The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series by Sir Richard Steele;Joseph Addison
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page 39 of 3879 (01%)
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year, and when, at the same time, his wife's mother was proposing a
settlement of her money beneficial to himself, Steele replied that he was far from desiring, if he should survive his wife, 'to turn the current of the estate out of the channel it would have been in, had I never come into the family.' Liberal always of his own to others, he was sometimes without a guinea, and perplexed by debt. But he defrauded no man. When he followed his Prue to the grave he was in no man's debt, though he left all his countrymen his debtors, and he left more than their mother's fortune to his two surviving children. One died of consumption a year afterwards, the other married one of the Welsh Judges, afterwards Lord Trevor. The friendship--equal friendship--between Steele and Addison was as unbroken as the love between Steele and his wife. Petty tales may have been invented or misread. In days of malicious personality Steele braved the worst of party spite, and little enough even slander found to throw against him. Nobody in their lifetime doubted the equal strength and sincerity of the relationship between the two friends. Steele was no follower of Addison's. Throughout life he went his own way, leading rather than following; first as a playwright; first in conception and execution of the scheme of the 'Tatler', 'Spectator', and 'Guardian'; following his own sense of duty against Addison's sense of expediency in passing from the 'Guardian' to the 'Englishman', and so to energetic movement upon perilous paths as a political writer, whose whole heart was with what he took to be the people's cause. When Swift had been writing to Addison that he thought Steele 'the vilest of mankind,' in writing of this to Swift, Steele complained that the 'Examiner',--in which Swift had a busy hand,--said Addison had 'bridled him in point of politics,' adding, |
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