presented his wife with a country house at Hampton. It appears she had a
chariot and pair, and sometimes four horses: he himself enjoyed a little
horse for his own riding. He paid, or promised to pay, his barber fifty
pounds a year, and always went abroad in a laced coat and a large
black-buckled periwig, that must have cost somebody fifty guineas. He was
rather a well-to-do gentleman, Captain Steele, with the proceeds of his
estates in Barbadoes (left to him by his first wife), his income as a
writer of the _Gazette_, and his office of gentleman waiter to his Royal
Highness Prince George. His second wife brought him a fortune too. But it
is melancholy to relate, that with these houses and chariots and horses
and income, the Captain was constantly in want of money, for which his
beloved bride was asking as constantly. In the course of a few pages we
begin to find the shoemaker calling for money, and some directions from
the Captain, who has not thirty pounds to spare. He sends his wife, "the
beautifullest object in the world," as he calls her, and evidently in
reply to applications of her own, which have gone the way of all waste
paper, and lighted Dick's pipes, which were smoked a hundred and forty
years ago--he sends his wife now a guinea, then a half-guinea, then a
couple of guineas, then half a pound of tea; and again no money and no tea
at all, but a promise that his darling Prue shall have some in a day or
two: or a request, perhaps, that she will send over his night-gown and
shaving-plate to the temporary lodging where the nomadic captain is lying,
hidden from the bailiffs. Oh that a Christian hero and late captain in
Lucas's should be afraid of a dirty sheriff's officer! That the pink and
pride of chivalry should turn pale before a writ! It stands to record in
poor Dick's own handwriting; the queer collection is preserved at the
British Museum to this present day; that the rent of the nuptial house in
Jermyn Street, sacred to unutterable tenderness and Prue, and three doors
from Bury Street, was not paid until after the landlord had put in an
execution on Captain Steele's furniture. Addison sold the house and
furniture at Hampton, and, after deducting the sum in which his
incorrigible friend was indebted to him, handed over the residue of the
proceeds of the sale to poor Dick, who wasn't in the least angry at
Addison's summary proceeding, and I dare say was very glad of any sale or
execution, the result of which wa