Commissionership of Stamps; and to enter the House of Commons. He did not require Pope to point him out. lamentingly to Congreve, as a great instance of the fate of all who are so carried away, with the risk of being not only punished by the other party but of suffering from their own. Even from the warning of Addison, that his zeal for the public might be ruinous to himself, he had turned silently aside. Not a day now passed that the most violent scurrilities were not directed against his pen and person, in which one of Swift's "under-writers," Wagstaff, made himself conspicuous; and Colley Cibber laughs at the way in which these scribes were already labouring to transfer to his friend Addison the credit of all his Tatlers and Spectators. Nevertheless he went steadily on. "It is not for me," he remarked with much dignity, to say how I write or speak, but it is for me to say I do "both honestly; and when I threw away some fame for "letters and politeness, to serve the nobler ends of justice " and government, I did not do it with a design to be as "negligent of what should be said of me with relation to

66

my integrity. No, wit and humour are the dress and "ornament of the mind; but honesty and truth are the "soul itself." We may, or may not, think Steele discreet in the choice he made; but of his sincerity and disinterestedness there ought to be no doubt whatever.

When at last, upon the publication of his Crisis, which was but the sequel to those papers in the Guardian that led to his election for Stockbridge, the motion was made to expel him for having "maliciously insinuated that the "Protestant succession in the House of Hanover is in "danger under her Majesty's administration," the Whigs rallied to his support with what strength they could. Robert Walpole and General Stanhope took their place on either side of him as he waited at the bar, and Addison prompted him throughout his spirited and temperate defence. He spoke, says one who heard him, for near three hours, with such temper, eloquence, and unconcern, as gave entire satisfaction to all who were not prepossessed

against him. But perhaps the most interesting occurrence of that memorable day was the speech of Lord Finch. This young nobleman, afterwards famous as a ininister and orator, owed gratitude to Steele for having repelled in the Guardian a libel on his sister, and he rose to make his maiden speech in defence of her defender. But bashfulness overcame him, and after a few confused sentences he sat down, crying out as he did so, "It is strange I cannot speak for this man, though I could readily fight for him!" Upon this, such cheering rang through the house, that suddenly the young lord took heart, rose again, and made the first of a long series of telling and able speeches. Of course, however, it did not save Steele, who was expelled by a majority of nearly a hundred in a house of four hundred members.

66

66

It was a short-lived triumph, we need hardly say. Soon came the blow which struck down that tyrant majority, dispersed its treason into air, consigned Oxford to the Tower, and drove Bolingbroke into exile. Eagerly Steele wrote to his wife from the St. James's coffeehouse, on the 31st of July 1714, that the Queen was dead. It was a mistake, but she died next day. Three days later he writes from the Thatched-house, St. James's, that he has been loaded with compliments by the Regents, and assured of something immediately. Yet it was but little he obtained. He received a place in the household (surveyorship of the royal stables); was placed in the commission of peace for Middlesex; and, on subsequently going up with an address from that county, was knighted. A little before he became Sir Richard, however, the member for Truro resigned the supervision of the Theatre Royal (then a government office, entitling to a share in the patent, and worth seven or eight hundred a year), and the players so earnestly petitioned for Steele as his successor, that he was named to the office. "His spirits "took such a lively turn upon it," says Cibber, "that, "had we been all his own sons, no unexpected act of filial duty could have more endeared us to him." Whatever the

coldness elsewhere might be, here, at any rate, was warmth enough. Benefits past were not benefits forgot, with those lively good-natured men. They remembered, as Cibber tells us, when a criticism in the Tatler used to fill their theatre at a time when nothing else could; and they knew that not a comedian among them' but owed something to Richard Steele, whose good nature on one occasion had even consented that Doggett should announce the Tatler as intending to be bodily present at his benefit, and had permitted him to dress a fictitious Isaac Bickerstaff at himself for amusement of the crowded house.'

The politicians Steele certainly found less mindful of the past than the players. But if we show that the course he took in the prosperous days of Whiggism differed in no respect from that which he had taken in its adverse days, some excuse may perhaps suggest itself for the dispensers of patronage and office. He entered Parliament for Boroughbridge, the Duke of Newcastle having given him his interest there; and for some time, and with some success as a speaker, he took part in the debates. To judge from his criticism on orators, one might suppose himself to have been a proficient in the art, and he was doubtless more

1 I have spoken of this already, but I may here add that the most humble, as well as the highest, obtained his good word; and it would be difficult to give a better instance, in a few lines, at once of his kindness and his genius as a critic of players, than by what he says of a small actor of Betterton's time: "Mr. William Peer "distinguished himself particularly "in two characters, which no man "ever could touch but himself. One "of them was the speaker of the pro"logue to the play which is con"trived in the tragedy of Hamlet, to "awake the conscience of the guilty

princess. Mr. William Peer spoke "that preface to the play with such "an air as represented that he was "an actor; and with such an inferior

manner as only acting an actor, "that the others on the stage were

2 This was on Monday the 16th of January 1709-10, Mr. Bickerstaff having gravely promised in Saturday's Tatler, in reply to a letter from Doggett saying it would bring him the greatest house since the visit of the Morocco ambassador, that he'd come in between the first and second act of Love for Love (pleased at his choice, he told him, of so excellent a play, and looking on him as the best of comedians), and would remain in the R. H. box over the pit until the end of the fourth act. The applause at the fictitious Isaac's appearance was tremendous.

than an average speaker. He knew how to avoid, at any rate, what he points out as a great error committed by the speakers of his day in confounding oratory with passion, and thinking the si vis me flere as applicable in the one as in the other case. If any man would exert an uncontrolled influence over those who listen to him, said Steele, never let him lose control over himself. This was no great period for oratory, however. No successor had yet appeared to Henry St. John in the Commons, nor even to Robert Harley. Steele wittily described the House at the time as consisting very much of silent people oppressed by the choice of a great deal to say, and of eloquent people ignorant that what they said was nothing to the purpose; and as it was, he tells us, his own ambition to speak only what he thought, so it was his weakness to think such a course might have its use. Undoubtedly such a course he did absolutely take; nor does he at any time seem, out of deference to party or its prejudices, to have compromised a single opinion sincerely entertained by him.

He attacked every attempt to give power to the Church independent of the State; he held that all eagerness in clergymen to grasp at exorbitant power was but popery in another form;' and he created much offence by declaring that, if Rome pretended to be infallible and England to be always in the right, he saw little difference between the two. In his prosperity Harley had no assailant more

1 A further remark made by him in the course of this argument is well worth attention and reflection in the present day. "I am now brought," he says, 66 by the natural course of "such thoughts, to examine into the "conduct of Christians, and particu"larly of Protestants of all sorts. "One thing drew on another and, 66 as little conversant as I have here"tofore been in such matters, I "quickly found that Christianity was "neither unintelligible, nor ill-na"tured; that the Gospel does not "invade the rights of mankind, nor "invest any men with authority de

bitter, and in his adversity no more generous opponent, than Steele. "I transgressed, my lord, against you," he said, "when you could make twelve peers in a day; I "ask your pardon when you are a private nobleman." As he had fought the Schism bill under the Tories, under the Whigs he pleaded for toleration to the Roman Catholics. "I suppose this," he wrote to his wife, "gave a "handle to the fame of my being a Tory; but you may perhaps by this time have heard that I am turned Pres"byterian, for the same day, in a meeting of a hundred "parliament-men, I laboured as much for the Protestant "Dissenters." No man was so bitter against the Jacobites, as long as any chance of their success remained; but none so often or so successfully interceded on their behalf for mercy, when the day had gone against them. The mischief of the South Sea scheme was by Steele more than any man exposed; but for such of the directors as had themselves been its dupes, no man afterwards spoke so charitably. Walpole had befriended him most on the question of his expulsion, and he admired him more than any other politician; yet he alone in the House spoke against Walpole's proposition about the Debt, "because "he did not think the way of doing it just." Addison was the man he to the last admired the most, and, notwithstanding any recurring coolness or difference, loved the most on earth; but, on the question of Lord Sunderland's Peerage bill, he joined Walpole against Addison, and with tongue and pen so actively promoted the defeat of that mischievous measure, that we may even yet, on this score, hold ourselves to be his debtors.

To this rapid sketch of Steele's career as a politician, it might seem superfluous to add his complaint against those who neglected him, or that, when the Duke of Newcastle had been so mean as to punish his opposition to the Peerage bill by depriving him of his Drury-lane appointment (to which, we may interpose, he was restored as soon as Walpole returned to office), he should thus have written to Lady Steele: "I am talking to my wife,