In 1705 he married a widow, one Mrs. Stretch, who died a year and a half later and left him a snug estate in the Barbadoes. Thus secured against the chance of adverse fortune, he sold his commission in the army, and set up as man of letters. Like all the writers of his time, however, he considered his pen to be at the service of his political party, and expected a reward in some civil office. In 1706 he was appointed Gentleman Usher to Prince George of Denmark, the stupid husband of Queen Anne, and in the following year was given the more lucrative position of Gazetteer. This office he held when, in 1709, he started _The Tatler_. About a year after the death of his first wife, Steele had married again, this time a "Welsh beauty," Miss Mary Scurlock. The letters of Steele to this lady, during the few weeks of acquaintance that preceded the marriage and for years thereafter, are the most delightful domestic correspondence in our language. They are most of them mere notelets, written in his office, at the club, in a tavern, anywhere whence he may send her a kind word. Steele never had any mastery of business, and it is probable that the bailiffs had something to do with the frequent absences from home that these letters record. Mrs. Steele, on the other hand, was a woman of unusually thrifty and methodical habit, to whom the carelessness and extravagance of her husband must have been very trying. It is evident from his letters that she sometimes gave him quite as much advice as he felt himself able to use. After the first few months, he has dropped the "Molly," and the letters are uniformly addressed to his "Dear Prue"; and once or twice he goes so far as to remonstrate with her quietly for an unendurable interference with his "business." Yet nothing disturbs his constant affection, and the letters are filled with the same playful, tender prettinesses to the last. That was a truthful signature with which he once signed a midnight letter when he could not come home: "I am, my dear Prue, a little in drink, but at all times, Your Own Faithful Husband, Richard Steele." There was no other man of letters in the Queen Anne time, I am sure, whose domestic life would bear turning wrong side out so well. Indeed, no other writer of that age appreciated so well the character of woman, or has given us such pictures of the beauty and charm of home. It was Steele who paid to Lady Elizabeth Hastings that best compliment ever offered to a lady, "To love her is a liberal education." It was in these happy, early years of his married life, when his fortunes, though always precarious, were hopeful, when he was enjoying the friendship of Halifax and Addison and Swift, when his own humor and invention were at their brightest, that Steele had the one great inspiration of his life--he conceived the idea of _The Tatler_.