With Tickell, the name of Thomas Parnell (1679-1718) goes naturally. He was a minor light among the wits; was befriended by Swift, and is remembered for "The Hermit," "The Night-Piece on Death," and one or two other effusions.
[CHAPTER XXVII.]
AUGUSTAN PROSE.
Steele.
Steele and Addison are the Twins among the stars of the age of Queen Anne. Swift impresses us as a greater genius than either Steele or Addison, but he is not loved, and he is not read as they are. Their lives, till two or three years before Addison's death, were united. They were schoolfellows at Charterhouse, fellow-undergraduates at Oxford, each was apt to take a hand in the other's play when the stage attracted them; they wrote together in the two famous journals, "The Tatler" and "The Spectator," which Steele created; some essays therein are a patchwork of pieces from both hands. They were both anxious to cleanse the stage; to bring decent morals and manners into fashion In the original manuscript of Steele's comedy, "The Conscious Lovers" (1722), are rough notes for a preface, written after Addison's death, "The fourth act was the business of the play. The case of duelling I have fought nor shall I ever fight again... Addison told me I had a faculty of drawing tears... Be that as it will, I shall endeavour to do what I can to promote noble things...."
Both men were moralists, but while Addison was the more moral, Steele was infinitely the more greatly given to moralizing. His heart was in the right place. He honoured women and pure affection, and temperance, and the wedded state. But his many brief notes to his second wife "Prue" (Miss Scurlock), written from all manner of places and at all sorts of hours, prove that poor Prue had often to dine alone. Business detained her Richard; he came home with the milk, and had a terrible headache next day. With the posts which he held under Government, with what he gained by his pen (and he was the owner of his own paper, and his own paymaster), with Mrs. Steele's fortune, they had resources enough, but Richard at intervals sends Prue a guinea or two; Richard is constantly in hiding from the bailiffs; is never out of debt; sometimes there is no coal, candle, or meat in the house. Steele was the most affectionate of men and the most generous. He boasted that the world owed Addison's essays to him, because he had made Addison overcome his laziness, and he told the world how greatly Addison was his superior. He wishes that they might write together some work to be called "The Monument," the memorial of their friendship. He took the side of poor discharged soldiers, whipped from parish to parish for their poverty. He adored children; his tears were as ready and heroic as the tears of Homer's warriors. But when he yielded to the temptations of the bottle and of extravagance, his wife and children had to suffer just as much as if Richard, in place of being a Christian Hero, had been no better than the wicked. Like Balzac he was a man of debts and of projects; he even wasted money on alchemy, and had a scheme for getting wealth in connexion with a lottery, a scheme which even then was found to be illegal. Mr. Swinburne called Steele "a sentimental debauchee," and indeed he shone more in preaching than in practice. Addison calls him "poor Dick," he is "poor Dick" to all the world now, if he were Sir Richard "to all Europe". But, when lip preached, he meant what he said, and his pleasant sermons, or rather pleas for goodness, kindness, faith, did "promote noble things," and he left the world more decent and more human than he found it.
Steele was born in Dublin in 1672; his family were not Celtic Irish folk; his father was in what is reckoned the less noble branch of the legal profession. When Sir Richard assumed heraldic bearings he calmly annexed those of another family of Steele, as' the elder Osborne, in "Vanity Fair," was supplied by his coachbuilder with the arms of the House of Leeds. Like the cousin of Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff, in "The Tatler" (No. 14), he was guilty of "treason against the Kings at Arms". Of his childhood we know only what he tells in that pathetic passage about his father's funeral: "I had a battledore in my hand and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling papa, for, I know not how, I had some idea that he was locked up there.... My mother was a very beautiful woman, of a noble spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst all the wildness of her transport, which methought struck me with an instinct of sorrow that, before I was sensible what it was to grieve, seized my very soul and has made pity the weakness of my heart ever since" ("Tatler," No. 181). "Hence it is that in me good nature is no merit, but having been so frequently overwhelmed with her tears before I knew the cause of any affliction... I imbibed consideration, remorse, and an unmanly gentleness of mind, which has since ensnared me into ten thousand calamities...." So a "Night of Memories and Sighs" is consecrated by Richard to his beloved dead, "when my servant knocked at the door with a letter, attended by a hamper of wine, of the same sort with that which is to be put on sale at Garraway's coffee house. Upon the receipt of it I sent for three friends.... We drank two bottles a man," and, as Mr. Arthur Pendennis says, found that there "was not a headache in a hogshead".
The fluid, in fact, as we know from the advertisement in this number of "The Tatler," was "extraordinary French claret". Dick conscientiously tested its merits, and gave it a puff in addition to the advertisement which was paid for. Thus he "promoted everything noble," including the vintage of Bordeaux, and, as Thackeray saw, there is no more characteristic essay of Steele's than this meditation on death and grief and loyal memory: à léal souvenir!