ence was equally painful to
him.

Yet Steele, gifted at all times with the susceptibility of genius, was
exercising the finest feelings of the heart; the same generosity of
temper which deluded his judgment, and invigorated his passions,
rendered him a tender and pathetic dramatist; a most fertile essayist;
a patriot without private views; an enemy whose resentment died away
in raillery; and a friend, who could warmly press the hand that
chastised him. Whether in administration, or expelled the House;
whether affluent, or flying from his creditors; in the fulness of his
heart he, perhaps, secured his own happiness, and lived on, like some
wits, extempore. But such men, with all their virtues and all their
genius, live only for themselves.

Steele, in the waste of his splendid talents, had raised sudden
enmities and transient friendships. The world uses such men as Eastern
travellers do fountains; they drink their waters, and when their
thirst is appeased, turn their hacks on them. Steele lived to be
forgotten. He opened his career with folly; he hurried through it in a
tumult of existence; and he closed it by an involuntary exile, amid
the wrecks of his fortune and his mind.

Steele, in one of his numerous periodical works, the twelfth number of
the "Theatre," has drawn an exquisite contrast between himself and
his friend Addison: it is a cabinet picture. Steele's careful pieces,
when warm with his subject, had a higher spirit, a richer flavour,
than the equable softness of Addison, who is only beautiful.

"There never was a more strict friendship than between these
gentlemen; nor had they ever any difference but what proceeded from
their different way of pursuing the same thing: the one, with
patience, foresight, and temperate address, always waited and stemmed
the torrent; while the other often plunged himself into it, and was as
often taken out by the temper of him who stood weeping on the bank for
his safety, whom he could not dissuade from leaping into it. Thus
these two men lived for some years last past, shunning each other, but
still preserving the most passionate concern for their mutual welfare.
But when they met, they were as unreserved as boys; and talked of the
greatest affairs, upon which they saw where they differed, without
pressing (what they knew impossible) to convert each other."

If Steele had the honour of the invention of those periodical papers
which first enlightened the national genius by