he
is still nothing more than Ensign Steele! He tells us that this grave
work made him considered, who had been no undelightful companion, as a
disagreeable fellow--and "The Christian Hero," by his own words,
appears to have fought off several fool-hardy geniuses who were for
"trying their valour on him," supposing a saint was necessarily a
poltroon. Thus "The Christian Hero," finding himself slighted by his
loose companions, sat down and composed a most laughable comedy, "The
Funeral;" and with all the frankness of a man who cares not to hide
his motives, he tells us, that after his religious work he wrote the
comedy because "nothing can make the town so fond of a man as a
successful play."[121] The historian who had to record such strange
events, following close on each other, as an author publishing a book
of piety, and then a farce, could never have discovered the secret
motive of the versatile writer, had not that writer possessed the most
honest frankness.

Steele was now at once a man of the town and its censor, and wrote
lively essays on the follies of the day in an enormous black peruke
which cost him fifty guineas! He built an elegant villa, but, as he
was always inculcating economy, he dates from "The Hovel." He detected
the fallacy of the South Sea scheme, while he himself invented
projects, neither inferior in magnificence nor in misery. He even
turned alchemist, and wanted to coin gold, merely to distribute it.
The most striking incident in the life of this man of volition, was
his sudden marriage with a young lady who attended his first wife's
funeral--struck by her angelical beauty, if we trust to his raptures.
Yet this sage, who would have written so well on the choice of a wife,
united himself to a character the most uncongenial to his own; cold,
reserved, and most anxiously prudent in her attention to money, she
was of a temper which every day grew worse by the perpetual imprudence
and thoughtlessness of his own. He calls her "Prue" in fondness and
reproach; she was Prudery itself! His adoration was permanent, and so
were his complaints; and they never parted but with bickerings--yet he
could not suffer her absence, for he was writing to her three or four
passionate notes in a day, which are dated from his office, or his
bookseller's, or from some friend's house--he has risen in the midst
of dinner to despatch a line to "Prue," to assure her of his affection
since noon.[122]--Her presence or her abs