“The first sense of sorrow I ever knew was upon the death of my father, at which time I was not quite five years of age.  But was rather amazed at what all the house meant, than possessed with a real understanding, why nobody was willing to play with me.  I remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it.  I had my battledore in my hand, and fell abeating the coffin, and calling ‘Papa,’ for, I know not how, I had some light idea that he was locked up there.  My mother catched me in her arms, and, transported beyond all patience of the silent grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her embrace, and told me, in a flood of tears, Pap could not hear me, and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under ground, whence he could never come to us again."*

Tatler, 181.

Steele’s sad, beautiful mother died soon after her husband, and little Dick was left more lonely than ever.  His uncle took charge of him, and sent him to Charterhouse, where he met Addison.  From there he went to Oxford, but left without taking a degree.  “A drum passing by,” he says, “being a lover of music, I listed myself for a soldier."* “He mounted a war horse, with a great sword in his hand, and planted himself behind King William the Third against Lewis the Fourteenth.”  But he says when he cocked his hat, and put on a broad sword, jack boots, and shoulder belt, he did not know his own powers as a writer, he did not know then that he should ever be able to “demolish a fortified town with a goosequill."** So Steele became a “wretched common trooper,” or, to put it more politely, a gentleman volunteer.  But he was not long in becoming an ensign, and about five years later he got his commission as captain.

Tatler, 89. *Theatre, 11.

In those days the life of a soldier was wild and rough.  Drinking and swearing were perhaps the least among the follies and wickedness they were given to, and Dick Steele was as ready as any other to join in all the wildness going.  But in spite of his faults and failings his heart was kind and tender.  He had no love of wickedness though he could not resist temptation.  So the dashing soldier astonished his companions by publishing a little book called the Christian Hero.  It was a little book written to show that no man could be truly great who was not religious.  He wrote it at odd minutes when his day’s work was over, when his mind had time “in the silent watch of the night to run over the busy dream of the day.”  He wrote it at first for his own use, “to make him ashamed of understanding and seeming to feel what was virtuous and yet living so quite contrary a life.”  Afterwards he resolved to publish it for the good of others.

But among Steele’s gay companions the book had little effect except to make them laugh at him and draw comparisons between the lightness of his words and actions, and the seriousness of the ideas set forth in his Christian Hero.  He found himself slighted instead of encouraged, and “from being thought no undelightful companion, was soon reckoned a disagreeable fellow."* So he took to writing plays, for “nothing can make the town so fond of a man as a successful play.”