Not more edifying nor much more successful was Vanbrugh's "False Friend," a _comedy_ in which there is a murder enacted before the audience! What the house lost by it was fully made up by the unequivocal success of the next new piece, the "Funeral, or Grief à la Mode." The author was then six and twenty years of age; this was his first piece, and his name was Steele. All that was known of him then was, that he was a native of Dublin, had been fellow-pupil at the Charter House with Addison, had left the University without a degree, and was said to have lost the succession to an estate in Wexford by enlisting as "a _private gentleman_ in the Horse Guards;" a phrase significant enough, as the proper designation of that body, at this day, is "Gentlemen of her Majesty's Royal Horse Guards." He was the wildest and wittiest young dog about town, when in 1701, he published, with a dedication to Lord Cutts, to whom he had been private secretary, and through whom he had been appointed to a company in Lord Lucas's Fusiliers, his _Christian Hero_, a treatise in which he showed what he was not, by showing what a man ought to be. It brought the poor fellow into incessant perplexity, and even peril. Some thought him a hypocrite, others provoked him as a coward, all measured his sayings and doings by his maxims in his _Christian Hero_, and Dick Steele was suffering in the regard of the town, when he resolved to redeem the character which he could not keep up to the level of his religious hero, by composing a comedy! He thoroughly succeeded, and there were troopers enough in the house to have beat the rest of the audience into shouting approbation, had they not been well inclined to do so spontaneously. The "Funeral" is the merriest and the most perfect of Steele's comedies. The characters are strongly marked, the wit genial, and not indecent. Steele was among the first who set about reforming the licentiousness of the old comedy. His satire in the "Funeral" is not against virtue, but vice and silliness. When the two lively ladies in widow's weeds meet, Steele's classical memory served him with a good illustration. "I protest, I wonder," says Lady Brumpton (Mrs. Verbruggen), "how two of us thus clad can meet with a grave face." The most genuine humour in the piece was that applied against lawyers; but more especially in the satire against undertakers, and all their mockery of woe. Take the scene in which Sable (Johnson) is giving instructions to his men, and reviewing them the while:--"Ha, you're a little more upon the dismal. This fellow has a good mortal look--place him near the corpse. That wainscot-face must be a-top o' the stairs. That fellow's almost in a fright, that looks as if he were full of some strange misery, at the end o' the hall! So!--But I'll fix you all myself. Let's have no laughing now, on any provocation. Look yonder at that hale, well-looking puppy! You ungrateful scoundrel, didn't I pity