SIR RICHARD STEELE
By Willard Connely 'n. Scribner's Sons, New York.
Turbulent, four-bottle Englishmen who lived so fully two hundred years ago have been embalmed too frequently by expert morticians like Aitken, Stephen, and Craik. Mr. Connely delivers Steele alive, in a racy and readable biography. Dick Steele, the orphaned child of an improvident father roams the streets of Dublin, amid a mixture "of lousiness and laziness, of misery and magnificence." The scene shifts to public school in London, and to Oxford, with colorful accounts of undergraduate life and wild oats. Leaving his more academic schoolmate, Addison, to compose Latin poems and win fellowships, Steele rushes off to the wars, to save his country from the Pretender, and to pick up some adventure. Frank of bearing, unwearied in spirit, impudently Irish, he wins the messroom as promptly as his scarlet coat of an officer in the Cold Stream Guards wins the favor of platoons of ladies. Specially amusing and instructive are the strategies whereby he lifts himself by his own bootstraps into the company and esteem of the greatest in the army, in society, and in letters. Addison, Congreve, and Swift were his close friends; hostesses adored him; his sovereign knighted him. It was all very delightful but hard on the health. Steele drank with the messroom, with Covent Garden, and with Mayfair, but he got the gout.
Like the heroes of his comedies, Steele was a good-hearted rake, a Prodigal whose principles were sound. He won duels with his sword, and denounced duelling with his pen. Illegitimate children of his own led him to propound schemes for providing for the illegitimate children of England. At once the censor and the censored his admonitions were inevitably more convincing and human than those of the more learned but less experienced Addison.
Never consistent, but never a hypocrite, Steele emerges from these pages as the exponent of his London. A lively clubman and bon viveur, an ardent party man, a talented journalist, and a successful dramatist, the penniless Irish orphan con- quered London. In the end, to be sure, indigestion and debts overcame him. Among the creditors who hounded him was the widow of Elihu Yale, whose husband "had made a fortune in the India trade, and had made a name by giving a shipload of books to a college in Connecticut."
