“Madam, it is the hardest thing in the World to be in Love, and yet attend Business. As for me all that speak to me find me out.… A gentleman ask’d me this morning what news from Lisbon, and I answered, ‘She’s exquisitely handsome.’” Here’s another—after marriage: “Dear Prue, I enclose two guineas, and will come home exactly at seven. Yrs tenderly.” And again: “Dear Prue, I enclose five guineas, but cannot come home to dinner. Dear little woman, take care of thyself, and eat and drink cheerfully.” Yet again: “Dear Prue, if you do not hear of me before three to-morrow, believe that I am too [tipsy] to obey your orders; but, however, know me to be your most affectionate, faithful husband.”
It is more promising for a man to speak of his own tippling than to have others speak of it; nor was this writer’s sinning in that way probably beyond the average in his time. But he was of that mercurial temperament which took wine straight to the brain; and so was always at bad odds with those men of better digestion (such as Swift and Addison) who were only tickled effusively with such bouts as lifted the hilarious Captain Steele into a noisy effervescence.
There are better and worse letters than those I have read; but never any lack of averment that he enjoys most of anything in life his wife’s delightful presence—but can’t get home, really cannot; some excellent fellows have come in, or he is at the tavern—business is important; and she is always his charming Prue; and always he twists a little wordy aureole of praise about her head or her curls. I suppose she took a deal of comfort out of his tender adjectives; but I think she learned early not to sit up for him, and got over that married woe with great alacrity. There is evidence that she loved him throughout; and other evidence that she gave him some moral fisticuffs—when he did get home—which made his next stay at the tavern easier and more defensible.
But he loved his Prue, in his way, all her life through, and showed a beautiful fondness for his children. In that budget of notelets I spoke of (and which the wife so carefully cherished), are some charming ones to his children: thus he writes to his daughter Elizabeth, whose younger sister, Mary, has just begun to put her initials, M. S., to messages of love to him:
“Tell her I am delighted: tell her how many fine things those two letters stand for when she writes them: M. S. is milk and sugar; mirth and safety; musick and songs; meat and sauce, as well as Molly and Spot, and Mary and Steele. You see I take pleasure in conversing with you by prattling anything to divert you.
Yr aff. father.”
But you must not think Steele was a man of no importance save in his own family. His friends counted by scores and hundreds; he had warm patrons among the chiefest men of the time; had political preferment and places of trust and profit, far better than his old captaincy; could have lived in handsome style and without anxieties, if his reckless kindnesses and convivialities had not made him improvident.
Steele’s Literary Qualities.
Nor must we forget the work by which he is chiefly known, I mean his establishment of the Tatler—the forerunner of all those delightful essays which went to the making of the Spectator and the Guardian; these latter having the more credit for their dignity and wise reticence, but the Tatler being more vivacious, and quite as witty. Addison came to the help of Steele in the Tatler, and Steele, afterward joined forces with Addison in the Spectator. I happen to be the owner of a very old edition of these latter essays, in whose “Table of Contents” some staid critic of the last generation has written his (or her) comments on the various topics discussed; and I find against the papers of Addison, such notes as—“instructive, sound, judicious;” and against those of Steele, I am sorry to say, such words as “flighty, light, witty, graceful, worthless;” and I am inclined to think the criticisms are pretty well borne out by the papers; but if flighty and light, he was not unwholesome; and he did not always carry the rollicking ways of the tavern into the little piquant journalism, where the grave and excellent Mr. Addison presided with him. Nay, there are better things yet to be said of him. He argued against the sin and folly of duelling with a force and pungency that went largely to stay that evil; and he never touches a religious topic that his manner does not take on an awe and a respect which belongs to the early pages of the Christian Hero. There are touches of pathos, too, in his writing, quite unmatchable; but straight and quick upon these you are apt to catch sound of the jingling spurs of the captain of dragoons. Thus, in that often quoted allusion to his father’s death (which happened in his boyhood), he says: