So with ups and downs the years passed.  However much money Steele got he never seemed to have any, and in spite of all his carelessness and jovialness, there is something sad in those last years of his life.  He quarreled with, and then for ever lost his life-long friend, Joseph Addison.  His two sons died, and at length, broken in health, troubled about money, he went to spend his last days in Carmarthen in Wales.  Here we have a last pleasant picture of him being carried out on a summer’s evening to watch the country lads and lasses dance.  And with his own hand, paralyzed though it was, he would write an order for a new gown to be given to the best dancer.  And here in Carmarthen, in 1729, he died and was buried in the Church of St. Peter.

BOOKS TO READ

Essays of Richard Steele, selected and edited by L. E. Steele.  Steele Selections from the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian, edited by Austin Dobson.

Chapter LXVII POPE—­THE “RAPE OF THE LOCK”

AS you have already guessed by the number of prose writers you have been reading about, this age, the age of the last Stuarts and the first Georges, was not a poetic one.  It was an age of art and posturing.  It was an age of fierce and passionate party strife—­strife between Whig and Tory which almost amounted to civil war, but instead of using swords and guns the men who took part in the strife used pen and ink.  They played the game without any rules of fair play.  No weapon was too vile or mean to be used if by it the enemy might be injured.

You have often been told that it is rude to make personal remarks, but the age of Anne was the age of personal remarks, and they were not considered rude.  The more cruel and pointed they were, the more clever they were thought to be.  To be stupid or ugly are not sins.  They ought not to be causes of scorn and laughter, but in the age of Anne they were accepted as such.  And if the enemy was worsted in the fight he took his revenge by holding up to ridicule the person of his victor.  To raise the unkind laughter of the world against an enemy was the great thing to be aimed at.  Added to this, too, the age was one of common sense.  All this does not make for poetry, yet in this age there was one poet, who, although he does not rank among our greatest poets, was still great, and perhaps had he lived in a less artificial age he might have been greater still.

This poet was Alexander Pope, the son of a well-to-do Catholic linen-draper.  He was born in London in 1688, but soon afterwards his father retired from business, and went to live in a little village not far from Windsor.