The days of man are doom’d to pain and strife,
  Quiet and ease are foreign to our life;
  No satisfaction is, below, sincere,
  Pleasure itself has something that’s severe.

Britain had rejoiced in the high fortune of King William, and now a mourning world attended his wife to the tomb.  The poor were her first and deepest mourners, poor from many causes; and then Steele pictured, with warm sympathy, form after form of human suffering.  Among those mourning poor were mothers who, in the despair of want, would have stabbed infants sobbing for their food,

  But in the thought they stopp’d, their locks they tore,
  Threw down the steel, and cruelly forbore. 
  The innocents their parents’ love forgive,
  Smile at their fate, nor know they are to live.

To the mysteries of such distress the dead queen penetrated, by her ‘cunning to be good.’  After the poor, marched the House of Commons in the funeral procession.  Steele gave only two lines to it: 

  With dread concern, the awful Senate came,
  Their grief, as all their passions, is the same. 
  The next Assembly dissipates our fears,
  The stately, mourning throng of British Peers.

A factious intemperance then characterized debates of the Commons, while the House of Lords stood in the front of the Revolution, and secured the permanency of its best issues.  Steele describes, as they pass, Ormond, Somers, Villars, who leads the horse of the dead queen, that ’heaves into big sighs when he would neigh’—­the verse has in it crudity as well as warmth of youth—­and then follow the funeral chariot, the jewelled mourners, and the ladies of the court,

  Their clouded beauties speak man’s gaudy strife,
  The glittering miseries of human life.

I yet see, Steele adds, this queen passing to her coronation in the place whither she now is carried to her grave.  On the way, through acclamations of her people, to receive her crown,

  She unconcerned and careless all the while
  Rewards their loud applauses with a smile,
  With easy Majesty and humble State
  Smiles at the trifle Power, and knows its date.

But now

What hands commit the beauteous, good, and just, The dearer part of William, to the dust?  In her his vital heat, his glory lies, In her the Monarch lived, in her he dies. ...  No form of state makes the Great Man forego The task due to her love and to his woe; Since his kind frame can’t the large suffering bear In pity to his People, he’s not here:  For to the mighty loss we now receive The next affliction were to see him grieve.

If we look from these serious strains of their youth to the literary expression of the gayer side of character in the two friends, we find Addison sheltering his taste for playful writing behind a Roman Wall of hexameter.  For among his Latin poems in the Oxford ‘Musae Anglicanae’ are eighty or ninety lines of resonant