other married one of the Welsh
Judges, afterwards Lord Trevor.

The friendship--equal friendship--between Steele and Addison was as
unbroken as the love between Steele and his wife. Petty tales may have
been invented or misread. In days of malicious personality Steele braved
the worst of party spite, and little enough even slander found to throw
against him. Nobody in their lifetime doubted the equal strength and
sincerity of the relationship between the two friends. Steele was no
follower of Addison's. Throughout life he went his own way, leading
rather than following; first as a playwright; first in conception and
execution of the scheme of the 'Tatler', 'Spectator', and 'Guardian';
following his own sense of duty against Addison's sense of expediency in
passing from the 'Guardian' to the 'Englishman', and so to energetic
movement upon perilous paths as a political writer, whose whole heart
was with what he took to be the people's cause.

When Swift had been writing to Addison that he thought Steele 'the
vilest of mankind,' in writing of this to Swift, Steele complained that
the 'Examiner',--in which Swift had a busy hand,--said Addison had
'bridled him in point of politics,' adding,

'This was ill hinted both in relation to him and me. I know no party;
but the truth of the question is what I will support as well as I can,
when any man I honour is attacked.'

John Forster, whose keen insight into the essentials of literature led
him to write an essay upon each of the two great founders of the latest
period of English literature, Defoe and Steele, has pointed out in his
masterly essay upon Steele that Swift denies having spoken of Steele as
bridled by his friend, and does so in a way that frankly admits Steele's
right to be jealous of the imputation. Mr. Forster justly adds that
throughout Swift's intimate speech to Stella,

'whether his humours be sarcastic or polite, the friendship of Steele
and Addison is for ever suggesting some annoyance to himself, some
mortification, some regret, but never once the doubt that it was not
intimate and sincere, or that into it entered anything inconsistent
with a perfect equality.'

Six months after Addison's death Steele wrote (in No. 12 of the
'Theatre', and I am again quoting facts cited by John Forster),

'that there never was a more strict friendship than between himself
and Addison, nor had they ever any difference but what proceeded from
their d