ble objects, and consider
the havoc which is made among the tender and the innocent, pity enters
with an unmixed softness, and possesses all our souls at once.

Here (were there words to express such sentiments with proper
tenderness) I should record the beauty, innocence, and untimely death,
of the first object my eyes ever beheld with love. The beauteous virgin!
How ignorantly did she charm, how carelessly excel! O Death! thou hast
right to the bold, to the ambitious, to the high, and to the haughty,
but why this cruelty to the humble, to the meek, to the undiscerning, to
the thoughtless?[301] Nor age, nor business, nor distress, can erase the
dear image from my imagination. In the same week, I saw her dressed for
a ball, and in a shroud. How ill did the habit of Death become the
pretty trifler? I still behold the smiling earth--A large train of
disasters were coming on to my memory, when my servant knocked at my
closet door, and interrupted me with a letter, attended with a hamper of
wine, of the same sort with that which is to be put to sale on Thursday
next at Garraway's Coffee-house.[302] Upon the receipt of it, I sent for
three of my friends. We are so intimate, that we can be company in
whatever state of mind we meet, and can entertain each other without
expecting always to rejoice. The wine we found to be generous and
warming, but with such a heat as moved us rather to be cheerful than
frolicsome. It revived the spirits without firing the blood. We
commended it till two of the clock this morning, and having to-day met a
little before dinner, we found, that though we drank two bottles a man,
we had much more reason to recollect than forget what had passed the
night before.

[Footnote 299: Steele's father, Richard Steele, was a Dublin solicitor.
His mother, whose maiden name was Elinor Sheyles, had married Thomas
Symes, of Dublin, as her first husband.]

[Footnote 300: Thackeray has compared the treatment of Death by Swift,
Addison, and Steele. After speaking of Addison's "lovely serenity" and
Swift's "savage indignation," he turns to Steele: "The third, whose
theme is Death, too, and who will speak his word of mortal as Heaven
teaches him, leads you up to his father's coffin, and shows you his
beautiful mother weeping, and himself an unconscious little boy
wondering at her side. His own natural tears flow as he takes your hand,
and confidingly asks for your sympathy; 'See how good and innocent and
beautiful