Pope’s contributions to the _Spectator_ led in 1712 to Steele’s making his acquaintance, which was followed by his introducing the young poet to his courtly friend Addison. One can fancy the fine presence and handsome countenance of the distinguished essayist, his Sir Charles Grandison air, and the stately suavity of his bow, which brings the side-locks of his voluminous wig an arm’s length beyond the shapely hand laid impressively on the breast of his deep-flapped waistcoat, and the ill-dressed, crooked figure and sallow face of the youthful poet. But remembering that Pope at seventeen years of age had been admitted to the company of the wits at Wills’s, it is probable that the stately compliments of the great moralist, whose mission it was to help reform the morals and manners of the day, did not so much affect him as they might have done an older man less conscious of his acknowledged power; and the nervous flushing of the sallow cheek, the brightening of the large dark eyes, and the slight quiver of the sensitive muscles of the melancholy mouth, may be as much the result of infelt pride as of modesty. [Illustration: _Sir Richard Steele._] It was Addison who, on reading the first two cantos of the ‘Rape of the Lock,’ pronounced it ‘a delicious little thing’; ‘it was _merum sal_,’ he said, but when Pope resolved to recast the whole poem, and asked Addison’s advice, and the latter entreated him not to run the risk of spoiling it, in doing so he affronted the morbidly jaundiced mind of the poet, who, on the altered poem proving a success, called Addison’s counsel insidious, and accused the amiable giver of it of baseness.[39] It is a pleasant recollection not only to have seen Steele’s cottage, but to have stood with my friend, Eliza Meteyard, in the room to the right where some of those witty, playful, clever papers were composed, in which the follies and vices of the times are mirrored with graphic power in the pages of the now too rarely read _Spectator_ and _Guardian_. [Illustration: To My Lov’d Tutour Dʳ. Ellis With Secret impulse thus do Streams return To that Capacious Ocean whence they’re born: Oh Would but Fortune come wᵗʰ. bounty fraught Proportion’d to yᵉ mind wᶜʰ. thou hast taught!. Till then let these unpolish’d leaves impart The Humble Offering of a Gratefull Heart. Richᵈ: Steele ] There might have been an ampler number of them, perhaps, but for the proximity of the Upper Flask and Bull and Bush taverns, and the near neighbourhood of the Wells. But it is still pleasant to fancy the lifting of the gate-latch, and to see in imagination going up the garden-path, or issuing from it, with Steele in the midst of them, Arbuthnot and Gay and Pope, and it may be Swift, famous associates and friends, whose almost centuries-old footsteps—for those who care to look beneath the surface of the present—underlie the dust upon the hillside, and give the road a charm beyond its own.