“Tell her I am delighted: tell her how many fine things those two letters stand for when she writes them: _M. S._ is _milk and sugar_; _mirth and safety_; _musick and songs_; _meat and sauce_, as well as _Molly and Spot_, and _Mary and Steele_. You see I take pleasure in conversing with you by prattling anything to divert you. Yr aff. father.” But you must not think Steele was a man of no importance save in his own family. His friends counted by scores and hundreds; he had warm patrons among the chiefest men of the time; had political preferment and places of trust and profit, far better than his old captaincy; could have lived in handsome style and without anxieties, if his reckless kindnesses and convivialities had not made him improvident. _Steele’s Literary Qualities._ Nor must we forget the work by which he is chiefly known, I mean his establishment of the _Tatler_--the forerunner of all those delightful essays which went to the making of the _Spectator_ and the _Guardian_; these latter having the more credit for their dignity and wise reticence, but the _Tatler_ being more vivacious, and quite as witty. Addison came to the help of Steele in the _Tatler_, and Steele, afterward joined forces with Addison in the _Spectator_. I happen to be the owner of a very old edition of these latter essays, in whose “Table of Contents” some staid critic of the last generation has written his (or her) comments on the various topics discussed; and I find against the papers of Addison, such notes as--“_instructive_, _sound_, _judicious_;” and against those of Steele, I am sorry to say, such words as “_flighty_, _light_, _witty_, _graceful_, _worthless_;” and I am inclined to think the criticisms are pretty well borne out by the papers; but if _flighty_ and _light_, he was not unwholesome; and he did not always carry the rollicking ways of the tavern into the little piquant journalism, where the grave and excellent Mr. Addison presided with him. Nay, there are better things yet to be said of him. He argued against the sin and folly of duelling with a force and pungency that went largely to stay that evil; and he never touches a religious topic that his manner does not take on an awe and a respect which belongs to the early pages of the _Christian Hero_. There are touches of pathos, too, in his writing, quite unmatchable; but straight and quick upon these you are apt to catch sound of the jingling spurs of the captain of dragoons. Thus, in that often quoted allusion to his father’s death (which happened in his boyhood), he says: “I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a beating the coffin, and calling ‘Papa.’… My mother catched me in her arms, and almost smothered me in her embraces, and told me, in a flood of tears, ‘Papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more.’”