte (we are only quoting Mr. John Stuart Mill), the latter would leave a man nearly perfect political freedom. It was rather fortunate for Ensign Steele that when he found himself "awakened" there was not a Romish priest handy; he was perfectly ready for one, and a great convert has been lost. Sensitive and-we will not write the second epithetnatures like his are utterly abroad without religion. Steele took to religion with the formulas which were most familiar to him, and what is more, he stuck to his religion with all his faults. The key to the whole man's life is, that he created a high standard for himself, and was eternally vexed that he could not attain it. Addison never erected any particular standard; he could not help being good; Becky Sharp says. that anybody could be good with three thousand a year. We doubt that, because we have seen a great many people who were extremely naughty on four times the money. But we say that Addison was good, because he had a perfect temper, unswerving honesty, and a heart and soul entirely incapable of wrong-doing in any shape or form. A world of Addisons would be so perfect that any improvement on it would become an unnecessary impertinence: poor Ensign Steele had Addison and William the Third in his mind's eye when he wrote 'The Christian Hero' and dedicated it-to Lord Cutts!

The effect of this work was not by any means encouraging. We knew an old lady once, who, in a fit of absence of mind, said grace before sitting down to a rubber of whist. A traditional sporting parson is said to have given out from the reading-desk, "the Collect for the Sunday next before the Derby." Steele's 'Christian Hero' was received by the mess of the Fusiliers very much as though a gentleman were to propose to read prayers at Tattersall's the night before the St. Leger. It was all as good as-as-Addison, but it would not do; the fact was that he was not in a position to preach; his comrades might quote against him:

"Some parsons are like finger-posts,

I've often heard them say.

They never go to heaven themselves,
But only point the way."

A doctor who will not take his own medicine inspires little confidence; but when a man preaches and does not practise he does an infinity of positive harm. There is no set of men who have served the state better, or done more to raise the moral tone of their associates, than the religious soldier, such as a Gardiner, a Havelock, or a Lieutenant Willoughby; but then they showed the fruit of their teaching in their own lives; we fear that Steele did not.