was always in difficulties, he hid from bailiffs, he did many other
things that tarnish honour, more or less, and things for which he had to
beg Prue's special pardon; but yet he is not a fit subject for the
unhandsome incredulity which is proud to be always at hand with an ironic
commentary on such letters as his.

I have no wish to bowdlerize Sir Richard Steele, his ways and words. He
wrote to Prue at night when the burgundy had been too much for him, and
in the morning after. He announces that he is coming to her "within a
pint of wine." One of his gayest letters--a love-letter before the
marriage, addressed to "dear lovely Mrs. Scurlock"--confesses candidly
that he had been pledging her too well: "I have been in very good
company, where your health, under the character of the woman I loved
best, has been often drunk; so that I may say that I am dead drunk for
your sake, which is more than _I die for you_."

Steele obviously drank burgundy wildly, as did his "good company"; as did
also the admirable Addison, who was so solitary in character and so
serene in temperament. But no one has, for this fault, the right to put
a railing accusation into the mouth of Prue. Every woman has a right to
her own silence, whether her silence be hers of set purpose or by
accident. And every creature has a right to security from the banterings
peculiar to the humourists of a succeeding age. To every century its own
ironies, to every century its own vulgarities. In Steele's time they had
theirs. They might have rallied Prue more coarsely, but it would have
been with a different rallying. Writers of the nineteenth century went
about to rob her of her grace.

She kept some four hundred of these little letters of her lord's. It was
a loyal keeping. But what does Thackeray call it? His word is