imes, had braved
martyrdom for his political principles, and demanded, when the Whig
party was triumphant, a large compensation for what he had suffered when
it was militant. The Whig leaders took a very different view of his
claims. They thought that he had, by his own petulance and folly,
brought them as well as himself into trouble, and though they did not
absolutely neglect him, doled out favors to him with a sparing hand. It
was natural that he should be angry with them, and especially angry with
Addison. But what above all seems to have disturbed Sir Richard, was the
elevation of Tickell, who, at thirty, was made by Addison Under
Secretary of State; while the Editor of the Tatler and Spectator, the
author of the Crisis, the member for Stockbridge who had been persecuted
for firm adherence to the House of Hanover, was, at near fifty, forced,
after many solicitations and complaints, to content himself with a share
in the patent of Drury Lane Theatre. Steele himself says in his
celebrated letter to Congreve that Addison, by his preference of
Tickell, "incurred the warmest resentment of other gentlemen;" and
everything seems to indicate that, of those resentful gentlemen, Steele
was himself one.

While poor Sir Richard was brooding over what he considered as Addison's
unkindness, a new cause of quarrel arose. The Whig party, already
divided against itself, was rent by a new schism. The celebrated Bill
for limiting the number of Peers had been brought in. The proud Duke of
Somerset, first in rank of all the nobles whose religion permitted them
to sit in Parliament, was the ostensible author of the measure. But it
was supported, and, in truth, devised by the Prime Minister.

We are satisfied that the Bill was most pernicious; and we fear that the
motives which induced Sunderland to frame it were not honorable to him.
But we cannot deny that it was supported by many of the best and wisest
men of that age. Nor was this strange. The royal prerogative had, within
the memory of the generation then in the vigor of life, been so grossly
abused that it was still regarded with a jealousy which, when the
peculiar situation of the House of Brunswick is considered, may perhaps
be called immoderate. The particular prerogative of creating peers had,
in the opinion of the Whigs, been grossly abused by Queen Anne's last
ministry; and even the Tories admitted that her Majesty, in swamping, as
it has since been called, the Upper House,