There can be very little doubt that Steele had been greatly distressed and hurt by the rupture of the friendship which had so long existed between himself and Addison, but that Tickell should have taken his place in Addison's affections must have been inexpressibly galling to him. Naturally irritated, his irritation had no doubt been intensified by Addison appointing Tickell Under Secretary of State, and still more by his making him his literary executor--offices which Steel might naturally have expected, had all gone well, to fill himself. It would not have been in human nature that he could regard Tickell with any other feelings than hostility and jealousy. Tickell's omission of the _Drummer_ from Addison's works was, in all probability--such at least is the impression which the letter makes on me--a mere pretext for the gratification of personal spite. There is nothing to justify the interpretation which he puts on Tickell's words. All that Steele here says about Addison he had said publicly and quite as emphatically before, as Tickell had recorded. As Steele had, in Tickell's own words, given to Addison 'the honour of the most applauded pieces,' it is absurd to accuse Tickell of insinuating that Addison wished his papers to be marked because he was afraid Steele would assume the credit of these pieces. In one important particular he flatly contradicts himself. At the beginning he asks 'whether it was a decent and reasonable thing that works written, as a great part of Mr. Addison's were, in correspondence with me, ought to have been published without my review of the catalogue of them.' Three pages afterward, it appears that, in compliance with the request of Addison delivered to him by Tickell, he did mark with his own hand those _Tatlers_ which were inserted in Addison's works--a statement of Tickell's, but a statement to which Steele takes no exception. So far from attempting to disparage Steele, Tickell does ample justice to him; and to accuse him of insensibility to Addison's virtues, and of cold indifference to him personally, is a charge refuted not only by all we know of Tickell, but by every page in the tract itself. Many of the objections which he makes to Tickell's remarks are too absurd to discuss. From nothing indeed which Tickell says, but from one of Steele's own admissions, it is impossible not to draw a conclusion very derogatory to Steele's honesty, and to make us suspect that his sensitiveness was caused by his own uneasy conscience: 'What I never did declare was Mr. Addison's I had his direct injunctions to hide.' This certainly seems to imply that Steele had allowed himself to be credited with what really belonged to his friend. A month after Addison's death he had written in great alarm to Tonson, on hearing that it had been proposed to separate Addison's papers in the _Tatler_ from his own. He bases his objection, it is true, on the pecuniary injury which he and his family would suffer, but this is plainly mere