Apology for himself and his Writings.

The plays of the Restoration had been very coarse.  Those of Steele show the beginning of a taste for better things, “Tho’ full of incidents that move laughter, virtue and vice appear just as they ought to do,” he says of his first comedy.  But although we may still find Steele’s plays rather amusing, it is not as a dramatist that we remember him, but as an essayist.

Steele led a happy-go-lucky life, nearly always cheerful and in debt.  His plays brought him in some money, he received a Government appointment which brought him more, and when he was about thirty-three he married a rich widow.  Still he was always in debt, always in want of money.

In about a year Steele’s wife died, and he was shortly married to another well-off lady.  About this time he left the army, it is thought, although we do not know quite surely, and for long afterwards he was called Captain Steele.

Steele wrote a great many letters to his second wife, both before and after his marriage.  She kept them all, and from them we can learn a good deal of this warm-hearted, week-willed, harum-scarum husband.  She is “Dearest Creature,” “Dear Wife,” “Dear Prue” (her name, by the way, was Mary), and sometimes “Ruler,” “Absolute Governess,” and he “Your devoted obedient Husband,” “Your faithful, tender Husband.”  Many of the letters are about money troubles.  We gather from them that Dick Steele loved his wife, but as he was a gay and careless spendthrift and she was a proud beauty, a “scornful lady,” for neither of them was life always easy.

It was about two years after this second marriage that Steele suddenly began the Tatler.  He did not write under his own name, but under that of Isaac Bickerstaff, a name which Swift had made use of in writing one of his satires.  As has been said, the genius of Steele has been overshadowed by that of Addison, for Steele had such a whole-hearted admiration for his friend that he was ready to give him all the praise.  And yet it is nearly always to Steele that we owe the ideas which were later worked out and perfected by Addison.

It is Steele, too, that we owe the first pictures of English family life.  It has been said that he “was the first of our writers who really seemed to admire and respect women,"* and if we add “after the Restoration” we come very near the truth.  Steele had a tender heart towards children too, and in more than one paper his love of them shows itself.  Indeed, as we read we cannot help believing that in real life Captain Dick had many child-friends.  Here is how he tells of a visit to a friend’s house:—­ Thackeray.

“I am, as it were, at home at that house, and every member of it knows me for their well-wisher.  I cannot indeed express the pleasure it is, to be met by the children with so much joy as I am when I go thither.  The boys and girls strive who shall come first, when they think it is I that am knocking at the door.  And that child which loses the race to me, runs back again to tell the father it is Mr. Bickerstaff.