=57=: 12. =The Duke of Monmouth.= The natural son of Charles II, who, during the reign of James II, in 1685, invaded England and attempted to seize the crown; but was defeated in the battle of Sedgemoor,--the last battle fought on English soil,--taken prisoner, and executed on Tower Hill. He was a young man of little ability; but his personal beauty and engaging manners won him many friends. See the portrait of him as Absalom in Dryden's _Absalom and Achitophel_, 29, 30: "His motions all accompanied with grace, And Paradise was opened in his face." =58=: 23. =R.= One of Steele's signatures. See note, p. 219. III. SIR ROGER'S CRITICISMS ON POLITE SOCIETY =Motto.= "They used to think it a great crime, even deserving of death, if a young man did not rise up in the presence of an elder."--Juvenal, _Satires_, xiii. 54. =59=: 6. =Wit and sense.= These were reckoned in the Queen Anne time the cardinal virtues not only of literature, but of society. Keenness and quickness of intellect, grace of form in letters, urbanity and good breeding, brilliancy of converse in society--these were the qualities the age most admired. This paper is one of many written by Steele to protest against the divorce of these qualities from morality and religion. =59=: 9. =Abandoned writings of men of wit.= Steele probably has especially in mind the drama of his time. English comedy was never so witty and never so abandoned as in the fifty years following the Restoration. =60=: 8. =Lincoln's Inn Fields.= A large square just west of Lincoln's Inn, at this time much frequented by beggars and sharpers. =61=: 24. =Sir Richard Blackmore= (1650-1729), a dull, long-winded poet of the time, whose verse has little beside its virtue to recommend it. In the Preface to his long philosophical poem, _The Creation_, published a few months after this paper was written, he inveighs at great length against the licentiousness and atheism of men of wit and letters; but the sentences in the text seem to be quoted, though inaccurately, from the Preface to his earlier epic, _Prince Arthur_ (1695). IV. THE CLUB AND THE SPECTATOR =Motto.= "A wild beast spares his own kind."--Juvenal, _Satires_, xv. 159. =65=: 13. =The opera and the puppet-show.= The absurd unrealities of the Italian opera, then recently introduced into England, were a subject of frequent sarcastic comment in _The Spectator_. "Audiences," says Addison, "have often been reproached by writers for the coarseness of their taste; but our present grievance does not seem to be the want of a good taste, but of common sense." For strictures on the opera, see Nos. 1, 13, 18, 22, 29, 31. =65=: 15. =Dress and equipage of persons of quality.= Perhaps he refers to No. 16, in which the Spectator had ventured some criticism upon muffs and garters and fringed gloves and other "foppish ornaments."