STEELE, SIR RICHARD 6 ( Irish man of letters in the reign of Queen Anne, is inseparably associated in the history of literature with his personal friend Addison. The two were born in the same year. Steele, the senior by less than two months, was baptized on March 12, 1672 in Dublin. His father, also Richard Steele, was an attorney. He died before his son had reached his sixth year, but the boy found a protector in his maternal uncle, Henry Gascoigne, secretary and confidential agent to two successive dukes of Ormonde. Through his influence he was nominated to the Charterhouse in 1684, and there first met with Addison. Five years afterwards he proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, and was a postmaster at Merton when Addison was a demy at Magdalen. Their schoolboy friendship was con tinued at the university, and probably helped to give a more serious turn to Steele's mind than his natural temperament would have taken under different companionship. Without waiting for a degree he volunteered into the army, and served for some time as a cadet "under the command of the unfortunate duke of Ormond" (i.e., the first duke's grandson, who was attainted in 1715). This escapade was made without his uncle's consent, and cost him, according to his own account, "the succession to a very good estate in the county of Wexford in Ireland." He found a patron in Lord Cutts, to whom he dedicated a poem on the funeral of Queen Mary (1695). Cutts took the gentleman trooper into his household as secretary, made him an officer in his own regiment, and ultimately procured for him a captaincy in Lord Lucas's regiment of foot. A duel which he fought with Captain Kelly in Hyde Park in 1700, and in which he wounded his an tagonist dangerously, inspired him with the dislike of duelling that he showed to the end of his life. Steele won William III.'s favour (too late to be of practical use) by a timely reference to him in The Christian Hero, his first prose treatise, published in April 1701. Steele complained that the reception of The Christian Hero by his comrades was not so respectful; they persisted in trying him by his own standard, ana would not pass "the least levity in his words and actions" without protest. He therefore determined to clear his character of the charge of undue solemnity by writing a comedy, The Funeral ( i7oi ). With this play he
began his work of reconciling wit, good humour and good breed ing with virtuous conduct which he was afterwards to accomplish in the famous essays in the Taller and the Spectator. In his next comedy, The Lying Lover; or, the Ladies' Friendship (1703), based on Corneille's Menteur, Steele's moral purpose was directly avowed, and the play, according to his own statement, was "damned for its piety." The Tender Husband, an imitation of Moliere's Sicilien (in April 1705), was more successful. It was seventeen years before Steele again tried his fortune on the stage with The Conscious Lovers, the best and most successful of his comedies, produced in December 1722.
Steele was always in want of money. He had £300 a year from his gazetteership (paying a tax of £45), too as gentleman waiter to Prince George, £850 from the Barbadoes estates of his first wife, a widow named Margaret Stretch, and some fortune by his second wife—Mrs. Mary Scurlock, the "dear Prue" of his charming letters. But he lived in considerable state after his second marriage, and before he started the Tatler was borrow ing money. The assumed name of the editor was Isaac Bicker staff, but Addison discovered the real author in the sixth number, and began to contribute in the eighteenth. The success of the Tatler was established before Addison joined him, and Addison contributed to only forty-two of the two hundred and seventy-one numbers that had appeared when the paper was stopped, obscurely, in January 1711.