"Yr. most humble sev't.
"J. Addison.
"Fountain Tavern."
That night at the "Fountain," perchance, they discussed that war of words which might then have been raging between the author of the "Pastorals" and Pope, moistening their clay with a frequency to which they were both somewhat notoriously inclined.
My friend rides hard her hobby for choice editions, and she hunts with a will whenever a good old copy of a well-beloved author is up for pursuit. She is not a fop in binding, but she must have appropriate dresses for her favorites. She knows what
"Adds a precious seeing to the eye"
as well as Hayday himself, and never lets her folios shiver when they ought to be warm. Moreover, she reads her books, and, like the scholar in Chaucer, would rather have
"At her beddès head
A twenty bokes, clothed in black and red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophy,
Than robes rich, or fiddle, or psaltrie."
I found her not long ago deep in a volume of "Mr. Welsted's Poems"; and as that author is not particularly lively or inviting to a modern reader, I begged to know why he was thus honored. "I was trying," said she, "to learn, if possible, why Dicky Steele should have made his daughter a birth-day gift of these poems. This copy I found on a stall in Fleet Street many years ago, and it has in Sir Richard's handwriting this inscription on one of the fly-leaves:—
"ELIZABETH STEELE
Her Book
Giv'n by Her Father
RICHARD STEELE.
March 20th, 1723.