ching, as is his
wont, quite a divine effulgence as he looks heavenward, he speaks in words
of inspiration almost, of "the Great Day, when we shall all of us be
contemporaries, and make our appearance together".

The third, whose theme is Death, too, and who will speak his word of moral
as Heaven teaches him, leads you up to his father's coffin, and shows you
his beautiful mother weeping, and himself an unconscious little boy
wondering at her side. His own natural tears flow as he takes your hand
and confidingly asks your sympathy. "See how good and innocent and
beautiful women are," he says, "how tender little children! Let us love
these and one another, brother--God knows we have need of love and pardon."
So it is each man looks with his own eyes, speaks with his own voice, and
prays his own prayer.

When Steele asks your sympathy for the actors in that charming scene of
Love and Grief and Death, who can refuse it? One yields to it as to the
frank advance of a child, or to the appeal of a woman. A man is seldom
more manly than when he is what you call unmanned--the source of his
emotion is championship, pity, and courage; the instinctive desire to
cherish those who are innocent and unhappy, and defend those who are
tender and weak. If Steele is not our friend he is nothing. He is by no
means the most brilliant of wits nor the deepest of thinkers: but he is
our friend: we love him, as children love their love with an A, because he
is amiable. Who likes a man best because he is the cleverest or the wisest
of mankind; or a woman because she is the most virtuous, or talks French;
or plays the piano better than the rest of her sex? I own to liking Dick
Steele the man, and Dick Steele the author, much better than much better
men and much better authors.

The misfortune regarding Steele is, that most part of the company here
present must take his amiability upon hearsay, and certainly can't make
his intimate acquaintance. Not that Steele was worse than his time; on the
contrary, a far better, truer, and higher-hearted man than most who lived
in it. But things were done in that society, and names were named, which
would make you shudder now. What would be the sensation of a polite youth
of the present day, if at a ball he saw the young object of his affections
taking a box out of her pocket and a pinch of snuff: or if at dinner, by
the charmer's side, she deliberately put her knife into her mouth? If she
cut her mother's th