DEATH OF LADY STEELE.

In the spring of 1717, Lady Steele visited Llangunnor, near Caermarthen, to look after her family estate there. Sir Richard about this time was much occupied in London with a project for conveying fish alive, by which he assured his wife, he firmly believed he should make his fortune; but, like most of his other schemes, this did not succeed.

Steele's fondness for his children and his wife is playfully expressed in the two following letters written by him to her in Wales:

DEAR PRUE,

Hampton Court, March 16, 1716-17.

If you have written anything to me which I should have received last night, I beg your pardon that I cannot answer till the next post. Your son at the present writing is mighty well employed in tumbling on the floor of the room and sweeping the sand with a feather. He grows a most delightful child, and very full of play and spirit. He is also a very great scholar: he can read his primer; and I have brought down my Virgil. He makes most shrewd remarks about the pictures. We are very intimate friends and playfellows. He begins to be very ragged; and I hope I shall be pardoned if I equip him with new clothes and frocks, or what Mrs. Evans and I shall think for his service.

MY DEAREST PRUE,

-

March 26, 1717.

I have received yours, wherein you give me the sensible affliction of telling me enow of the continual pain in your head. When I lay in your place, and on your pillow, I assure you I fell into tears last night, to think that my charming little insolent might be then awake and in pain; and took it to be a sin to go to sleep.

For this tender passion towards you, I must be contented that your Prueship will condescend to call yourself my well-wisher.

In one of her latest letters, when illness kept them apart, one in London, the other at Hampton Court, her happening to call him good Dick so delights him, that he tells her he could almost forget his miserable gout and lameness, and walk down to her. Not long after this, her illness terminated fatally. She died on the morrow of the Christmas-day of 1718, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, in that part of the south transept not included in Poet's Corner: a gravestone is placed over her remains.

STEELE AGAIN IN SCOTLAND.

Sir Richard renewed his official visit to Edinburgh in the

year 1719, after Lady Steele's death, (1720 and 1721): in the latter year we find this allusion to some party of pleasure. He writes to Mr. James Anderson, the editor of the Diplomata Scotia: "Just before I received yours, I sent a written message to Mr. Montgomery, advising that I designed the coach should go to your house, to take in your galaxy, and after call for his star," referring, probably, to the female members of Mr. Anderson's and Mr. Montgomery's families. In the ensuing month, he writes to Mr. Anderson from the York Buildings Office in London, regarding an application he had had from a poor woman named Margaret Gow. He could not help her with her petition; but he sent a small bill representing money of his own for her relief. "This trifle," he says, "in her housewifery hands, will make cheerful her numerous family at Collingtown."

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These," adds Mr. Chambers, " are meagre particulars regarding Steele's visits to Scotland, but are at least serviceable in illustrating his noted kindheartedness

'Kind Richy Spee, the friend of a' distressed,'

as he is called by Allan Ramsay, who doubtless made his personal acquaintance at this time."

STEELE AND THE PRESBYTERIANS.

When in Scotland, Sir Richard had interviews with a considerable number of the Presbyterian clergy, with the view of inducing them to agree to a union of the Presbyterian and Episcopal churches-a "devout imagination," which one would have thought very few such interviews would have required to dispel. He was particularly struck with James Hart, one of the ministers of Edinburgh, an excellent man and most attractive preacher. What most impressed Steele was, the good humour and benevolence of Hart in his private character, and the severe style in which he launched forth in the pulpit on the subject of human nature, and the frightful punishments awaiting the great mass of mankind in another state of existence. Steele called him, on this account, "the Hangman of the Gospel."

THE MENDICANTS' FEAST.

While in Edinburgh, Steele gave a proof of his benevolent humour by assembling all the eccentric-looking mendicants of the Scottish capital in a tavern in Lady Stair's Close, and

there pleasing the whimsical taste of himself and one or two friends by witnessing their enjoyment of an abundant feast, and observing their various oddities. Nor was the effect upon Steele temporary or evanescent; for he afterwards confessed that from this mendicants' feast he had drunk in enough of native drollery to compose a comedy.

"THE TOWER OF REPENTANCE."

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Steele, in one of his journeys to Scotland, soon after he had. crossed the Border, near Annan, observed a shepherd on a hill-side, and reading a book. He and his companions rode up, and one of them asked the man what he was reading. It proved to be the Bible. "And what do you learn from this book ?" asked Sir Richard. "I learn from it the way to Heaven." "Very well," replied the Knight, we are desirous of going to the same place, and wish you would show us the way." Then the shepherd, turning about, pointed to a tall and conspicuous object on an eminence, at some miles' distance, and said: "Weel, gentlemen, ye maun just gang by that tower." The party, surprised and amused, demanded to know how the tower was called. The shepherd answered, "It is the Tower of Repentance."

It was so in verity. Some centuries ago, a Border cavalier, in a fit of remorse, had built a tower, to which he gave the name of Repentance. It lies near Hoddam House, in the parish of Cummertrees, rendered by its eminent situation a conspicuous object to all the country round.-Chambers's Domestic Annals of Scotland.

SPECULATION AT YORK BUILDINGS.

The reader, we dare say, will remember the picturesque water-gate at the south end of Buckingham-street, in the Strand, facing the Thames. This is all that remains of the stately York House, which the Duke of Buckingham borrowed for the entertainment of foreign princes. His Grace pulled down the old house, and erected a large and temporary structure, sumptuously fitted up, which he used for state occasions: "his noble soul," Pepys tells us, appeared "in every place, in the doorcases and the windows." The Duke sold the house and gardens in 1672: the mansion was taken down and the gardens cleared, and upon the site were erected

"York Buildings." Harley, Earl of Oxford, was living here in 1708; and a dozen years later, we find Sir Richard Steele residing here upon an extravagant scale, in a house in Villiersstreet. The "Buildings" appear to have been a focus for speculators; and Steele projected here a sort of nursery for the stage, which required large premises; and possibly, he may have fitted up for this purpose, some portion of Buckingham's structure that may have been spared. Here he gave a sumptuous entertainment to some two hundred guests, amusing them with dramatic recitations. Addison assisted, and wrote an epilogue for the occasion, in which we can relish the sly humour of these lines:

"The Sage, whose guests you are to-night, is known
To watch the public weal, though not his own."

It was in fitting up the theatre, which was opened with this entertainment, that Steele was outwitted by his carpenter by retaliation much more moderate than that which characterizes the builders' strikes of our times. The theatre was nearly completed, and before it was opened, Steele was anxious to try whether the place was well adapted for hearing. Accordingly, he placed himself in the most remote part of the gallery, and begged the carpenter who built the house to speak up from the stage. The man at first said that he was "unaccustomed to public speaking," and did not know what to say to his honour; but the good-natured knight called out to him to say whatever was uppermost; and, after a moment, the carpenter began, in a voice perfectly audible: Sir Richard Steele!" he said, "for three months past me and my men have been a-working in this theatre, and we've never seen the colour of your honour's money: we will be very much obliged if you'll pay it directly, for until you do we wont drive in another nail." Sir Richard said that his friend's elocution was perfect, but that he didn't like his subject much.

Steele resided in Villiers-street after his wife's death, from 1721 to 1724: Mr. Peter Cunningham, in searching the ratebooks of St. Martin's, found, in 1725, the word "gone" written against Steele's name.

"THE CONSCIOUS LOVERS."

After Steele's serious failure in the Lying Lover, in 1704, he did not reappear as a dramatist till 1722, when he pro

duced his comedy of the Conscious Lovers, the most successful of his productions, and so carefully written that Parson Adams thought it as good as a sermon. There is a theatrical on dit that George I. gave Steele 5007. for this piece. Dr. Drake says of it, in his oracular manner:

The great, the appropriate praise of Steele is to have been the first who, after the licentious age of Charles II., endeavoured to introduce the Virtues on the stage. He clothed them with the brilliancy of genius; he placed them in situations most interesting to the human heart; and he taught his audience not to laugh at, but to execrate vice, to despise the lewd fool and the witty rake, to applaud the efforts of the good, and to rejoice in the punishment of the wicked.

In his preface to the Conscious Lovers (published after its representation,) Steele records that at one of its early performances, a general officer in a front box was observed to be weeping at the scene between Indiana and her father; when Wilks, the comedian, observed that he was certain the officer would fight ne'er the worse for that.

STEELE RETIRES TO WALES.

We have seen that on various trying occasions Steele's political virtue stood firm; and it is only justice to add that when overwhelmed with debt, he evinced unceasing anxiety to retrieve his fortunes. Nor were his embarrassments solely the result of extravagant living: he was altogether of a speculative turn of mind, and living in an age of bubble schemes, he fell a victim to its perils. "No man's projects for fortune," says Mr. Forster, "had so often failed, yet none were so often renewed. Indeed the art of his genius told against him in his life, and that he could so readily disentangle his thoughts from what most gave them pain and uneasiness, and direct his sensibility at will, to flow into many channels, had certainly not a tendency to favour the balance at his banker's."

Upon the authority of a Bishop, we find it stated that when Steele's affairs became involved shortly before his death, he retired into Wales solely for the purpose of doing justice to his creditors, at a time when he had the fairest prospect of satisfying their claims to the uttermost farthing.** Steele owed his property in South Wales to his wife, the only

* See Bishop Hoadly's Works, vol. i. p. 19.