Their pungent repartees, their brilliant fancies and clever witticisms, those mental coruscations of the moment, may yet be floating airily in space, but the more solid portions of their intellectual riches have become national endowments, and their harvest result is with us yet. The commonplace row of mean shops called Steele’s Terrace marks the place where Steele’s double-fronted cottage stood, elevated some 15 feet above the roadway, with a large strip of garden ground before it, but solitary even when I was accustomed to see it, no other house being close to it. Nichols, quoted by Park, alluding to Steele’s disappearance from town to this ‘solitude’ at Hampstead, writes, ‘It is to be feared that there were too many pecuniary reasons for this temporary retirement,’ a supposition generally adopted by Sir Richard’s biographers. I venture to think that another cause existed more pressing than the importunities of creditors or the exigencies of straitened means. Exactly one month after Steele’s letter to Pope, describing his whereabouts, Swift, writing to Mrs. Dingley from the old Court suburb, under the date of July 1, 1712, tells her ‘Steele was arrested the other day for making a lottery directly against an Act of Parliament; he is now under prosecution, but they think it will be dropped out of pity. I believe he will very soon lose his employment, for he has been mighty impertinent of late in his _Spectators_, and I will never offer a word on his behalf.’[40] Feeling himself disgraced, and desirous of keeping out of the way of his town acquaintances, seems a more cogent reason for his seclusion than the fear of his creditors, especially when we learn that the _Spectator_, instead of falling off in popularity, was selling better than ever and at double its original price; and that at the close of this summer he had taken a house for his wife in Bloomsbury Square, which does not look as if he was in want of funds. As for the irritable Dean, who had threatened to do nothing for him, a little further on in his ‘Correspondence’ he is telling the same lady of all he had done for the Whigs, and adds that he had ‘kept Steele in his place.’[41]