If we turn now to the verse written by Steele in his young Oxford days, and within twelve months of the date of Addison's lines upon English poets, we have what Steele called The Procession.' It is the procession of those who followed to the grave the good Queen Mary, dead of small-pox, at the age of 32. Steele shared his friend Addison's delight in Milton, and had not, indeed, got beyond the sixth number of the Tatler before he compared the natural beauty and innocence of Milton's Adam and Eve with Dryden's treatment of their love. But the one man for whom Steele felt most enthusiasm was not to be sought through books, he was a living moulder of the future of the nation. Eagerly intent upon King William, the hero of the Revolution that secured our liberties, the young patriot found in him also the hero of his verse. Keen sense of the realities about him into which Steele had been born, spoke through the very first lines of this poem :

The days of man are doom'd to pain and strife,
Quiet and ease are foreign to our life;
No satisfaction is, below, sincere,

Pleasure itself has something that's severe.

Britain had rejoiced in the high fortune of King William, and now a mourning world attended his wife to the tomb. The poor were her first and deepest mourners, poor from many causes; and then Steele pictured, with warm sympathy, form after form of human suffering. Among those mourning poor were mothers who, in the despair of want, would have stabbed infants sobbing for their food,

But in the thought they stopp'd, their locks they tore,
Threw down the steel, and cruelly forbore.

The innocents their parents' love forgive,

Smile at their fate, nor know they are to live.

To the mysteries of such distress the dead queen penetrated, by her 'cunning to be 'good.' After the poor, marched the House of Commons in the funeral procession. Steele gave only two lines to it:

With dread concern, the awful Senate came,
Their grief, as all their passions, is the same.
The next Assembly dissipates our fears,
The stately, mourning throng of British Peers.

A factious intemperance then characterized debates of the Commons, while the House of Lords stood in the front of the Revolution, and secured the permanency of its best issues. Steele describes, as they pass, Ormond, Somers, Villars, who leads the horse of the dead queen, that heaves into big sighs when he would neigh'-the verse has in it crudity as well as warmth of youth-and then follow the funeral chariot, the jewelled mourners, and the ladies of the court,

Their clouded beauties speak man's gaudy strife,
The glittering miseries of human life.

I yet see, Steele adds, this queen passing to her coronation in the place whither she now is carried to her grave. On the way, through acclamations of her people, to receive

If we look from these serious strains of their youth to the literary expression of the gayer side of character in the two friends, we find Addison sheltering his taste for playful writing behind a Roman Wall of hexameter. For among his Latin poems in the Oxford Musa Anglicane are eighty or ninety lines of resonant Latin verse upon 'Machine Ges'ticulantes, anglice A Puppet-show.' Steele, taking life as he found it, and expressing mirth in his own way of conversation, wrote an English comedy, and took the word of a College friend that it was valueless. There were two paths in life then open to an English writer. One was the smooth and level way of patronage; the other a rough up-hill track for men who struggled in the service of the people. The way of patronage was honourable. The age had been made so very discerning by the Romans and the French that a true understanding of the beauties of literature was confined to the select few who had been taught what to admire. Fine writing was beyond the rude appreciation of the multitude. Had, therefore, the reading public been much larger than it was, men of fastidious taste, who paid as much deference to polite opinion as Addison did in his youth, could have expected only audience fit but few, and would have been without encouragement to the pursuit of letters unless patronage rewarded merit. The other way had charms only for the stout-hearted pioneer who foresaw where the road was to be made that now is the great highway of our literature. Addison went out into the world by the way of his time; Steele by the way of ours.

Addison, after the campaign of 1695, offered to the King the homage of a paper of verses on the capture of Namur, and presented them through Sir John Somers, then Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. To Lord Somers he sent with them a flattering dedicatory address. Somers, who was esteemed a man of taste, was not unwilling to 're'ceive the present of a muse unknown.' He asked Addison to call upon him, and became his patron. Charles Montagu, afterwards Earl of Halifax, critic and wit himself, shone also among the statesmen who were known patrons of letters. Also to him, who was a prince of patrons 'fed with soft dedication all day long,' Addison introduced himself. To him, in 1697, as it was part of his public fame to be a Latin scholar, Addison, also a skilful Latinist, addressed, in Latin, a paper of verses on the Peace of Ryswick. With Somers and Montagu for patrons, the young man of genius who wished to thrive might fairly commit himself to the service of the Church, for which he had been bred by his father; but Addison's tact and refinement promised to be serviceable to the State, and so it was that, as Steele tells us, Montagu made Addison a layman. 'His arguments

' were founded upon the general pravity and corruption of men of business, who wanted 'liberal education. And I remember, as if I had read the letter yesterday, that my Lord 'ended with a compliment, that, however he might be represented as no friend to the 'Church, he never would do it any other injury than keeping Mr. Addison out of it.' To the good offices of Montagu and Somers, Addison was indebted, therefore, in 1699, for a travelling allowance of £300 a-year. The grant was for his support while qualifying himself on the continent by study of modern languages, and otherwise, for diplomatic service. It dropped at the King's death, in the spring of 1702, and Addison was cast upon his own resources; but he throve, and lived to become an Under-Secretary of State in days that made Prior an Ambassador, and rewarded with official incomes Congreve, Rowe, Hughes, Philips, Stepney, and others. Throughout his honourable career prudence dictated to Addison more or less of dependence on the friendship of the strong. An honest friend of the popular cause, he was more ready to sell than give his pen to it; although the utmost reward would at no time have tempted him to throw his conscience into the bargain. The good word of Halifax obtained him from Godolphin, in 1704, the Government order for a poem on the Battle of Blenheim, with immediate earnest of payment for it in the office of a Commissioner of Appeal in the Excise worth £200 a-year. For this substantial reason Addison wrote the Campaign; and upon its success, he obtained the further reward of an Irish Under-secretaryship.

The Campaign is not a great poem. Reams of Campaigns would not have made Addison's name, what it now is, a household word among his countrymen. The Remarks 'on several Parts of Italy, &c.,' in which Addison followed up the success of his Campaign with notes of foreign travel, represent him visiting Italy as 'Virgil's Italy,' the land of the great writers in Latin, and finding scenery or customs of the people eloquent of them at every turn. He crammed his pages with quotation from Virgil and

b

Horace, Ovid and Tibullus, Propertius, Lucan, Juvenal and Martial, Lucretius, Statius, Claudian, Silius Italicus, Ausonius, Seneca, Phædrus, and gave even to his 'understand'ing age' an overdose of its own physic for all ills of literature. He could not see a pyramid of jugglers standing on each other's shoulders, without observing how it explained a passage in Claudian which shows that the Venetians were not the inventors of this trick. But Addison's short original accounts of cities and states that he saw are pleasant as well as sensible, and here and there, as in the space he gives to a report of St. Anthony's sermon to the fishes, or his short account of a visit to the opera at Venice, there are indications of the humour that was veiled, not crushed, under a sense of classical propriety. In his account of the political state of Naples and in other passages, there is mild suggestion also of the love of liberty, a part of the fine nature of Addison which had been slightly warmed by contact with the generous enthusiasm of Steele. In his poetical letter to Halifax written during his travels, Addison gave the sum of his prose volume when he told how he felt himself

-on classic ground.

For here the Muse so oft her harp has strung,
That not a mountain rears its head unsung;
Renown'd in verse each shady thicket grows,
And ev'ry stream in heav'nly numbers flows.

But he was writing to a statesman of the Revolution, who was his political patron, just then out of office, and propriety suggested such personal compliment as calling the Boyne a Tiber, and Halifax an improvement upon Virgil; while his heart was in the closing emphasis, also proper to the occasion, which dwelt on the liberty that gives their smile to the barren rocks and bleak mountains of Britannia's isle, while for Italy, rich in the unexhausted stores of nature, proud Oppression in her valleys reigns, and tyranny usurps her happy plains. Addison's were formal raptures, and he knew them to be so, when he wrote,

I bridle in my struggling Muse with pain,

That longs to launch into a bolder strain.

Richard Steele was not content with longing to be bold. Eager, at that turning point of her national life, to serve England with strength of arm, at least, if not with the good brains which he was neither encouraged nor disposed to value highly, Steele's patriotism impelled him to make his start in the world, not by the way of patronage, but by enlisting himself as a private in the Coldstream Guards. By so doing he knew that he offended a relation, and lost a bequest. As he said of himself afterwards, 'when he mounted a 'war-horse, with a great sword in his hand, and planted himself behind King William III. 'against Louis XIV., he lost the succession to a very good estate in the county of Wex'ford, in Ireland, from the same humour which he has preserved ever since, of preferring the state of his mind to that of his fortune.' Lord Cutts, the Colonel of the Regiment, made Steele his Secretary, and got him an Ensign's commission. It was then that he wrote his first book, the Christian Hero, of which the modest account given by Steele himself long afterwards, when put on his defence by the injurious violence of faction, is as follows: 'He first became an author when an Ensign of the Guards, a way of life ex'posed to much irregularity; and being thoroughly convinced of many things, of which 'he often repented, and which he more often repeated, he writ, for his own private use, 'a little book called the Christian Hero, with a design principally to fix upon his own 'mind a strong impression of virtue and religion, in opposition to a stronger propensity 'towards unwarrantable pleasures. This secret admiration was too weak; he therefore 'printed the book with his name, in hopes that a standing testimony against himself, and 'the eyes of the world (that is to say, of his acquaintance) upon him in a new light, would 'make him ashamed of understanding and seeming to feel what was virtuous, and living 'so contrary a life. Among his brother soldiers, and fresh from the Oxford worship of old classical models, the religious feeling that accompanies all true refinement, and that was indeed part of the English nature in him as in Addison, prompted Steele to write this book, in which he opposed to the fashionable classicism of his day a sound reflection that the heroism of Cato or Brutus had far less in it of true strength, and far less adaptation to the needs of life, than the unfashionable Christian Heroism set forth by the Sermon on the Mount.

According to the second title of this book it is an Argument, proving that no Prin'ciples but those of Religion are sufficient to make a Great Man.' It is addressed to Lord Cutts in a dedication dated from the Tower-Yard, March 23, 1701, and is in four chapters, of which the first treats of the heroism of the ancient world, the second connects man with his Creator, by the Bible Story and the Life and Death of Christ, the third defines the Christian as set forth by the character and teaching of St. Paul, applying the definition practically to the daily life of Steele's own time. In the last chapter he descends from the consideration of those bright incentives to a higher life, and treats of the ordinary passions and interests of men, the common springs of action (of which, he says, the chief are Fame and Conscience) which he declares to be best used and improved when joined with religion; and here all culminates in a final strain of patriotism, closing with the character of King William, 'that of a glorious captain, and (what he much more ' values than the most splendid titles) that of a sincere and honest man.' This was the character of William which, when, in days of meaner public strife, Steele quoted it years afterwards in the Spectator, he broke off painfully and abruptly with a

tator.

Steele's Christian Hero obtained many readers. Its fifth edition was appended to the first collection of the Tatler into volumes, at the time of the establishment of the SpecThe old bent of the English mind was strong in Steele, and he gave unostentatiously a lively wit to the true service of religion, without having spoken or written to the last day of his life a word of mere religious cant. One officer thrust a duel on him for his zeal in seeking to make peace between him and another comrade. Steele, as an officer, then, or soon afterwards, made a Captain of Fusiliers, could not refuse to fight, but stood on the defensive; yet in parrying a thrust his sword pierced his antagonist, and the danger in which he lay quickened that abiding detestation of the practice of duelling, which caused Steele to attack it in his plays, in his Tatler, in his Spectator, with persistent energy.

Of the Christian Hero his companions felt, and he himself saw, that the book was too didactic. It was indeed plain truth out of Steele's heart, but an air of superiority, freely allowed only to the professional man teaching rules of his own art, belongs to a too didactic manner. Nothing was more repugnant to Steele's nature than the sense of this. He had defined the Christian as 'one who is always a benefactor, with the mien of a receiver.' And that was his own character, which was, to a fault, more ready to give than to receive, more prompt to ascribe honour to others than to claim it for himself. To right himself, Steele wrote a light-hearted comedy, The Funeral, or Grief à la Mode; but at the core even of that lay the great earnestness of his censure against the mockery and mummery of grief that should be sacred; and he blended with this, in the character of Lawyer Puzzle, a protest against mockery of truth and justice by the intricacies of the law. The liveliness of this comedy made Steele popular with the wits; and the inevitable touches of the author's patriotism brought on him also the notice of the Whigs. Party men might, perhaps, already feel something of the unbending independence that was in Steele himself, as in this play he made old Lord Brumpton teach it to his son :

'But be thou honest, firm, impartial;

Let neither love, nor hate, nor faction move thee;
Distinguish words from things, and men from crimes.'

King William, perhaps, had he lived, could fairly have recognized in Steele the social form of that sound mind which in Defoe was solitary. In a later day it was to Steele a proud recollection that his name, to be provided for, was in the last table-book ever worn by the glorious and immortal William III.'

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The Funeral, first acted with great success in 1702, was followed in the next year by The Tender Husband, to which Addison contributed some touches, for which Addison wrote a Prologue, and which Steele dedicated to Addison, who would be surprised,' he said, 'in the midst of a daily and familiar conversation, with an address which bears so 'distant an air as a public dedication.' Addison and his friend were then thirty-one years old. Close friends when boys, they are close friends now in the prime of manhood. It was after they had blended wits over the writing of this comedy that Steele expressed his wish for a work, written by both, which should serve as THE MONUMENT to their most

happy friendship. When Addison and Steele were amused together with the writing of this comedy, Addison, having lost his immediate prospect of political employment, and his salary too, by King William's death in the preceding year, had come home from his travels. On his way home he had received, at Amsterdam, news of his father's death. As his father's eldest son, he had, on his return to England, family affairs to arrange, and probably some money to receive. Though attached to a party that lost power at the accession of Queen Anne, and waiting for new employment, Addison,--who had declined the Duke of Somerset's over-condescending offer of a hundred a year and all expenses as travelling tutor to his son, the Marquis of Hertford-was able, while lodging in a garret in the Haymarket, to associate in London with the men by whose friendship he hoped to rise, and was, with Steele, admitted into the select society of wits, and men of fashion who affected wit and took wits for their comrades, in the Kitcat Club.] When in 1704 Marlborough's victory at Blenheim revived the Whig influence, the suggestion of Halifax to Lord Treasurer Godolphin caused Addison to be applied to for his poem of the Campaign. It was after the appearance of this poem that Steele's play was printed, with the dedication to his friend, in which he said, 'I look upon my intimacy with you as one of 'the most valuable enjoyments of my life. At the same time I make the town no ill com'pliment for their kind acceptance of this comedy, in acknowledging that it has so far 'raised my opinion of it, as to make me think it no improper memorial of an inviolable 'Friendship. I should not offer it to you as such, had I not been very careful to avoid 'every thing that might look ill-natured, immoral, or prejudicial to what the better part of 'mankind hold sacred and honourable.'

This was the common ground between the friends. Collier's 'Short View of the Pro'faneness and Immorality of the English Stage' had been published in 1698; it attacked a real evil, if not always in the right way, and Congreve's reply to it had been a failure. Steele's comedies with all their gaiety and humour were wholly free from the garnish of oaths and unwholesome expletives which his contemporaries seemed to think essential to stage emphasis. Each comedy of his was based on seriousness, as all sound English wit has been since there have been writers in England. The gay manner did not conceal all the earnest thoughts that might jar with the humour of the town; and thus Steele was able to claim, by right of his third play, the honour of being the only English 'dramatist who had had a piece damned for its piety.'

This was the Lying Lover, produced in 1704, an adaptation from Corneille in which we must allow that Steele's earnestness in upholding truth and right did cause him to spoil the comedy. The play was afterwards re-adapted by Foote as the Liar, and in its last form, with another change or two, has been revived lately with great success. It is worth while to note how Steele dealt with the story of this piece. Its original is a play by Alarcon, which Corneille at first supposed to have been a play by Lope de Vega. Alarcon, or, to give him his full style, Don Juan Ruiz de Alarcon y Mendoza, was a Mexican-born Spaniard of a noble family which had distinguished itself in Mexico from the time of the conquest, and took its name of Alarcon from a village in New Castile. The poet was a humpbacked dwarf, a thorough, but rather haughty, Spanish gentleman, poet and wit, who wrote in an unusually pure Spanish style; a man of the world, too, who came to Spain in or about the year 1622, and held the very well-paid office of reporter to the Royal Council of the Indies. When Alarcon, in 1634, was chosen by the Court to write a festival drama, and, at the same time, publishing the second part of his dramatic works, vehemently reclaimed plays for which, under disguised names, some of his contemporaries had taken credit to themselves, there was an angry combination against him, in which Lope de Vega, Gongora, and Quevedo were found taking part. All that Alarcon wrote was thoroughly his own, but editors of the 17th century boldly passed over his claims to honour, and distributed his best works among plays of other famous writers, chiefly those of Rojas and Lope de Vega. This was what deceived Corneille, and caused him to believe and say that Alarcon's la Verdad sospechosa, on which, in 1642, he founded his Menteur, was a work of Lope de Vega's. Afterwards Corneille learnt how there had been in this matter lying among editors. He gave to Alarcon the honour due, and thenceforth it is chiefly by this play that Alarcon has been remembered out of Spain. In Spain, when in 1852 Don Juan Hartzenbusch edited Alarcon's comedies for the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, he had to remark on the unjust neglect of that good author in