As an essayist Steele is careless, rapid, emotional, and disposed to be on the best terms with himself and with his readers. He makes them sure that if they could have met him in his rollicking mood at Will's Coffee-house, he would have treated them all round, even if, like Goldsmith, he had been forced to borrow the money to do it. But he was not always in this reckless humour. His heart was expansive in its sympathies and tender as a woman's; his mind was open to all kindly influences, and his essays have in them the rich blood and vivid utterances of a man who has 'warmed both hands before the fire of life.'
Between Steele's Guardian (1713) and the Rambler of Johnson (1750), a period of thirty-seven years, a swarm of periodicals testify to the fame of Steele and Addison. The reader curious on the subject will find in Dr. Drake's essays a minute account of the numerous essayists who flourished, or who made an effort to live, between the close of the eighth volume of the Spectator and the beginning of the present century. Of these a few have still a place on our shelves, but for the most part they enjoyed a butterfly existence, and serve but to prove the immeasurable superiority of the writers who created the English Essay.
FOOTNOTES:
[36] Cibber's Apology, p. 386.
[37] Courthope's Addison, p. 150.
[38] English Dramatic Literature, vol. ii., p. 603.
[39] 'It is a strange thing,' he writes, 'that you will not behave yourself with the obedience people of worse features do, but that I must be always giving you an account of every trifle and minute of my time.'
[40] Steele had been previously married to Mrs. Stretch, a widow, who possessed an estate in the West Indies; but the lady did not long survive the marriage.
[41] Victor's Original Letters, Dramatic Pieces, and Poems, vol. i., p. 330.
[42] Selections from Steele, by Austin Dobson. Introduction, p. xxx. Clarendon Press.