The ‘Funeral’, first acted with great success in 1702, was followed in the next year by ‘The Tender Husband’, to which Addison contributed some touches, for which Addison wrote a Prologue, and which Steele dedicated to Addison, who would ‘be surprised,’ he said, ’in the midst of a daily and familiar conversation, with an address which bears so distant an air as a public dedication.’  Addison and his friend were then thirty-one years old.  Close friends when boys, they are close friends now in the prime of manhood.  It was after they had blended wits over the writing of this comedy that Steele expressed his wish for a work, written by both, which should serve as the monument to their most happy friendship.  When Addison and Steele were amused together with the writing of this comedy, Addison, having lost his immediate prospect of political employment, and his salary too, by King William’s death in the preceding year, had come home from his travels.  On his way home he had received, in September, at the Hague, news of his father’s death.  He wrote from the Hague, to Mr. Wyche,

  ’At my first arrival I received the news of my father’s death, and
  ever since have been engaged in so much noise and company, that it was
  impossible for me to think of rhyming in it.’

As his father’s eldest son, he had, on his return to England, family affairs to arrange, and probably some money to receive.  Though attached to a party that lost power at the accession of Queen Anne, and waiting for new employment, Addison—­who had declined the Duke of Somerset’s over-condescending offer of a hundred a year and all expenses as travelling tutor to his son, the Marquis of Hertford—­was able, while lodging poorly in the Haymarket, to associate in London with the men by whose friendship he hoped to rise, and was, with Steele, admitted into the select society of wits, and men of fashion who affected wit and took wits for their comrades, in the Kitcat Club.  When in 1704 Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim revived the Whig influence, the suggestion of Halifax to Lord Treasurer Godolphin caused Addison to be applied to for his poem of the ‘Campaign’.  It was after the appearance of this poem that Steele’s play was printed, with the dedication to his friend, in which he said,

’I look upon my intimacy with you as one of the most valuable enjoyments of my life.  At the same time I make the town no ill compliment for their kind acceptance of this comedy, in acknowledging that it has so far raised my opinion of it, as to make me think it no improper memorial of an inviolable Friendship.  I should not offer it to you as such, had I not been very careful to avoid everything that might look ill-natured, immoral, or prejudicial to what the better part of mankind hold sacred and honourable.’

This was the common ground between the friends.  Collier’s ’Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage’ had been