The friendship—­equal friendship—­between Steele and Addison was as unbroken as the love between Steele and his wife.  Petty tales may have been invented or misread.  In days of malicious personality Steele braved the worst of party spite, and little enough even slander found to throw against him.  Nobody in their lifetime doubted the equal strength and sincerity of the relationship between the two friends.  Steele was no follower of Addison’s.  Throughout life he went his own way, leading rather than following; first as a playwright; first in conception and execution of the scheme of the ‘Tatler’, ‘Spectator’, and ‘Guardian’; following his own sense of duty against Addison’s sense of expediency in passing from the ‘Guardian’ to the ‘Englishman’, and so to energetic movement upon perilous paths as a political writer, whose whole heart was with what he took to be the people’s cause.

When Swift had been writing to Addison that he thought Steele ’the vilest of mankind,’ in writing of this to Swift, Steele complained that the ’Examiner’,—­in which Swift had a busy hand,—­said Addison had ‘bridled him in point of politics,’ adding,

  ’This was ill hinted both in relation to him and me.  I know no party;
  but the truth of the question is what I will support as well as I can,
  when any man I honour is attacked.’

John Forster, whose keen insight into the essentials of literature led him to write an essay upon each of the two great founders of the latest period of English literature, Defoe and Steele, has pointed out in his masterly essay upon Steele that Swift denies having spoken of Steele as bridled by his friend, and does so in a way that frankly admits Steele’s right to be jealous of the imputation.  Mr. Forster justly adds that throughout Swift’s intimate speech to Stella,

’whether his humours be sarcastic or polite, the friendship of Steele and Addison is for ever suggesting some annoyance to himself, some mortification, some regret, but never once the doubt that it was not intimate and sincere, or that into it entered anything inconsistent with a perfect equality.’

Six months after Addison’s death Steele wrote (in No. 12 of the ‘Theatre’, and I am again quoting facts cited by John Forster),

’that there never was a more strict friendship than between himself and Addison, nor had they ever any difference but what proceeded from their different way of pursuing the same thing; the one waited and stemmed the torrent, while the other too often plunged into it; but though they thus had lived for some years past, shunning each other, they still preserved the most passionate concern for their mutual welfare; and when they met they were as unreserved as boys, and talked of the greatest affairs, upon which they saw where they differed, without pressing (what they knew impossible) to convert each other.’

As to the substance or worth of what thus divided them, Steele only adds the significant expression of his hope that, if his family is the worse, his country may be the better, ’for the mortification he has undergone.’