...  Fuit Ilium, et ingens
  Gloria.

Steele’s ‘Christian Hero’ obtained many readers.  Its fifth edition was appended to the first collection of the ‘Tatler’ into volumes, at the time of the establishment of the ‘Spectator’.  The old bent of the English mind was strong in Steele, and he gave unostentatiously a lively wit to the true service of religion, without having spoken or written to the last day of his life a word of mere religious cant.  One officer thrust a duel on him for his zeal in seeking to make peace between him and another comrade.  Steele, as an officer, then, or soon afterwards, made a Captain of Fusiliers, could not refuse to fight, but stood on the defensive; yet in parrying a thrust his sword pierced his antagonist, and the danger in which he lay quickened that abiding detestation of the practice of duelling, which caused Steele to attack it in his plays, in his ‘Tatler’, in his ‘Spectator’, with persistent energy.

Of the ‘Christian Hero’ his companions felt, and he himself saw, that the book was too didactic.  It was indeed plain truth out of Steele’s heart, but an air of superiority, freely allowed only to the professional man teaching rules of his own art, belongs to a too didactic manner.  Nothing was more repugnant to Steele’s nature than the sense of this.  He had defined the Christian as ’one who is always a benefactor, with the mien of a receiver.’  And that was his own character, which was, to a fault, more ready to give than to receive, more prompt to ascribe honour to others than to claim it for himself.  To right himself, Steele wrote a light-hearted comedy, ‘The Funeral’, or ‘Grief a la Mode’; but at the core even of that lay the great earnestness of his censure against the mockery and mummery of grief that should be sacred; and he blended with this, in the character of Lawyer Puzzle, a protest against mockery of truth and justice by the intricacies of the law.  The liveliness of this comedy made Steele popular with the wits; and the inevitable touches of the author’s patriotism brought on him also the notice of the Whigs.  Party men might, perhaps, already feel something of the unbending independence that was in Steele himself, as in this play he made old Lord Brumpton teach it to his son: 

  ’But be them honest, firm, impartial;
  Let neither love, nor hate, nor faction move thee;
  Distinguish words from things, and men from crimes.’

King William, perhaps, had he lived, could fairly have recognized in Steele the social form of that sound mind which in Defoe was solitary.  In a later day it was to Steele a proud recollection that his name, to be provided for, ’was in the last table-book ever worn by the glorious and immortal William iii.’