ys forbear to show it,
by playing a little upon his admirer; but he was in no danger of retort;
his jests were endured without resistance or resentment. But the sneer
of jocularity was not the worst. Steele, whose imprudence of generosity,
or vanity of profusion, kept him always incurably necessitous, upon some
pressing exigence, in an evil hour, borrowed a hundred pounds of his
friend probably without much purpose of repayment; but Addison, who
seems to have had other notions of a hundred pounds, grew impatient of
delay, and reclaimed his loan by an execution. Steele felt with great
sensibility the obduracy of his creditor, but with emotions of sorrow
rather than of anger.

In 1687 he was entered into Queen's College in Oxford, where, in 1689,
the accidental perusal of some Latin verses gained him the patronage
of Dr. Lancaster, afterwards Provost of Queen's College; by whose
recommendation he was elected into Magdalen College as a demy, a term by
which that society denominates those who are elsewhere called scholars:
young men who partake of the founder's benefaction, and succeed in their
order to vacant fellowships. Here he continued to cultivate poetry and
criticism, and grew first eminent by his Latin compositions, which are
indeed entitled to particular praise. He has not confined himself to
the imitation of any ancient author, but has formed his style from
the general language, such as a diligent perusal of the productions of
different ages happened to supply. His Latin compositions seem to have
had much of his fondness, for he collected a second volume of the "Musae
Anglicanae" perhaps for a convenient receptacle, in which all his Latin
pieces are inserted, and where his poem on the Peace has the first
place. He afterwards presented the collection to Boileau, who from that
time "conceived," says Tickell, "an opinion of the English genius
for poetry." Nothing is better known of Boileau than that he had an
injudicious and peevish contempt of modern Latin, and therefore his
profession of regard was probably the effect of his civility rather than
approbation.

Three of his Latin poems are upon subjects on which perhaps he would not
have ventured to have written in his own language: "The Battle of the
Pigmies and Cranes," "The Barometer," and "A Bowling-green." When the
matter is low or scanty, a dead language, in which nothing is mean
because nothing is familiar, affords great conveniences; and by the
sonorous mag