Steele. report could be given by his masters and ushers of that thick-set, square-faced, black-eyed, soft-hearted little Irish Thackeray on boy. He was very idle. He was whipped deservedly a great number of times. Though he had very good parts of his own, he got other boys to do his lessons for him, and only took just as much trouble as should enable him to scuffle through his exercises, and by good fortune escape the flogging block. One hundred and fifty years after, I have myself inspected, but only as an amateur, that instrument of righteous torture still existing, and in occasional use, in a secluded private apartment of the old Charterhouse school; and have no doubt it is the very counterpart, if not the ancient and interesting machine itself, at which poor Dick Steele submitted himself to the tormentors. "Besides being very kind, laży, and good-natured, this boy went invariably into debt with the tartwoman; ran out of bounds, and entered into pecuniary, or rather promissory, engagements with the neighboring lollipop venders and piemen-exhibited an early fondness for drinking mum and sack, and borrowed from all his comrades who had money to lend. I have no sort of authority for the statements here made of Steele's early life; but if the child is father of the man, the father of young Steele of Merton, who left Oxford without taking a degree, and entered into the Life Guards-the father of Captain Steele of Lucas's Fusiliers, who got his company through the patronage of my Lord Cutts-the father of Mr. Steele, the Commissioner of Stamps, the editor of the Gazette, the Tatler, and Spectator, the expelled member of Parliament, and the author of the Tender Husband and the Conscious Lovers, if man and boy resembled each other, Dick Steele, the schoolboy, must have been one of the most generous, good-for-nothing, amiable little creatures that ever conjugated the verb tupto, I beat, tuptomai, I am whipped, in any school in Great Britain. "Almost every gentleman who does me the honor to hear me will remember that the very greatest character which he has seen in the course of his life, and the person to whom he has looked up with the greatest wonder and reverence, was the head boy at his school. . . . I have seen great men in my time, but never such a great one as that head boy of my childhood; we all thought he must be Prime Minister, and I was disappointed on meeting him in after life to find he was no more than six feet high. "Dick Steele, the Charterhouse gownboy, contracted such an admiration in the years of his childhood, and retained it faithfully through his life. Through the school, and through the world, whithersoever his strange fortune led this erring, wayward, affectionate creature, Joseph Addison was always his head boy. Addison wrote his exercises. Addison did his best themes. He ran on Addison's messages; fagged for him and blacked his shoes; to be in Joe's company was Dick's greatest pleasure; and he took a sermon or a caning from his monitor with the most boundless reverence, acquiescence, and affection." Leaving school, Steele went to Oxford, then entered the army, and ultimately rose to the rank of captain. He wrote a religious work, The Christian Hero, by which he complained he gained a reputation for piety which he found it difficult to live up to. To counteract this, and to" enliven his character," he wrote a com Steele founds 1709. edy called The Funeral (1701). After pro- "The Tatler," ducing several other plays, Steele drifted into journalism, and after writing for a paper called The Gazette, founded The Tatler. After a few weeks. * Thackeray's "English Humorists," p. 200. Addison became a contributor, but even before this the success of the paper was assured. The Tatler was discontinued in 1711 to make way for The Spectator, a joint enterprise of Addison and Steele. This ran until 1713, when it was succeeded by The Guardian, the last periodical for which the friends worked together. Steele was extravagant, good-natured, and fond of fine clothes. When he had money he spent it like a prince, and so did not have it long. He "outlived his wife, his income, his health, almost everything but his kind heart. That ceased to trouble him in 1729, when he died, worn out and almost forgotten by his contemporaries, in Wales, where he had the remnant of a property." "'* Addison. Joseph Addison (1672-1719) was more reserved, shy, and dignified than his rollicking friend Dick Steele. He was the son of a clergyman, and he had himself so much of the clerical gravity that a contemporary called him "a parson in a tyewig." Like Steele he went to Oxford after leaving the Charterhouse school, but unlike Steele won a scholarship by some Latin verses. Like most of the authors of the time Addison was obliged to depend on patronage for a living. He was granted a pension in return for a laudatory poem. on the Peace of Ryswick (1697). This he lost on the king's death (William III., 1702), and in the following year he returned to England from a Continental tour, with no certain prospects. Poetry came a second time to his aid. He made a great hit by a poem called The Campaign, in which he celebrated the Duke of Marlborough's great victory at Blenheim, and was appointed to a government position. In 1713 he brought out his tragedy of Cato, which gave him a prodigious reputation, but, as we know, he had before this begun a work of even more permanent importance in his contributions * Thackeray's "English Humorists," p. 210. to the Tatler and Spectator. As an essayist, Addison possessed a finer art than that of Steele, yet it was Steele who first suggested what Addison brought to perfection. This was the case with the famous character of Sir Roger de Coverley, the typical country gentleman of the time. Both Steele and Addison wrote Addison and Steele Social Reformers. as moralists, and in their work one sees that the reaction against the excesses of the Restoration had already begun. Their method as reformers is in keeping with the spirit of the time. They did not assail vice and folly with indignant eloquence, but, with delicate tact and unvarying good humor, they gently made them ridiculous. Addison regretted the emptiness and frivolity of the fashionable women, and set himself to bring a new interest into their lives. "There are none," he says, "to whom this paper will be more useful than to the female world," and his direct appeal to the women readers is memorable in the history of the literature. Such papers as "The Fine Lady's Journal," "The Exercise of the Fan," "The Dissection of a Beau's Head," and of a "Coquette's Heart," with their minute observation and kindly satire of manners, are highly representative. In "Ned Softly," Addison laughs at the literary doctrines of the day, showing us against a background of club life a "very pretty poet," who studies the approved maxims of poetry before sitting down to write, and who spends a whole hour in adapting the turn of the words in two lines. Finally, we see in these early eighteenth century essays the forerunners of a new art. The faithful description of life and manners, the feeling for character The Essay the Novel. and incident, show that the essays have only Precursor of the to be thrown into the form of a continued narrative to give us the modern novel. Before the eigh * "Spectator," No 10. Read this entire paper. teenth century was half over, Samuel Richardson and Joseph Fielding had continued in the novel that paint. ing of contemporary life which the essayist had begun. The character and work of Addison cannot be better summed up than in the famous tribute of Macaulay, who calls him" the unsullied statesman; the acMacaulay on Addison. complished scholar, the great satirist who alone knew how to use ridicule without abusing it; who, without inflicting a wound, affected a great social reform, and who reconciled wit and virtue after a long and painful separation, during which wit had been led astray by profligacy and virtue by fanaticism.” * SELECTIONS FROM ADDISON. NED SOFTLY THE POET. Idem inficeto est inficetior rure, Simul poemata attigit; neque idem unquam Possis - Catul. I yesterday came hither about two hours before the company generally make their appearance, with a design to read over all the newspapers; but upon my sitting down, I was accosted by Ned Softly, who saw me from a corner in the other end of the room, where I found he had been writing something. Mr. Bickerstaff,” says he, "I observe by a late paper of yours, that you and I are just of a humour; for you must know, of all impertinences there is nothing which I so much hate as news. I never read a gazette in my life; and never trouble my head about our armies, whether they win or lose; or in what part of the world they lie encamped." Without giving me time to reply, he drew a paper of verses out of his pocket, telling me that he had something which would entertain me more agreeably; and that he would desire my judgment upon every line, for that we had time enough before us until the company came in. Ned Softly is a very pretty poet, and a great admirer of easy lines. * Macaulay, Essay on "Life and Writings of Addison.” |