’I beg of you to shew my letters to no one living, but let us be contented with one another’s thoughts upon our words and actions, without the intervention of other people, who cannot judge of so delicate a circumstance as the commerce between man and wife.’

But they are printed for the frivolous to laugh at and the wise to honour.  They show that even in his most thoughtless or most anxious moments the social wit, the busy patriot, remembered his ‘dear Prue,’ and was her lover to the end.  Soon after marriage, Steele took his wife to a boarding-school in the suburbs, where they saw a young lady for whom Steele showed an affection that caused Mrs. Steele to ask, whether she was not his daughter.  He said that she was.  ‘Then,’ said Mrs. Steele, ‘I beg she may be mine too.’  Thenceforth she lived in their home as Miss Ousley, and was treated as a daughter by Steele’s wife.  Surely this was a woman who deserved the love that never swerved from her.  True husband and true friend, he playfully called Addison her rival.  In the Spectator there is a paper of Steele’s (No. 142) representing some of his own love-letters as telling what a man said and should be able to say of his wife after forty years of marriage.  Seven years after marriage he signs himself, ’Yours more than you can imagine, or I express.’  He dedicates to her a volume of the Lady’s Library, and writes of her ministrations to him: 

  ’if there are such beings as guardian angels, thus are they employed. 
  I will no more believe one of them more good in its inclinations than
  I can conceive it more charming in its form than my wife.’

In the year before her death he was signing his letters with ’God bless you!’ and ‘Dear Prue, eternally yours.’  That Steele made it a duty of his literary life to contend against the frivolous and vicious ridicule of the ties of marriage common in his day, and to maintain their sacred honour and their happiness, readers of the ‘Spectator’ cannot fail to find.

Steele, on his marriage in 1707, took a house in Bury Street, St. James’s, and in the following year went to a house at Hampton, which he called in jest the Hovel.  Addison had lent him a thousand pounds for costs of furnishing and other immediate needs.  This was repaid within a year, and when, at the same time, his wife’s mother was proposing a settlement of her money beneficial to himself, Steele replied that he was far from desiring, if he should survive his wife, ’to turn the current of the estate out of the channel it would have been in, had I never come into the family.’  Liberal always of his own to others, he was sometimes without a guinea, and perplexed by debt.  But he defrauded no man.  When he followed his Prue to the grave he was in no man’s debt, though he left all his countrymen his debtors, and he left more than their mother’s fortune to his two surviving children.  One died of consumption a year afterwards, the other married one of the Welsh Judges, afterwards Lord Trevor.