Steele’s father according to the register, also named Richard, was an attorney in Dublin.  Steele seems to draw from experience—­although he is not writing as of himself or bound to any truth of personal detail—­when in No. 181 of the ‘Tatler’ he speaks of his father as having died when he was not quite five years of age, and of his mother as ’a very beautiful woman, of a noble spirit.’  The first Duke of Ormond is referred to by Steele in his Dedication to the ‘Lying Lover’ as the patron of his infancy; and it was by this nobleman that a place was found for him, when in his thirteenth year, among the foundation boys at the Charterhouse, where he first met with Joseph Addison.  Addison, who was at school at Lichfield in 1683-4-5, went to the Charterhouse in 1686, and left in 1687, when he was entered of Queen’s College, Oxford.  Steele went to Oxford two years later, matriculating at Christ Church, March 13, 1689-90, the year in which Addison was elected a Demy of Magdalene.  A letter of introduction from Steele, dated April 2, 1711, refers to the administration of the will of ’my uncle Gascoigne, to whose bounty I owe a liberal education.’  This only representative of the family ties into which Steele was born, an ‘uncle’ whose surname is not that of Steele’s mother before marriage, appears, therefore, to have died just before or at the time when the ‘Spectator’ undertook to publish a sheetful of thoughts every morning, and—­Addison here speaking for him—­looked forward to

  ’leaving his country, when he was summoned out of it, with the secret
  satisfaction of thinking that he had not lived in vain.’

To Steele’s warm heart Addison’s friendship stood for all home blessings he had missed.  The sister’s playful grace, the brother’s love, the mother’s sympathy and simple faith in God, the father’s guidance, where were these for Steele, if not in his friend Addison?

Addison’s father was a dean; his mother was the sister of a bishop; and his ambition as a schoolboy, or his father’s ambition for him, was only that he should be one day a prosperous and pious dignitary of the Church.  But there was in him, as in Steele, the genius which shaped their lives to its own uses, and made them both what they are to us now.  Joseph Addison was born into a home which the steadfast labour of his father, Lancelot, had made prosperous and happy.  Lancelot Addison had earned success.  His father, Joseph’s grandfather, had been also a clergyman, but he was one of those Westmoreland clergy of whose simplicity and poverty many a joke has been made.  Lancelot got his education as a poor child in the Appleby Grammar School; but he made his own way when at College; was too avowed a Royalist to satisfy the Commonwealth, and got, for his zeal, at the Restoration, small reward in a chaplaincy to the garrison at Dunkirk.  This was changed, for the worse, to a position of the same sort at Tangier, where he remained eight years.  He lost that office by misadventure, and