heart was with the cause of the Revolution, and he owed also to the Ormonds a kind of family allegiance.  What was more natural than that he should be among those young Oxford men who were tempted to enlist in the Chancellor’s own regiment for the defence of liberty?  Lord Cutts, the Colonel of the Regiment, made Steele his Secretary, and got him an Ensign’s commission.  It was then that he wrote his first book, the ‘Christian Hero’, of which the modest account given by Steele himself long afterwards, when put on his defence by the injurious violence of faction, is as follows: 

’He first became an author when an Ensign of the Guards, a way of life exposed to much irregularity; and being thoroughly convinced of many things, of which he often repented, and which he more often repeated, he writ, for his own private use, a little book called the ’Christian Hero’, with a design principally to fix upon his own mind a strong impression of virtue and religion, in opposition to a stronger propensity towards unwarrantable pleasures.  This secret admiration was too weak; he therefore printed the book with his name, in hopes that a standing testimony against himself, and the eyes of the world (that is to say, of his acquaintance) upon him in a new light, would make him ashamed of understanding and seeming to feel what was virtuous, and living so contrary a life.’

Among his brother soldiers, and fresh from the Oxford worship of old classical models, the religious feeling that accompanies all true refinement, and that was indeed part of the English nature in him as in Addison, prompted Steele to write this book, in which he opposed to the fashionable classicism of his day a sound reflection that the heroism of Cato or Brutus had far less in it of true strength, and far less adaptation to the needs of life, than the unfashionable Christian Heroism set forth by the Sermon on the Mount.

According to the second title of this book it is ’an Argument, proving that no Principles but those of Religion are sufficient to make a Great Man.’  It is addressed to Lord Cutts in a dedication dated from the Tower-Yard, March 23, 1701, and is in four chapters, of which the first treats of the heroism of the ancient world, the second connects man with his Creator, by the Bible Story and the Life and Death of Christ, the third defines the Christian as set forth by the character and teaching of St. Paul, applying the definition practically to the daily life of Steele’s own time.  In the last chapter he descends from the consideration of those bright incentives to a higher life, and treats of the ordinary passions and interests of men, the common springs of action (of which, he says, the chief are Fame and Conscience) which he declares to be best used and improved when joined with religion; and here all culminates in a final strain of patriotism, closing with the character of King William, ’that of a glorious captain, and (what he much more values than the most splendid titles) that of a sincere and honest man.’  This was the character of William which, when, in days of meaner public strife, Steele quoted it years afterwards in the Spectator, he broke off painfully and abruptly with a