Chapter I: Introduction (1)

When Richard Steele, in number 555 of his 'Spectator', signed its last paper and named those who had most helped him

'to keep up the spirit of so long and approved a performance,'

he gave chief honour to one who had on his page, as in his heart, no name but Friend. This was

'the gentleman of whose assistance I formerly boasted in the Preface
and concluding Leaf of my 'Tatlers'. I am indeed much more proud of
his long-continued Friendship, than I should be of the fame of being
thought the author of any writings which he himself is capable of
producing. I remember when I finished the 'Tender Husband', I told him
there was nothing I so ardently wished, as that we might some time or
other publish a work, written by us both, which should bear the name
of THE MONUMENT, in Memory of our Friendship.'

Why he refers to such a wish, his next words show. The seven volumes of the 'Spectator', then complete, were to his mind The Monument, and of the Friendship it commemorates he wrote,

'I heartily wish what I have done here were as honorary to that sacred
name as learning, wit, and humanity render those pieces which I have
taught the reader how to distinguish for his.'

So wrote Steele; and the 'Spectator' will bear witness how religiously his friendship was returned. In number 453, when, paraphrasing David's Hymn on Gratitude, the 'rising soul' of Addison surveyed the mercies of his God, was it not Steele whom he felt near to him at the Mercy-seat as he wrote

Thy bounteous hand with worldly bliss
Has made my cup run o'er,
And in a kind and faithful Friend
Has doubled all my store?

The _Spectator_, Steele-and-Addison's _Spectator_, is a monument befitting the most memorable friendship in our history. Steele was its projector, founder, editor, and he was writer of that part of it which took the widest grasp upon the hearts of men. His sympathies were with all England. Defoe and he, with eyes upon the future, were the truest leaders of their time. It was the firm hand of his friend Steele that helped Addison up to the place in literature which became him. It was Steele who caused the nice critical taste which Addison might have spent only in accordance with the fleeting fashions of his time, to be inspired with all Addison's religious earnestness, and to be enlivened with the free play of that sportive humour, delicately whimsical and gaily wise, which made his conversation the delight of the few men with whom he sat at ease. It was Steele who drew his friend towards the days to come, and made his gifts the wealth of a whole people. Steele said in one of the later numbers of his _Spectator_, No. 532, to which he prefixed a motto that assigned to himself only the part of whetstone to the wit of others,

'I claim to myself the merit of having extorted excellent productions
from a person of the greatest abilities, who would not have let them
appear by any other means.'

There were those who argued that he was too careless of his own fame in unselfish labour for the exaltation of his friend, and, no doubt, his rare generosity of temper has been often misinterpreted. But for that Addison is not answerable. And why should Steele have defined his own merits? He knew his countrymen, and was in too genuine accord with the spirit of a time then distant but now come, to doubt that, when he was dead, his whole life's work would speak truth for him to posterity.

The friendship of which this work is the monument remained unbroken from boyhood until death. Addison and Steele were schoolboys together at the Charterhouse. Addison was a dean's son, and a private boarder; Steele, fatherless, and a boy on the foundation. They were of like age. The register of Steele's baptism, corroborated by the entry made on his admission to the Charterhouse (which also implies that he was baptized on the day of his birth) is March 12, 1671, Old Style; New Style, 1672. Addison was born on May-day, 1672. Thus there was a difference of only seven weeks.

Steele's father according to the register, also named Richard, was an attorney in Dublin. Steele seems to draw from experience--although he is not writing as of himself or bound to any truth of personal detail--when in No. 181 of the 'Tatler' he speaks of his father as having died when he was not quite five years of age, and of his mother as 'a very beautiful woman, of a noble spirit.' The first Duke of Ormond is referred to by Steele in his Dedication to the 'Lying Lover' as the patron of his infancy; and it was by this nobleman that a place was found for him, when in his thirteenth year, among the foundation boys at the Charterhouse, where he first met with Joseph Addison. Addison, who was at school at Lichfield in 1683-4-5, went to the Charterhouse in 1686, and left in 1687, when he was entered of Queen's College, Oxford. Steele went to Oxford two years later, matriculating at Christ Church, March 13, 1689-90, the year in which Addison was elected a Demy of Magdalene. A letter of introduction from Steele, dated April 2, 1711, refers to the administration of the will of 'my uncle Gascoigne, to whose bounty I owe a liberal education.' This only representative of the family ties into which Steele was born, an 'uncle' whose surname is not that of Steele's mother before marriage, appears, therefore, to have died just before or at the time when the 'Spectator' undertook to publish a sheetful of thoughts every morning, and--Addison here speaking for him--looked forward to

'leaving his country, when he was summoned out of it, with the secret
satisfaction of thinking that he had not lived in vain.'

To Steele's warm heart Addison's friendship stood for all home blessings he had missed. The sister's playful grace, the brother's love, the mother's sympathy and simple faith in God, the father's guidance, where were these for Steele, if not in his friend Addison?

Addison's father was a dean; his mother was the sister of a bishop; and his ambition as a schoolboy, or his father's ambition for him, was only that he should be one day a prosperous and pious dignitary of the Church. But there was in him, as in Steele, the genius which shaped their lives to its own uses, and made them both what they are to us now. Joseph Addison was born into a home which the steadfast labour of his father, Lancelot, had made prosperous and happy. Lancelot Addison had earned success. His father, Joseph's grandfather, had been also a clergyman, but he was one of those Westmoreland clergy of whose simplicity and poverty many a joke has been made. Lancelot got his education as a poor child in the Appleby Grammar School; but he made his own way when at College; was too avowed a Royalist to satisfy the Commonwealth, and got, for his zeal, at the Restoration, small reward in a chaplaincy to the garrison at Dunkirk. This was changed, for the worse, to a position of the same sort at Tangier, where he remained eight years. He lost that office by misadventure, and would have been left destitute if Mr. Joseph Williamson had not given him a living of £120 a-year at Milston in Wiltshire. Upon this Lancelot Addison married Jane Gulstone, who was the daughter of a Doctor of Divinity, and whose brother became Bishop of Bristol. In the little Wiltshire parsonage Joseph Addison and his younger brothers and sisters were born. The essayist was named Joseph after his father's patron, afterwards Sir Joseph Williamson, a friend high in office. While the children grew, the father worked. He showed his ability and loyalty in books on West Barbary, and Mahomet, and the State of the Jews; and he became one of the King's chaplains in ordinary at a time when his patron Joseph Williamson was Secretary of State. Joseph Addison was then but three years old. Soon afterwards the busy father became Archdeacon of Salisbury, and he was made Dean of Lichfield in 1683, when his boy Joseph had reached the age of 11. When Archdeacon of Salisbury, the Rev. Lancelot Addison sent Joseph to school at Salisbury; and when his father became Dean of Lichfield, Joseph was sent to school at Lichfield, as before said, in the years 1683-4-5. And then he was sent as a private pupil to the Charterhouse. The friendship he there formed with Steele was ratified by the approval of the Dean. The desolate boy with the warm heart, bright intellect, and noble aspirations, was carried home by his friend, at holiday times, into the Lichfield Deanery, where, Steele wrote afterwards to Congreve in a Dedication of the 'Drummer',

'were things of this nature to be exposed to public view, I could show
under the Dean's own hand, in the warmest terms, his blessing on the
friendship between his son and me; nor had he a child who did not
prefer me in the first place of kindness and esteem, as their father
loved me like one of them.'

Addison had two brothers, of whom one traded and became Governor of Fort George in India, and the other became, like himself, a Fellow of Magdalene College, Oxford. Of his three sisters two died young, the other married twice, her first husband being a French refugee minister who became a Prebendary of Westminster. Of this sister of Addison's, Swift said she was 'a sort of wit, very like him. I was not fond of her.'

In the latter years of the seventeenth century, when Steele and Addison were students at Oxford, most English writers were submissive to the new strength of the critical genius of France. But the English nation had then newly accomplished the great Revolution that secured its liberties, was thinking for itself, and calling forth the energies of writers who spoke for the people and looked to the people for approval and support. A new period was then opening, of popular influence on English literature. They were the young days of the influence now full grown, then slowly getting strength and winning the best minds away from an imported Latin style adapted to the taste of patrons who sought credit for nice critical discrimination. In 1690 Addison had been three years, Steele one year, at Oxford. Boileau was then living, fifty-four years old; and Western Europe was submissive to his sway as the great monarch of literary criticism. Boileau was still living when Steele published his 'Tatler', and died in the year of the establishment of the 'Spectator'. Boileau, a true-hearted man, of genius and sense, advanced his countrymen from the nice weighing of words by the Précieuses and the grammarians, and by the French Academy, child of the intercourse between those ladies and gentlemen. He brought ridicule on the inane politeness of a style then in its decrepitude, and bade the writers of his time find models in the Latin writers who, like Virgil and Horace, had brought natural thought and speech to their perfection. In the preceding labour for the rectifying of the language, preference had been given to French words of Latin origin. French being one of those languages in which Latin is the chief constituent, this was but a fair following of the desire to make it run pure from its source.

If the English critics who, in Charles the Second's time, submitted to French law, had seen its spirit, instead of paying blind obedience to the letter, they also would have looked back to the chief source of their language. Finding this to be not Latin but Saxon, they would have sought to give it strength and harmony, by doing then what, in the course of nature, we have learnt again to do, now that the patronage of literature has gone from the cultivated noble who appreciates in much accordance with the fashion of his time, and passed into the holding of the English people. Addison and Steele lived in the transition time between these periods. They were born into one of them and--Steele immediately, Addison through Steele's influence upon him--they were trusty guides into the other. Thus the 'Spectator' is not merely the best example of their skill. It represents also, perhaps best represents, a wholesome Revolution in our Literature. The essential character of English Literature was no more changed than characters of Englishmen were altered by the Declaration of Right which Prince William of Orange had accepted with the English Crown, when Addison had lately left and Steele was leaving Charterhouse for Oxford. Yet change there was, and Steele saw to the heart of it, even in his College days.

Oxford, in times not long past, had inclined to faith in divine right of kings. Addison's father, a church dignitary who had been a Royalist during the Civil War, laid stress upon obedience to authority in Church and State. When modern literature was discussed or studied at Oxford there would be the strongest disposition to maintain the commonly accepted authority of French critics, who were really men of great ability, correcting bad taste in their predecessors, and conciliating scholars by their own devout acceptance of the purest Latin authors as the types of a good style or proper method in the treatment of a subject. Young Addison found nothing new to him in the temper of his University, and was influenced, as in his youth every one must and should be, by the prevalent tone of opinion in cultivated men. But he had, and felt that he had, wit and genius of his own. His sensitive mind was simply and thoroughly religious, generous in its instincts, and strengthened in its nobler part by close communion with the mind of his friend Steele.

May we not think of the two friends together in a College chamber, Addison of slender frame, with features wanting neither in dignity nor in refinement, Steele of robust make, with the radiant 'short face' of the 'Spectator', by right of which he claimed for that worthy his admission to the Ugly Club. Addison reads Dryden, in praise of whom he wrote his earliest known verse; or reads endeavours of his own, which his friend Steele warmly applauds. They dream together of the future; Addison sage, but speculative, and Steele practical, if rash. Each is disposed to find God in the ways of life, and both avoid that outward show of irreligion, which, after the recent Civil Wars, remains yet common in the country, as reaction from an ostentatious piety which laid on burdens of restraint; a natural reaction which had been intensified by the base influence of a profligate King. Addison, bred among the preachers, has a little of the preacher's abstract tone, when talk between the friends draws them at times into direct expression of the sacred sense of life which made them one.

Apart also from the mere accidents of his childhood, a speculative turn in Addison is naturally stronger than in Steele. He relishes analysis of thought. Steele came as a boy from the rough world of shame and sorrow; his great, kindly heart is most open to the realities of life, the state and prospects of his country, direct personal sympathies; actual wrongs, actual remedies. Addison is sensitive, and has among strangers the reserve of speech and aspect which will pass often for coldness and pride, but is, indeed, the shape taken by modesty in thoughtful men whose instinct it is to speculate and analyze, and who become self-conscious, not through conceit, but because they cannot help turning their speculations also on themselves. Steele wholly comes out of himself as his heart hastens to meet his friend. He lives in his surroundings, and, in friendly intercourse, fixes his whole thought on the worth of his companion. Never abating a jot of his ideal of a true and perfect life, or ceasing to uphold the good because he cannot live to the full height of his own argument, he is too frank to conceal the least or greatest of his own shortcomings. Delight and strength of a friendship like that between Steele and Addison are to be found, as many find them, in the charm and use of a compact where characters differ so much that one lays open as it were a fresh world to the other, and each draws from the other aid of forces which the friendship makes his own. But the deep foundations of this friendship were laid in the religious earnestness that was alike in both; and in religious earnestness are laid also the foundations of this book, its Monument.

Both Addison and Steele wrote verse at College. From each of them we have a poem written at nearly the same age: Addison's in April, 1694, Steele's early in 1695. Addison drew from literature a metrical 'Account of the Greatest English Poets.' Steele drew from life the grief of England at the death of William's Queen, which happened on the 28th of December, 1694.

Addison, writing in that year, and at the age of about 23, for a College friend,

A short account of all the Muse-possest,
That, down from Chaucer's days to Dryden's times
Have spent their noble rage in British rhymes,

was so far under the influence of French critical authority, as accepted by most cultivators of polite literature at Oxford and wherever authority was much respected, that from 'An Account of the Greatest English Poets' he omitted Shakespeare. Of Chaucer he then knew no better than to say, what might have been said in France, that

... age has rusted what the Poet writ,
Worn out his language, and obscured his wit:
In vain he jests in his unpolish'd strain,
And tries to make his readers laugh in vain.
Old Spenser next, warm'd with poetic rage,
In ancient tales amused a barb'rous age;
But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore,
Can charm an understanding age no more.

It cost Addison some trouble to break loose from the critical cobweb of an age of periwigs and patches, that accounted itself 'understanding,' and the grand epoch of our Elizabethan literature, 'barbarous.' Rymer, one of his critics, had said, that

'in the neighing of an horse, or in the growling of a mastiff, there
is a meaning, there is as lively expression, and, may I say, more
humanity than many times in the tragical flights of Shakespeare.'

Addison, with a genius of his own helped to free movement by the sympathies of Steele, did break through the cobwebs of the critics; but he carried off a little of their web upon his wings. We see it when in the 'Spectator' he meets the prejudices of an 'understanding age,' and partly satisfies his own, by finding reason for his admiration of 'Chevy Chase' and the 'Babes in the Wood', in their great similarity to works of Virgil. We see it also in some of the criticisms which accompany his admirable working out of the resolve to justify his true natural admiration of the poetry of Milton, by showing that 'Paradise Lost' was planned after the manner of the ancients, and supreme even in its obedience to the laws of Aristotle. In his 'Spectator' papers on Imagination he but half escapes from the conventions of his time, which detested the wildness of a mountain pass, thought Salisbury Plain one of the finest prospects in England, planned parks with circles and straight lines of trees, despised our old cathedrals for their 'Gothic' art, and saw perfection in the Roman architecture, and the round dome of St. Paul's. Yet in these and all such papers of his we find that Addison had broken through the weaker prejudices of the day, opposing them with sound natural thought of his own. Among cultivated readers, lesser moulders of opinion, there can be no doubt that his genius was only the more serviceable in amendment of the tastes of his own time, for friendly understanding and a partial sharing of ideas for which it gave itself no little credit.

It is noticeable, however, that in his Account of the Greatest English Poets, young Addison gave a fifth part of the piece to expression of the admiration he felt even then for Milton. That his appreciation became critical, and, although limited, based on a sense of poetry which brought him near to Milton, Addison proved in the 'Spectator' by his eighteen Saturday papers upon 'Paradise Lost'. But it was from the religious side that he first entered into the perception of its grandeur. His sympathy with its high purpose caused him to praise, in the same pages that commended 'Paradise Lost' to his countrymen, another 'epic,' Blackmore's 'Creation', a dull metrical treatise against atheism, as a work which deserved to be looked upon as

'one of the most useful and noble productions of our English verse.
The reader,' he added, of a piece which shared certainly with
Salisbury Plain the charms of flatness and extent of space, 'the
reader cannot but be pleased to find the depths of philosophy
enlivened with all the charms of poetry, and to see so great a
strength of reason amidst so beautiful a redundancy of the
imagination.'

The same strong sympathy with Blackmore's purpose in it blinded Dr. Johnson also to the failure of this poem, which is Blackmore's best. From its religious side, then, it may be that Addison, when a student at Oxford, first took his impressions of the poetry of Milton. At Oxford he accepted the opinion of France on Milton's art, but honestly declared, in spite of that, unchecked enthusiasm:

Whate'er his pen describes I more than see,
Whilst every verse, arrayed in majesty,
Bold and sublime, my whole attention draws,
And seems above the critic's nicer laws.

This chief place among English poets Addison assigned to Milton, with his mind fresh from the influences of a father who had openly contemned the Commonwealth, and by whom he had been trained so to regard Milton's service of it that of this he wrote:

Oh, had the Poet ne'er profaned his pen,
To varnish o'er the guilt of faithless men;
His other works might have deserved applause
But now the language can't support the cause,
While the clean current, tho' serene and bright,
Betrays a bottom odious to the sight.

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 her crown,

She unconcerned and careless all the while
Rewards their loud applauses with a smile,
With easy Majesty and humble State
Smiles at the trifle Power, and knows its date.

But now

What hands commit the beauteous, good, and just,
The dearer part of William, to the dust?
In her his vital heat, his glory lies,
In her the Monarch lived, in her he dies.
...
No form of state makes the Great Man forego
The task due to her love and to his woe;
Since his kind frame can't the large suffering bear
In pity to his People, he's not here:
For to the mighty loss we now receive
The next affliction were to see him grieve.

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 'Musæ Anglicanæ' are eighty or ninety lines of resonant Latin verse upon 'Machinæ Gesticulantes, '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 'receive 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 Horace, Ovid and Tibullus, Propertius, Lucan, Juvenal and Martial, Lucretius, Statius, Claudian, Silius Italicus, Ausonius, Seneca, Phædrus, and gave even to his 'understanding 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 hath 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 learning 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 Wexford, in Ireland,
from the same humour which he has preserved, ever since, of preferring
the state of his mind to that of his fortune.'

Steele entered the Duke of Ormond's regiment, and had reasons for enlistment. James Butler, the first Duke, whom his father served, had sent him to the Charterhouse. That first Duke had been Chancellor of the University at Oxford, and when he died, on the 21st of July, 1688, nine months before Steele entered to Christchurch, his grandson, another James Butler, succeeded to the Dukedom. This second Duke of Ormond was also placed by the University of Oxford in his grandfather's office of Chancellor. He went with King William to Holland in 1691, shared the defeat of William in the battle of Steinkirk in August, 1692, and was taken prisoner in July, 1693, when King William was defeated at Landen. These defeats encouraged the friends of the Stuarts, and in 1694, Bristol, Exeter and Boston adhered to King James. Troops were raised in the North of England to assist his cause. In 1696 there was the conspiracy of Sir George Barclay to seize William on the 15th of February. Captain Charnock, one of the conspirators, had been a Fellow of Magdalene. On the 23rd of February the plot was laid before Parliament. There was high excitement throughout the country. Loyal Associations were formed. The Chancellor of the University of Oxford was a fellow-soldier of the King's, and desired to draw strength to his regiment from the enthusiasm of the time. Steele's heart was with the cause of the Revolution, and he owed also to the Ormonds a kind of family allegiance. What was more natural than that he should be among those young Oxford men who were tempted to enlist in the Chancellor's own regiment for the defence of liberty? 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
exposed 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 Principles 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

... Fuit Ilium, et ingens
Gloria.

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 'Spectator'. The 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 them 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.'

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, in September, at the Hague, news of his father's death. He wrote from the Hague, to Mr. Wyche,

'At my first arrival I received the news of my father's death, and
ever since have been engaged in so much noise and company, that it was
impossible for me to think of rhyming in it.'

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 poorly 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
compliment 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 everything 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 Profaneness 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 at times 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 Spain also, where the poets and men of letters had long wished in vain for a complete edition of his works. Lope de Vega, it may be added, was really the author of a sequel to 'la Verdad sospechosa', which Corneille adapted also as a sequel to his 'Menteur', but it was even poorer than such sequels usually are.

The 'Lying Lover' in Alarcon's play is a Don Garcia fresh from his studies in Salamanca, and Steele's Latine first appears there as a Tristan, the gracioso of old Spanish comedy. The two ladies are a Jacinta and Lucrecia. Alarcon has in his light and graceful play no less than three heavy fathers, of a Spanish type, one of whom, the father of Lucrecia, brings about Don Garcia's punishment by threatening to kill him if he will not marry his daughter; and so the Liar is punished for his romancing by a marriage with the girl he does not care for, and not marrying the girl he loves.

Corneille was merciful, and in the fifth act bred in his 'Menteur' a new fancy for Lucrece, so that the marriage at cross purposes was rather agreeable to him.

Steele, in adapting the 'Menteur' as his 'Lying Lover', altered the close in sharp accordance with that 'just regard to a reforming age,' which caused him (adapting a line in his 'Procession' then unprinted) to write in his Prologue to it, 'Pleasure must still have something that's severe.' Having translated Corneille's translations of Garcia and Tristan (Dorante and Cliton) into Young Bookwit and Latine, he transformed the servant into a college friend, mumming as servant because, since 'a prating servant is necessary in intrigues,' the two had 'cast lots who should be the other's footman for the present expedition.' Then he adapted the French couplets into pleasant prose comedy, giving with a light touch the romancing of feats of war and of an entertainment on the river, but at last he turned desperately serious, and sent his Young Bookwit to Newgate on a charge of killing the gentleman--here called Lovemore--who was at last to win the hand of the lady whom the Liar loved. In his last act, opening in Newgate, Steele started with blank verse, and although Lovemore of course was not dead, and Young Bookwit got at last more than a shadow of a promise of the other lady in reward for his repentance, the changes in construction of the play took it beyond the bounds of comedy, and were, in fact, excellent morality but not good art. And this is what Steele means when he says that he had his play damned for its piety.

With that strong regard for the drama which cannot well be wanting to the man who has an artist's vivid sense of life, Steele never withdrew his good will from the players, never neglected to praise a good play, and, I may add, took every fair occasion of suggesting to the town the subtlety of Shakespeare's genius. But he now ceased to write comedies, until towards the close of his life he produced with a remarkable success his other play, the 'Conscious Lovers'. And of that, by the way, Fielding made his Parson Adams say that 'Cato' and the 'Conscious Lovers' were the only plays he ever heard of, fit for a Christian to read, 'and, I must own, in the latter there are some things almost solemn enough for a sermon.'

Perhaps it was about this time that Addison wrote his comedy of the 'Drummer', which had been long in his possession when Steele, who had become a partner in the management of Drury Lane Theatre, drew it from obscurity, suggested a few changes in it, and produced it--not openly as Addison's--upon the stage. The published edition of it was recommended also by a preface from Steele in which he says that he liked this author's play the better

'for the want of those studied similies and repartees which we, who
have writ before him, have thrown into our plays, to indulge and gain
upon a false taste that has prevailed for many years in the British
theatre. I believe the author would have condescended to fall into
this way a little more than he has, had he before the writing of it
been often present at theatrical representations. I was confirmed in
my thoughts of the play by the opinion of better judges to whom it was
communicated, who observed that the scenes were drawn after Molière's
manner, and that an easy and natural vein of humour ran through the
whole. I do not question but the reader will discover this, and see
many beauties that escaped the audience; the touches being too
delicate for every taste in a popular assembly. My brother-sharers'
(in the Drury Lane patent) 'were of opinion, at the first reading of
it, that it was like a picture in which the strokes were not strong
enough to appear at a distance. As it is not in the common way of
writing, the approbation was at first doubtful, but has risen every
time it has been acted, and has given an opportunity in several of its
parts for as just and good actions as ever I saw on the stage.'