Sir Trusty, who keeps Rosamond’s bower, and has a scolding wife.  But there is a happy compliment to Marlborough in giving to King Henry a vision at Woodstock of the glory to come for England, and in a scenic realization of it by the rising of Blenheim Palace, the nation’s gift to Marlborough, upon the scene of the Fair Rosamond story.  Indeed there can be no doubt that it was for the sake of the scene at Woodstock, and the opportunity thus to be made, that Rosamond was chosen for the subject of the opera.  Addison made Queen Eleanor give Rosamond a narcotic instead of a poison, and thus he achieved the desired happy ending to an opera.

Believe your Rosamond alive.

‘King.’  O happy day!  O pleasing view! 
My Queen forgives—­

‘Queen.’ —­My lord is true.

‘King.’  No more I’ll change.

‘Queen.’  No more I’ll grieve.

‘Both.’  But ever thus united live.

That is to say, for three days, the extent of the life of the opera.  But the literary Under-Secretary had saved his political dignity with the stage tribute to Marlborough, which backed the closet praise in the ‘Campaign.’

In May, 1707, Steele received the office of Gazetteer, until then worth L60, but presently endowed by Harley with a salary of L300 a-year.  At about the same time he was made one of the gentlemen ushers to Queen Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark.  In the same year Steele married.  Of his most private life before this date little is known.  He had been married to a lady from Barbadoes, who died in a few months.  From days referred to in the ‘Christian Hero’ he derived a daughter of whom he took fatherly care.  In 1707 Steele, aged about 35, married Miss (or, as ladies come of age were then called, Mrs.) Mary Scurlock, aged 29.  It was a marriage of affection on both sides.  Steele had from his first wife an estate in Barbadoes, which produced, after payment of the interest on its encumbrances, L670 a-year.  His appointment as Gazetteer, less the L45 tax on it, was worth L255 a-year, and his appointment on the Prince Consort’s household another hundred.  Thus the income upon which Steele married was rather more than a thousand a-year, and Miss Scurlock’s mother had an estate of about L330 a-year.  Mary Scurlock had been a friend of Steele’s first wife, for before marriage she recalls Steele to her mother’s mind by saying, ’It is the survivor of the person to whose funeral I went in my illness.’

‘Let us make our regards to each other,’ Steele wrote just before marriage, ’mutual and unchangeable, that whilst the world around us is enchanted with the false satisfactions of vagrant desires, our persons may be shrines to each other, and sacred to conjugal faith, unreserved confidence, and heavenly society.’

There remains also a prayer written by Steele before first taking the sacrament with his wife, after marriage.  There are also letters and little notes written by Steele to his wife, treasured by her love, and printed by a remorseless antiquary, blind to the sentence in one of the first of them: