ture.

with all the paraphernalia of a great household in miniaTo the end of his life Steele's finances were in a bad condition, and he seems each year to have met his debts by borrowing anew.

In 1709, following an idea that must have occurred to him in the conduct of the Gazette, Steele started the Tatler, frankly a money-making enterprise, but one which exerted a great and growing public influence. In 1710 he was appointed one of the commissioners of the stamp office, with a salary of three hundred pounds. In the same year, on the entrance of the Tories into power, he shared the ill fortune of his friends and his party, losing his most important office, the Gazetteship. He threw himself with the more vigor, however, into the Spectator, which he began, with Addison's help, in 1711, and which exceeded the Tatler in importance and popularity. As the Tories gained still further power Steele became more active in political discussion. In an anonymous pamphlet he eulogized the Duke of Marlborough at the very moment of his dismissal from his high offices; he took a share in the controversy about the creation of new peers, and, after bringing the Spectator to a close in 1712, he began the Guardian in 1713, again with the help of Addison and others. The new journal, though started with peaceable intentions, soon precipitated him into a quarrel with the Tory Examiner, severed forever his friendly relations with Swift, and confirmed him in his political career. In June of the same year he resigned his pension as gentleman waiter to Prince George, that he might not be dependent upon a queen whose chosen ministry he was attacking, and his office as one of the stamp commissioners, that he might legally run for parliament. In July, shortly after the return of the French ambassador to London, much popular excitement was caused by a

petition to the Queen from the inhabitants of Dunkirk, praying that, contrary to the provisions of the recent treaty of Utrecht, its harbor should not be destroyed. Steele protested strongly, in the Guardian, against this memorial, which was being widely circulated in England, and insisted that the British nation expected the demolition of Dunkirk. His strong language enraged the Tories, who attacked him, in a pamphlet war, even more vigorously than the Whigs defended him. In October Steele stopped the Guardian and began, without the assistance of Addison, the Englishman, which was intended to deal almost entirely with matters less amusing than vital to national life. At the beginning of 1714 he also published, with the aid of others, the Crisis, a powerful statement of the whole political situation. Parliament met in February. Almost the first business of the Tory majority was to expel Steele from the house, to which he had been elected from Stockbridge, on a charge of writing and publishing seditious matter. He was now in great pecuniary difficulties, and would perhaps have been entirely ruined had not three thousand pounds been put into his hands by unknown friends. In spite of his attempted disgrace he did not cease expressing his political views, in the short-lived Lover, the Reader, which for its nine numbers was in direct opposition to the Examiner, and in several pamphlets. The Queen died August 1, and George I., a few weeks after his arrival in England, made Steele, the valiant defender of the Hanoverian succession, deputy lieutenant or the county of Middlesex, surveyor of the royal stables at Hampton Court, a justice of the peace, and supervisor of Drury Lane Theatre.

From 1714 to 1724 the main facts of Steele's life can be best given under two heads, that of his connection with the theatre and that of his part in public affairs.

Like his predecessor in the office of supervisor of Drury Lane, Steele received at first a pension of seven hundred pounds from the licensed actors, Wilks, Cibber,

Doggett, and Booth. This arrangement, however, was soon changed, with their full approval, by Steele's obtaining from the King a patent which made him and the actors colleagues in the management and profits of the theatre, responsible to the King for the conduct of it, but not subject to the authority of the Lord Chamberlain. In 1717, a new Lord Chamberlain requested the managers of the theatre to accept a license under his authority instead of a patent. This they declined to do. Two years later, nevertheless, when Steele was again in political disgrace for opposing certain Whig projects, the government revenged itself by allowing the Lord Chamberlain to forbid Cibber, who had just courteously dedicated his Ximena to Steele, to act or take part in the management of the theatre. Appeals to high officials for justice proving useless, Steele brought his cause before the people in an interesting periodical called the Theatre, but the patent was revoked, acting at Drury Lane forbidden, and a new license granted, from which Steele was excluded. Not until 1721, when Steele's sound policy in regard to the national finances had again won him the favor of the government, was the Lord Chamberlain forced to issue a warrant ordering the managers of the theatre to account to Steele for his share of the profits, past and future. Steele's fourth play, The Conscious Lovers, was produced with great success in November, 1722. At about the same time he was at work on another, The School of Action, but it was never completed.

During the first years of the reign of George I., Steele stood high in favor. In 1715 he received five hundred

pounds from the King, was knighted, and elected member of parliament from Boroughbridge. The same year he revived the Englishman as a weapon against the Tories, receiving a large sum of money for the services he thus rendered. In 1716 he was appointed, at a salary of a thousand pounds, one of thirteen commissioners instructed to deal with the forfeited estates of certain noblemen and gentlemen, chiefly Scottish, who had taken part in the recent rising for the Pretender, and he visited Scotland three times within the next few years in the service of this commission. By remonstrating, in the Plebeian and on the floor of the house, against the bill for limiting the royal prerogative of creating new peers, he lost the goodwill of the government, but regained it in the following year by taking - again with Walpole - the unpopular side in connection with the South Sea Scheme. The bubble burst, Walpole became first lord of the treasury, and Steele returned to favor.

In the latter part of his life Steele, engrossed with public affairs or in the pursuit of his private fortune, wrote little that can be classed as pure literature. Anxious, as he felt himself growing old, to increase his property for the sake of his children, he threw himself for several years, first into the establishment of a sort of large lecture or concert hall, and then into a seemingly sensible, but eventually unsuccessful, scheme, called the Fish Pool, for bringing fish alive to distant markets. The year 1718 saw the death of his wife, whom he had loved tenderly and faithfully. Thereafter he lived only for his children and the public welfare, but almost all he wrote seemed touched with weariness. From 1724 to 1729, for the better arrangement of his still disordered affairs, he spent the greater part of his time in Wales, in or near Carmarthen, where his wife's estates lay. For years he had been

plagued with the gout. In 1723 Vanbrugh wrote: "Happening to meet with Sir Richard Steele t'other day at Mr. Walpole's in town, he seemed to me to be (at least) in the declining way I had heard he was;" in 1725 he had a stroke of paralysis, suffering partial loss of speech. He died at Carmarthen September 1, 1729, at the age of fifty-seven, and was buried there. For some time there was talk of a monument's being raised to him in Westminster Abbey, where his wife lies, but the project was never carried out.

Steele had a natural daughter, known as Miss Ousley, and four children by his second wife, Elizabeth, Richard, Eugene, and Mary. Of these, the two sons died before their father, and Mary soon afterward. Elizabeth became Lady Trevor and had one child, a daughter, who died without issue. Miss Ousley married a Welsh gentleman, Mr. Aynston. Their only child, a daughter, married a Mr. Thomas, and Lord Trevor provided for the education of their two sons. Steele's only descendants, therefore, neither bore his name nor inherited, seemingly, his genius.

II.

PERSONAL APPEARANCE.

A spiteful friend of Steele's, Mrs. Manley, describes him in the New Atlantis as a "black beau (stuck up in a pert chariot), thickset, his eyes lost in his head, hanging eyebrows, broad face, and tallow complexion." A more open enemy, John Dennis, thus portrays him in a bitter pamphlet, The Characters and Conduct of Sir John Edgar, called by himself Sole Monarch of the Stage in Drury Lane: Sir John Edgar, of the county in Ireland, is of

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