early life; but if the child is father of the man, the father of young
Steele of Merton, who left Oxford without taking a degree, and entered the
Life Guards--the father of Captain Steele of Lucas's Fusiliers, who got his
company through the patronage of my Lord Cutts--the father of Mr. Steele
the Commissioner of Stamps, the editor of the _Gazette_, the _Tatler_, and
_Spectator_, the expelled Member of Parliament, and the author of the
_Tender Husband_ and the _Conscious Lovers_; if man and boy resembled each
other, Dick Steele the schoolboy must have been one of the most generous,
good-for-nothing, amiable little creatures that ever conjugated the verb
_tupto_, I beat, _tuptomai_, I am whipped, in any school in Great Britain.

Almost every gentleman who does me the honour to hear me will remember
that the very greatest character which he has seen in the course of his
life, and the person to whom he has looked up with the greatest wonder and
reverence, was the head boy at his school. The schoolmaster himself hardly
inspires such an awe. The head boy construes as well as the schoolmaster
himself. When he begins to speak the hall is hushed, and every little boy
listens. He writes off copies of Latin verses as melodiously as Virgil. He
is good-natured, and, his own masterpieces achieved, pours out other
copies of verses for other boys with an astonishing ease and fluency; the
idle ones only trembling lest they should be discovered on giving in their
exercises, and whipped because their poems were too good. I have seen
great men in my time, but never such a great one as that head boy of my
childhood: we all thought he must be Prime Minister, and I was
disappointed on meeting him in after-life to find he was no more than six
feet high.

Dick Steele, the Charterhouse gownboy, contracted such an admiration in
the years of his childhood, and retained it faithfully through his life.
Through the school and through the world, whithersoever his strange
fortune led this erring, wayward, affectionate creature, Joseph Addison
was always his head boy. Addison wrote his exercises. Addison did his best
themes. He ran on Addison's messages: fagged for him and blacked his
shoes: to be in Joe's company was Dick's greatest pleasure; and he took a
sermon or a caning from his monitor with the most boundless reverence,
acquiescence, and affection.(97)

Steele found Addison a stately college Don at Oxford, and himself did not
make much figure