t, although _The Spectator_, once read as a model of taste and
style, has become antiquated and has been superseded, it must still be
resorted to for its life-like portraiture of men and women, manners and
customs, and will be found truer and more valuable for these than history
itself.

CHAPTER XXVI.

STEELE AND SWIFT.

Sir Richard Steele. Periodicals. The Crisis. His Last Days. Jonathan
Swift--Poems. The Tale of a Tub. Battle of the Books. Pamphlets. M. B.
Drapier. Gulliver's Travels. Stella and Vanessa. His Character and
Death.

Contemporary with Addison, and forming with him a literary fraternity,
Steele and Swift were besides men of distinct prominence, and clearly
represent the age in which they lived.

SIR RICHARD STEELE.--If Addison were chosen as the principal literary
figure of the period, a sketch of his life would be incomplete without a
large mention of his lifelong friend and collaborator, Steele. If to Bacon
belongs the honor of being the first writer and the namer of the English
_essay_, Steele may claim that of being the first periodical essayist.

He was born in Dublin, in 1671, of English parents; his father being at
the time secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He received his
early education at the Charter-House school, in London, an institution
which has numbered among its pupils many who have gained distinguished
names in literature. Here he met and formed a permanent friendship with
Addison. He was afterwards entered as a student at Merton College, Oxford;
but he led there a wild and reckless life, and leaving without a degree,
he enlisted as a private in the Horse Guards. Through the influence of his
friends, he was made a cornet, and afterwards a captain, in the
Fusileers; but this only gave him opportunity for continued dissipation.
His principles were better than his conduct; and, haunted by conscience,
he made an effort to reform himself by writing a devotional work called
_The Christian Hero_; but there was such a contrast between his precepts
and his life, that he was laughed at by the town. Between 1701 and 1704 he
produced his three comedies. _The Funeral, or Grief a la Mode_; _The
Tender Husband_, and _The Lying Lover_. The first two were successful upon
the stage, but the last was a complete failure. Disgusted for the time
with the drama, he was led to find his true place as the writer of those
light, brilliant, periodical essays which form a pro