of comedians upon the accession of a new sovereign.  Steele also was returned as M.P. for Boroughbridge, in Yorkshire, was writer of the Address to the king presented by the Lord-lieutenant and the deputy lieutenants of Middlesex, and being knighted on that occasion, with two other of the deputies, became in the spring of the year, 1714, Sir Richard Steele.  Very few weeks after the death of his wife, in December, 1718, Sunderland, at a time when he had Addison for colleague, brought in a bill for preventing any future creations of peers, except when an existing peerage should become extinct.  Steele, who looked upon this as an infringement alike of the privileges of the crown and of the rights of the subject, opposed the bill in Parliament, and started in March, 1719, a paper called the ‘Plebeian’, in which he argued against a measure tending, he said, to the formation of an oligarchy.  Addison replied in the ‘Old Whig’, and this, which occurred within a year of the close of Addison’s life, was the main subject of political difference between them.  The bill, strongly opposed, was dropped for that session, and reintroduced (after Addison’s death) in the December following, to be thrown out by the House of Commons.

Steele’s argument against the government brought on him the hostility of the Duke of Newcastle, then Lord Chamberlain; and it was partly to defend himself and his brother patentees against hostile action threatened by the Duke, that Steele, in January, 1720, started his paper called the ‘Theatre’.  But he was dispossessed of his government of the theatre, to which a salary of L600 a-year had been attached, and suffered by the persecution of the court until Walpole’s return to power.  Steele was then restored to his office, and in the following year, 1722, produced his most successful comedy, ‘The Conscious Lovers’.  After this time his health declined; his spirits were depressed.  He left London for Bath.  His only surviving son, Eugene, born while the ‘Spectator’ was being issued, and to whom Prince Eugene had stood godfather, died at the age of eleven or twelve in November, 1723.  The younger also of his two daughters was marked for death by consumption.  He was broken in health and fortune when, in 1726, he had an attack of palsy which was the prelude to his death.  He died Sept. 1, 1729, at Carmarthen, where he had been boarding with a mercer who was his agent and receiver of rents.  There is a pleasant record that

’he retained his cheerful sweetness of temper to the last; and would often be carried out, of a summer’s evening, where the country lads and lasses were assembled at their rural sports,—­and, with his pencil, gave an order on his agent, the mercer, for a new gown to the best dancer.’

Two editions of the ‘Spectator’, the tenth and eleventh, were published by Tonson in the year of Steele’s death.  These and the next edition, dated 1739, were without the translations of the mottos,