But with this one exception, Steele’s little notes, kept by his wife while she lived, and treasured after her death by her daughter and his, are no record of the watchings and dodgings of a London farce.  It is worth while to remember that Steele’s dinner, which it was so often difficult to eat at home, was a thing of midday, and therefore of mid-business.  But that is a detail.  What is desirable is that a reasonable degree of sweetness should be attributed to Prue; for it is no more than just.  To her Steele wrote in a dedication:  “How often has your tenderness removed pain from my aching head, how often anguish from my afflicted heart.  If there are such beings as guardian angels, they are thus employed.  I cannot believe one of them to be more good in inclination, or more charming in form, than my wife.”

True, this was for the public; but not so were these daily notes; and these carry to her his assurance that she is “the beautifullest object in the world.  I know no happiness in this life in any degree comparable to the pleasure I have in your person and society.”  “But indeed, though you have every perfection, you have an extravagant fault, which almost frustrates the good in you to me; and that is, that you do not love to dress, to appear, to shine out, even at my request, and to make me proud of you, or rather to indulge the pride I have that you are mine.”  The correction of the phrase is finely considerate.

Prue cannot have been a dull wife, for this last compliment is a reply, full of polite alacrity, to a letter from her asking for a little flattery.  How assiduously, and with what a civilized absence of uncouthness, of shame-facedness, and of slang of the mind, with what simplicity, alertness, and finish, does he step out at her invitation, and perform!  She wanted a compliment, though they had been long married then, and he immediately turned it.  This was no dowdy Prue.

Her request, by the way, which he repeats in obeying it, is one of the few instances of the other side of the correspondence—­one of the few direct echoes of that one of the two voices which is silent.

The ceremony of the letters and the deferent method of address and signature are never dropped in this most intimate of letter-writing.  It is not a little depressing to think that in this very form and state is supposed, by the modern reader, to lurk the stealthiness of the husband of farce, the “rogue.”  One does not like the word.  Is it not clownish to apply it with intention to the husband of Prue?  He did not pay, he was always in difficulties, he hid from bailiffs, he did many other things that tarnish honour, more or less, and things for which he had to beg Prue’s special pardon; but yet he is not a fit subject for the unhandsome incredulity which is proud to be always at hand with an ironic commentary on such letters as his.