Steele, SIR RICHARD, the father of the Queen Anne essay, was born in Dublin in March 1672 (n.s.), and was there baptised at St Bridget's Church. His father, Richard Steele of Mountain (Monkstown), was an attorney; his mother had been a widow named Elinor Symes. His father died when he was a child (Tatler, No. 181). Mrs Steele did not long survive her husband, and the boy fell to the charge of an uncle, Henry Gascoigne, secretary to the first Duke of Ormond. Through Ormond's influence, in November 1684 Steele was placed upon the foundation at the Charterhouse, where he had Addison, his junior by six weeks, for contemporary. In December 1689 he entered Christ Church College, Oxford, and in March 1690 he matriculated. He tried hard for a Christ Church studentship, but eventually (in 1691) gained a post-mastership at Merton. At the university he was popular and respected, but in 1694 he suddenly enlisted as a cadet in the second troop of Horse Guards, then commanded by the second Duke of Ormond, thereby surrendering, according to his own account, some rather vaguely described expectations as a Wexford landowner. Already at college a dabbler in verse, in 1695 he made his appearance as a printed poet by The Procession, a conventional effusion on the funeral of Queen Mary, which he dedicated to John, Lord Cutts, who forthwith made him his secretary, and finally gave him a standard in his own regiment of Coldstream Guards. In June 1700 he became involved in a duel with an Irishman named Kelly, whom he had the misfortune to wound severely. One outcome of this occurrence was the production of the devotional manual known as The Christian Hero, which was written at the Tower Guard, and published in April 1701. With the public it was popular, but, as might be anticipated, it was regarded by Steele's military comrades as incompatible with his calling as a 'gentleman of the army.' 'From being thought no undelightful companion,' he 'was soon reckoned a disagreeable fellow;' and the necessity to 'enliven his character' drove him to the odd expedient of writing a play. This, The Funeral; or, Grief à la Mode, was acted at Drury Lane in December 1701. It was followed in 1703 by The Lying Lover, and in 1705 by The Tender Husband. About this time, it is supposed, being now a captain in Lord Lucas' Regiment of Foot, he engaged in certain researches for the 'philosopher's stone,' the details of which rest mainly upon the authority of that 'cornucopia of scandal,' the New Atalantis of Mrs De la Rivière Manley, although the fact of the researches is not denied. Their failure is practically synchronous with his marriage to a widow named Margaret Stretch (with estates in Barbadoes). The marriage took place in 1705, and the lady died two years later. In August 1706 Steele was appointed gentleman-waiter to Queen Anne's consort, Prince George of Denmark; and a few weeks after his wife's death, upon the recommendation of Arthur Mainwaring (who, like Steele, was a member of the Kit Cat Club), he was appointed by Harley, then a Secretary of State, to the post of Gazetteer, the annual salary of which was increased to £300. By this time, it is presumed, he had quitted the army; but he continued to be spoken of as 'Captain' Steele. The next notable occurrence in his life was his second marriage, in September 1707, to the beautiful Miss Mary Scurlock, the daughter of Jonathan Scurlock, deceased, of Llangunor in Carmarthen, and the 'Prue' of her husband's correspondence. Shortly afterwards, by the death of Prince George, he lost his court appointment. Then, without much warning, appeared on the 12th April 1709, the first number of the famous tri-weekly paper known as the Tatler, the putative author of which was one 'Isaac Bickerstaff,' a pseudonym borrowed from Swift. In January 1710, during the course of the Tatler, Steele was made a commissioner of stamps, and for some obscure reason was deprived of his gazetteership. The Tatler came to an end on 2d January 1711, to be succeeded in March by the more famous Spectator, which ceased 6th December 1712. To the Spectator, in March 1713, followed the Guardian. In all these enterprises Steele enjoyed the aid, as a contributor, of his friend and schoolfellow Addison—an aid the incalculable value of which he acknowledged with loyal cordiality. 'I fared (he said) like a distressed prince, who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid; I was undone by my auxiliary; when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without dependence on him' (Preface to Tatler, vol. iv.).
In beginning the Guardian Steele had made prudent profession of abstinence from political questions. But the moment was not favourable to restraint, even for less earnest men. From his youth he had been an ardent adherent of the Revolution, and now, as it was thought, the Hanoverian succession was in jeopardy. Before April 1713 he was involved in a bitter quarrel with Swift. Then the disquieting rumours that the demolition of the Dunkirk fortifications, which was provided for by the treaty of Utrecht, would not be insisted on drew from him an indignant pamphlet entitled The Importance of Dunkirk consider'd, to which Swift, on the other side, grimly retorted with The Importance of the 'Guardian' consider'd. Steele in the meantime had resigned his commissionership of stamps, and entered parliament as member for Stockbridge, concurrently dropping the Guardian for the professedly political Englishman. Shortly afterwards he published The Crisis (1714), a pamphlet on the Hanoverian succession, to which Swift replied with matchless irony by The Publick Spirit of the Whigs. When Steele actually entered upon his duties in the House he found he was a marked man. He was promptly impeached for seditious utterances in The Crisis, and, although he made a capable defence, was expelled. But with Anne's death, a few months subsequently, his party came into power and his troubles ended. In his best pamphlet, Mr Steele's Apology for Himself and his Writings (1714), he has given his own account of this part of his career.
That career, as far as literature is concerned, practically closed at this point. He again became a member of parliament, being returned for Boroughbridge; and a little later, upon presentation of an address to King George I., was knighted. He continued to produce periodicals and pamphlets, none of which are of great importance, though one of them, The Plebeian, had the effect of involving him in a painful controversy with his friend Addison. He was made a patentee of Drury Lane Theatre, where in 1722 he produced The Conscience Lovers, his best comedy. He also established the Censorium, a sort of aesthetic music-hall; and he devised an impracticable 'fish-pool' or well-boat for bringing salmon alive from Ireland. In December 1718 he lost his wife. He survived her for nearly eleven years, dying ultimately, 1st September 1729, at Carmarthen, where he was buried in St Peter's Church. Of his four children only two were living at his death. His daughter Mary soon followed her father; and the remaining and eldest child, Elizabeth, married a Welsh judge, afterwards the third Lord Trevor of Bromham.
Steele's character has suffered from various causes, among which may be reckoned the animosity aroused by his political writings, the careless candour of his own admissions of frailty, and the habitual comparison of his weaknesses with the colder and more equable goodness of Addison. He has been specially branded as intemperate, but there is no sufficient evidence why in this respect he should be singled out from his contemporaries. That he was incurably sanguine, and that he constantly mistook his expectations for his means, is manifest from his lifelong embarrassments. But these were the result of an improvident temperament and an uncertain income rather than of a vicious habit of mind; and he made a noble and successful attempt to pay his debts before he died. Upon the whole he was a warm-hearted and benevolent man, a devoted husband (some of his letters to his wife are among the most unfeigned in the language), a loving father, and a loyal friend.
As a literary man he may be more exactly estimated. Though he wrote verse, he has no claims as a poet. His plays are commendable efforts in the direction of the stage-purification advocated by Jeremy Collier; but their feeling for humorous character is more notable than their stage-craft, and they have never kept the boards. His political pamphlets were honest and straightforward, but not effectively polemical; and he had a terrible enemy in Swift, who as a former friend had learned his adversary's weakest side. His fame rests almost wholly upon his performances as an essayist. And here he was by no means the colorless colleague of Addison that is sometimes supposed. On the contrary, he was nearly always the fore-running and projecting spirit, and his ready sympathies and quick enthusiasm occasionally carried him to an altitude which Addison never attained. If he wanted Addison's restraint, his distinction, his exquisite art, he nevertheless rallied folly with admirable good-humour, rebuked vice with unvarying courage and dignity, and earned for himself the lasting gratitude of the 'beautiful sex,' as he called them, by the chivalry, the manliness, and the genuine respect with which, almost alone in his age, he spoke of women.
Steele has been written of by Macaulay (Edinburgh Review, 1843) and Thackeray (English Humourists, 1853), but most sympathetically by John Forster (Quarterly Review, 1855). In 1886 a Memoir of him, containing some new facts, was issued by the present writer in the 'English Worthies' series; and in 1889 followed a detailed Biography by Mr G. A. Aitken, embodying the results of prolonged and minute researches. A selection from Steele's Essays, with notes, was issued in 1885 by the Clarendon Press.