English Literature For Boys And Girls by H.E. Marshall

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You know that the books many of your grown-up friends read most
are called novels. But in the days when Joseph Addison and
Richard Steele wrote the Spectator, there were no novels. Even
Defoe's stories had not yet appeared, and it was therefore a new
delight for our forefathers to have the adventures of the
Spectator Club each day with their morning cup of tea or
chocolate. "Mr. Spectator," writes one lady, "your paper is part
of my tea equipage, and my servant knows my humour so well, that
calling for my breakfast this morning (it being past my usual
hour) she answered, the Spectator was not yet come in, but that
the tea-kettle boiled, and she expected it every moment."

Thus the Spectator had then become part of everyday life just as
our morning newspapers have now, and there must have been many
regrets among the readers when one member of the supposed Club
died, another married and settled down, and so on until at length
the Club was entirely dispersed and the Spectator ceased to
appear. It may interest you to know that the paper we now call
the Spectator was not begun until more than a hundred years after
its great namesake ceased to appear, the first number being
published in 1828.

It was after the Spectator ceased that Addison published his
tragedy called Cato. Cato was a great Roman who rebelled against
the authority of Caesar and in the end killed himself. His is a
story out of which a good tragedy might be made. But Addison's
genius is not dramatic, and the play does not touch our hearts as
Shakespeare's tragedies do. Yet, although we cannot look upon
Addison's Cato as a really great tragedy, there are lines in it
which every one remembers and quotes, although they may not know
where they come from. Such are, for instance, "Who deliberates
is lost," and

"'Tis not in mortals to command success,
But we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it."

But although Cato is not really great, the writer was perhaps the
most popular man of his day, and so his tragedy was a tremendous
success. With Cato Addison reached the highest point of his fame
as an author in his own day, but now we remember him much more as
a writer of delightful essays, and as the creator or at least the
perfecter of Sir Roger, for to Steele is due the first invention
of the worthy knight.

Fortune still smiled on Addison. When George I came to the
throne, the Whigs once more returned to power, and Addison again
became Secretary for Ireland. He still wrote, both on behalf of
his Government and to please himself.

And now, in 1716, when he was already a man of forty-four,
Addison married. His wife was the Dowager Countess of Warwick,
and perhaps she was that great lady whom he had lost a few years
before when he lost his post of Secretary of State. Of all
Addison's pleasant prosperous life these last years ought to have
been most pleasant and most prosperous. But it has been said
that his marriage was not happy, and that plain Mr. Addison was
glad at times to escape from the stately grandeur of his own home
and from the great lady, his wife, to drink and smoke with his
friends and "subjects" at his favorite coffee-house. For Addison
held sway and was surrounded by his little court of literary
admirers, as Dryden and Ben Jonson before him.

But whether Addison was happy in his married life or not, one
sorrow he did have. Between his old friend, Dick Steele, and
himself a coldness grew up. They disagreed over politics.
Steele thought himself ill-used by his party. His impatient,
impetuous temper was hurt at the cool balance of his friend's,
and so they quarreled. "I ask no favour of Mr. Secretary
Addison," writes Steele angrily. During life the quarrel was
never made up, but after Addison died Steele spoke of his friend
in his old generous manner. Under his new honors and labours
Addison's health soon gave way. He suffered much from asthma,
and in 1718 gave up his Government post. A little more than a
year later he died.

He met his end cheerfully and peacefully. "See how a Christian
can die," he said to his wild stepson, the Earl of Warwick, who
came to say farewell to his stepfather.

The funeral took place at dead of night in Westminster Abbey.
Whig and Tory alike joined in mourning, and as the torchlight
procession wound slowly through the dim isles, the organ played
and the choir sang a funeral hymn.

"How silent did his old companions tread,
By midnight lamps, the mansions of the dead,
Thro' breathing statues, then unheeded things,
Thro' rows of warriors, and thro' walks of Kings!
What awe did the slow solemn knell inspire,
The pealing organ, and the pausing choir;
The duties by the lawn-robed prelate paid,
And the last words, that dust to dust conveyed!

While speechless o'er thy closing grave we bend,
Accept these tears, thou dear departed Friend!"*

*T. Tickell.

So our great essayist was laid to rest, but it was not until many
years had come and gone that a statue in his honor was placed in
the Poets' Corner. This, says Lord Macaulay, himself a great
writer, was "a mark of national respect due to the unsullied
statesman, to the accomplished scholar, to the master of pure
English eloquence, to the consummate painter of life and manners.
It was due, above all, to the great satirist, who alone knew how
to use ridicule without abusing it, who, without inflicting a
wound, effected a great social reform, and who reconciled wit
with virtue, after a long and disastrous separation, during which
wit had been lead astray by profligacy, and virtue by
fanaticism."

BOOKS TO READ

Sir Roger de Coverley. The Coverley Papers, edited by O. M.
Myers.

Chapter LXVI STEELE--THE SOLDIER AUTHOR

YOU have heard a little about Dick Steele in connection with
Joseph Addison. Steele is always overshadowed by his great
friend, for whom he had such a generous admiration that he was
glad to be so overshadowed. But in this chapter I mean to tell
you a little more about him.

He was born, you know, in Dublin in 1671, and early lost his
father. About this he tells us himself in one of the Tatlers:

"The first sense of sorrow I ever knew was upon the death of my
father, at which time I was not quite five years of age. But was
rather amazed at what all the house meant, than possessed with a
real understanding, why nobody was willing to play with me. I
remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother
sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and
fell abeating the coffin, and calling 'Papa,' for, I know not
how, I had some light idea that he was locked up there. My
mother catched me in her arms, and, transported beyond all
patience of the silent grief she was before in, she almost
smothered me in her embrace, and told me, in a flood of tears,
Pap could not hear me, and would play with me no more, for they
were going to put him under ground, whence he could never come to
us again."*

*Tatler, 181.

Steele's sad, beautiful mother died soon after her husband, and
little Dick was left more lonely than ever. His uncle took
charge of him, and sent him to Charterhouse, where he met
Addison. From there he went to Oxford, but left without taking a
degree. "A drum passing by," he says, "being a lover of music, I
listed myself for a soldier."* "He mounted a war horse, with a
great sword in his hand, and planted himself behind King William
the Third against Lewis the Fourteenth." But he says when he
cocked his hat, and put on a broad sword, jack boots, and
shoulder belt, he did not know his own powers as a writer, he did
not know then that he should ever be able to "demolish a
fortified town with a goosequill."** So Steele became a
"wretched common trooper," or, to put it more politely, a
gentleman volunteer. But he was not long in becoming an ensign,
and about five years later he got his commission as captain.

*Tatler, 89.
**Theatre, 11.

In those days the life of a soldier was wild and rough. Drinking
and swearing were perhaps the least among the follies and
wickedness they were given to, and Dick Steele was as ready as
any other to join in all the wildness going. But in spite of his
faults and failings his heart was kind and tender. He had no
love of wickedness though he could not resist temptation. So the
dashing soldier astonished his companions by publishing a little
book called the Christian Hero. It was a little book written to
show that no man could be truly great who was not religious. He
wrote it at odd minutes when his day's work was over, when his
mind had time "in the silent watch of the night to run over the
busy dream of the day." He wrote it at first for his own use,
"to make him ashamed of understanding and seeming to feel what
was virtuous and yet living so quite contrary a life."
Afterwards he resolved to publish it for the good of others.

But among Steele's gay companions the book had little effect
except to make them laugh at him and draw comparisons between the
lightness of his words and actions, and the seriousness of the
ideas set forth in his Christian Hero. He found himself slighted
instead of encouraged, and "from being thought no undelightful
companion, was soon reckoned a disagreeable fellow."* So he took
to writing plays, for "nothing can make the town so fond of a man
as a successful play."

*Apology for himself and his Writings.

The plays of the Restoration had been very coarse. Those of
Steele show the beginning of a taste for better things, "Tho'
full of incidents that move laughter, virtue and vice appear just
as they ought to do," he says of his first comedy. But although
we may still find Steele's plays rather amusing, it is not as a
dramatist that we remember him, but as an essayist.

Steele led a happy-go-lucky life, nearly always cheerful and in
debt. His plays brought him in some money, he received a
Government appointment which brought him more, and when he was
about thirty-three he married a rich widow. Still he was always
in debt, always in want of money.

In about a year Steele's wife died, and he was shortly married to
another well-off lady. About this time he left the army, it is
thought, although we do not know quite surely, and for long
afterwards he was called Captain Steele.

Steele wrote a great many letters to his second wife, both before
and after his marriage. She kept them all, and from them we can
learn a good deal of this warm-hearted, week-willed, harum-scarum
husband. She is "Dearest Creature," "Dear Wife," "Dear Prue"
(her name, by the way, was Mary), and sometimes "Ruler,"
"Absolute Governess," and he "Your devoted obedient Husband,"
"Your faithful, tender Husband." Many of the letters are about
money troubles. We gather from them that Dick Steele loved his
wife, but as he was a gay and careless spendthrift and she was a
proud beauty, a "scornful lady," for neither of them was life
always easy.

It was about two years after this second marriage that Steele
suddenly began the Tatler. He did not write under his own name,
but under that of Isaac Bickerstaff, a name which Swift had made
use of in writing one of his satires. As has been said, the
genius of Steele has been overshadowed by that of Addison, for
Steele had such a whole-hearted admiration for his friend that he
was ready to give him all the praise. And yet it is nearly
always to Steele that we owe the ideas which were later worked
out and perfected by Addison.

It is Steele, too, that we owe the first pictures of English
family life. It has been said that he "was the first of our
writers who really seemed to admire and respect women,"* and if
we add "after the Restoration" we come very near the truth.
Steele had a tender heart towards children too, and in more than
one paper his love of them shows itself. Indeed, as we read we
cannot help believing that in real life Captain Dick had many
child-friends. Here is how he tells of a visit to a friend's
house:--
*Thackeray.

"I am, as it were, at home at that house, and every member of it
knows me for their well-wisher. I cannot indeed express the
pleasure it is, to be met by the children with so much joy as I
am when I go thither. The boys and girls strive who shall come
first, when they think it is I that am knocking at the door. And
that child which loses the race to me, runs back again to tell
the father it is Mr. Bickerstaff.

"This day I was led in by a pretty girl, that we all thought must
have forgot me, for the family has been out of town these two
years. Her knowing me again was a mighty subject with us, and
took up our discourse at the first entrance. After which they
began to rally me upon a thousand little stories they heard in
the country about my marriage to one of my neighbor's daughters.
Upon which the gentleman, my friend, said 'Nay, if Mr.
Bickerstaff marries a child of any of his old companions, I hope
mine shall have the preference. There's Mistress Mary is now
sixteen, and would make him as fine a widow as the best of
them.'"

After dinner the mother and children leave the two friends
together. The father speaks of his love for his wife, and his
fears for her health.

"'Ah, you little understand, you that have lived a bachelor, how
great a pleasure there is in being really beloved. Her face is
to me more beautiful than when I first saw it. In her
examination of her household affairs she show a certain
fearfulness to find a fault, which makes her servants obey her
like children, and the meanest we have has an ingenuous shame for
an offence, not always to be seen in children in other families.
I speak freely to you, my old friend. Ever since her sickness,
things that gave me the quickest joy before, turn now to a
certain anxiety. As the children play in the next room, I know
the poor things by their steps, and am considering what they must
do, should they lose their mother in their tender years. The
pleasure I used to take in telling my boy stories of the battles,
and asking my girl questions about the disposal of her baby, and
the gossiping of it, is turned into inward reflection and
melancholy.' The poor gentleman would have gone on much longer
with his sad forebodings, but his wife returning, and seeing by
his grave face what he had been talking about, said, with a
smile, 'Mr. Bickerstaff, don't believe a word of what he tells
you. I shall still live to have you for my second, as I have
often promised you, unless he takes more care of himself than he
has done since his coming to town. You must know, he tells me,
that he finds London is a much more healthy place than the
country, for he sees several of his old acquaintance and school-
fellows are here, young fellows with fair, full-bottomed
periwigs. I could scarce keep him this morning from going out
open-breasted.'" And so they sat and chatted pleasantly until,
"on a sudden, we were alarmed with the noise of a drum, and
immediately entered my little godson to give me a point of war.*
His mother, between laughing and chiding, would have put him out
of the room, but I would not part with him so. I found, upon
conversation with him, though he was a little noisy in his mirth,
that the child had excellent parts, and was a great master of all
the learning on the other side of eight years old. I perceived
him to be a very great historian in Aesop's Fables; but he frankly
declared to me his mind, that he did not delight in that
learning, because he did not believe they were true. For which
reason I found he had very much turned his studies, for about a
twelve-month past, into the lives and adventures of Don Bellianis
of Greece, Guy of Warwick, the Seven Champions, and other
historians of that age.

*A strain of war-like music.

"I could not but observe the satisfaction the father took in the
forwardness of his son, and that these diversions might turn to
some profit, I found the boy had made remarks which might be of
service to him during the course of his whole life. He would
tell you the mismanagements of John Hickathrift, find fault with
the passionate temper of Bevis of Southampton, and loved St.
George for being the champion of England; and by this means had
his thoughts insensibly moulded into the notions of discretion,
virtue, and honour.

"I was extolling his accomplishments, when the mother told me
that the little girl who led me in this morning was, in her way,
a better scholar than he. 'Betty,' says she, 'deals chiefly in
fairies and sprites, and sometimes, in a winter night, will
terrify the maids with her accounts, till they are afraid to go
up to bed.'

"I sat with them till it was very late, sometimes in merry,
sometimes in serious discourse, with this particular pleasure
which gives the only true relish to all conversation, a sense
that every one of us liked each other. I went home considering
the different conditions of a married life and that of a
bachelor. And I must confess it struck me with a secret concern
to reflect that, whenever I go off, I shall leave no traces
behind me. In this pensive mood I returned to my family, that is
to say, to my maid, my dog, and my cat, who only can be the
better or worse for what happens to me."*

*Tatler, 96.

You will be sorry to know that, a few Tatlers further on, the
kind mother of this happy family dies. But Steele was himself so
much touched by the thought of all the misery he was bringing
upon the others by giving such a sad ending to his story, that he
could not go on with the paper, and Addison had to finish it for
him.

The Spectator, you know, succeeded the Tatler, and it was while
writing for the Spectator that Steele took seriously to politics.
He became a member of Parliament and wrote hot political
articles. He and Swift crossed swords more than once, and from
being friends became enemies. But Steele's temper was too hot,
his pen too hasty. The Tories were in power, and he was a Whig,
and he presently found himself expelled from the House of Commons
for "uttering seditious libels." Shut out from politics, Steele
turned once more to essay-writing, and published, one after the
other, several papers of the same style as the Spectator, but
none of them lived long.

Better days, however, were coming. Queen Anne died, and King
George became a king in 1714, the Whigs returned to power, Steele
again received a Government post, again he sat in Parliament, and
a few months later he was knighted, and became Sir Richard
Steele. We cannot follow him through all his projects,
adventures, and writings. He was made one of the commissioners
for the forfeited estates of the Scottish lords who had taken
part in the '15, and upon this business he went several times to
Scotland. The first time he went was in the autumn of 1717. But
before that Lady Steele had gone to Wales to look after her
estates there. While she was there Dick wrote many letters to
her, some of which are full of tenderness for his children. They
show us something too of the happy-go-lucky household in the
absence of the careful mistress. In one he says:--

"Your son at the present writing is mighty well employed in
tumbling on the floor of the room, and sweeping the sand with a
feather. He grows a most delightful child, and very full of play
and spirit. He is also a very great scholar. He can read his
primer, and I have brought down my Virgil. He makes most shrewd
remarks about the pictures. We are very intimate friends and
play-fellows. He begins to be very ragged, and I hope I shall be
pardoned if I equip him with new clothes and frocks." Or again:-
- "The brats, my girls, stand on each side of the table, and
Molly says what I am writing now is about her new coat. Bess is
with me till she has new clothes. Miss Moll has taken upon her
to hold the sand-box,* and is so impertinent in her office that I
cannot write more. But you are to take this letter as from your
three best friends, Bess, Moll, and their Father.

*In those days there was no blotting-paper, and sand was used to
dry the ink.

"Moll bids me let you know that she fell down just now and did
not hurt herself."

Soon after this Steele set out for Scotland, and although the
business which brought him could not have been welcome to many a
Scottish gentleman, he himself was well received. They forgot
the Whig official in the famous writer. In Edinburgh he was
feasted and feted. "You cannot imagine," wrote Steele, "the
civilities and honours I had done me there. I never lay better,
ate or drank better, or conversed with men of better sense than
there." Poets and authors greeted him in verse, he was "Kind
Richy Spec, the friend to a' distressed," "Dear Spec," and many
stories are told of his doings among these new-found friends. He
paid several later visits to Scotland, but about a year after his
return from this first short visit Steele had a great sorrow.
His wife died. "This is to let you know," he writes to a cousin,
"that my dear and honoured wife departed this life last night."

And now that his children were motherless, Steele, when he was
away from them, wrote to them, always tender, often funny,
letters. It is Betty, the eldest, he addresses, she is "Dear
Child," "My dear Daughter," "My good Girlie." He bids them be
good and grow like their mother. "I have observed that your
sister," he says in one letter, "has for the first time written
the initial or first letters of her name. Tell her I am highly
delighted to see her subscription in such fair letters. And how
many fine things those two letters stand for when she writes
them. M. S. is Milk and Sugar, Mirth and Safety, Music and
Songs, Meat and Sauce, as well as Molly and Spot, and Mary and
Steele." I think the children must have loved their kind father
who wrote such pretty nonsense to them.

So with ups and downs the years passed. However much money
Steele got he never seemed to have any, and in spite of all his
carelessness and jovialness, there is something sad in those last
years of his life. He quarreled with, and then for ever lost his
life-long friend, Joseph Addison. His two sons died, and at
length, broken in health, troubled about money, he went to spend
his last days in Carmarthen in Wales. Here we have a last
pleasant picture of him being carried out on a summer's evening
to watch the country lads and lasses dance. And with his own
hand, paralyzed though it was, he would write an order for a new
gown to be given to the best dancer. And here in Carmarthen, in
1729, he died and was buried in the Church of St. Peter.

BOOKS TO READ

Essays of Richard Steele, selected and edited by L. E. Steele.
Steele Selections from the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian,
edited by Austin Dobson.

Chapter LXVII POPE--THE "RAPE OF THE LOCK"

AS you have already guessed by the number of prose writers you
have been reading about, this age, the age of the last Stuarts
and the first Georges, was not a poetic one. It was an age of
art and posturing. It was an age of fierce and passionate party
strife--strife between Whig and Tory which almost amounted to
civil war, but instead of using swords and guns the men who took
part in the strife used pen and ink. They played the game
without any rules of fair play. No weapon was too vile or mean
to be used if by it the enemy might be injured.

You have often been told that it is rude to make personal
remarks, but the age of Anne was the age of personal remarks, and
they were not considered rude. The more cruel and pointed they
were, the more clever they were thought to be. To be stupid or
ugly are not sins. They ought not to be causes of scorn and
laughter, but in the age of Anne they were accepted as such. And
if the enemy was worsted in the fight he took his revenge by
holding up to ridicule the person of his victor. To raise the
unkind laughter of the world against an enemy was the great thing
to be aimed at. Added to this, too, the age was one of common
sense. All this does not make for poetry, yet in this age there
was one poet, who, although he does not rank among our greatest
poets, was still great, and perhaps had he lived in a less
artificial age he might have been greater still.

This poet was Alexander Pope, the son of a well-to-do Catholic
linen-draper. He was born in London in 1688, but soon afterwards
his father retired from business, and went to live in a little
village not far from Windsor.

Alexander was an only son. He had one step-sister, but she was a
good many years older than he, and he seems never to have had any
child companions or real childhood. He must always have been
delicate, yet as a child his face was "round, plump, pretty, and
of a fresh complexion."* He is said, too, to have been very
sweet tempered, but his father and mother spoilt him not a
little, and when he grew up he lost that sweetness of temper.
Yet, unlike many spoilt children, Pope never forgot the reverence
due to father and mother. He repaid their love with love as
warm, and in their old age he tended and cared for them fondly.