Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/18

  rendered necessary, and he had recourse to money-lenders to raise the first loans required; then to friends to pay the interest on and to obtain renewals of these loans; then to other money-lenders to replace the original sums; and then to other friends to repay a portion of the first friendly loans, until, by the time his wife returned from the second visit to the Continent, he found himself so inextricably involved that he dared not face his position, dared not think of it himself, much less take her into his confidence, and so he went blindly on, paying interest on interest, and hoping ever, with a vague hope, for some relief from his troubles

That relief never came to James Ashurst in his lifetime. He struggled on in the same hopeless, helpless, hand-to-mouth fashion for about eight years more, always impecunious in the highest degree, always intending to retrieve his fallen fortune, always slowly, but surely, breaking and becoming less and less of a man under the harass of pecuniary troubles, when the illness which for some time had threatened him set in, and, as we have seen, he died.

are characters to whom History vouchsafes no more than a passing sneer or a disparaging monosyllable. Whether, for instance, she guides the pen of Johnson, of Scott, of Macaulay, or of Thackeray, the most dignified of the Muses misses no opportunity of calling the author of The Christian Hero "Dick." Sir Richard Steele is seldom distinguished in her pages by his proper title without a spirit of merriment, as if royalty had knighted him in jest. Yet the mere mention of his beloved and loving partner in genius and in fame, is always graced with some prefix of respect. Where, in the annals of the Augustan age of English literature, does History condescend to sport with the memory of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, and call him "Joe"?

This difference in distinguishing Steele from his friend is the more painful to those who admire him for the sake of his works, because it is greatly deserved. Contemporary and subsequent opinion has, no doubt, been harsh in selecting "Dick's" sins, as the sponsors who gave him that name; but his many virtues were obscured from all, except from his intimate companions. His own irrepressible candour flourished his worst faults in the faces of Mankind; who must not, therefore, be blamed for forming their judgment of him from the only evidence presented to them on the surface. With Addison the result was precisely opposite. The surface of his character shone with a polish that always commanded respect; and it was natural that his failings, concealed within a grave and stately exterior, should never have linked his name with the lightest touch of familiarity.

But, besides the personal shortcomings which Steele was too open-hearted to conceal, he laboured under a disadvantage from which his foremost associates were free; but which has since been entirely overlooked. During the time of his greatest popularity the doctrine of Caste was paramount. Reaction from the grand democratic convulsion of the previous century, had produced a democracy blind to its own interests. Tory mobs passionately assaulted opponents of passive obedience and the divine right of kings. So fervent was the worship of the Tuft, that the public at large liked their nobility and gentry the better for lording it over them. A fool of quality held his own, as a matter of course, against a Solon of humble birth, even in good company. Whatever the discussion, a well-born disputant in danger of defeat had only to ask the question, "Who are you, sir?" to be certain of victory, if his adversary's answer denoted him to be nothing better than a plebeian. In case of any sort of confusion respecting paternity, defeat would be the more crushing. This kind of humiliation Sir Richard Steele had constantly to endure. When teaching in the Tatler "the minuter decencies and inferior duties of life," Steele excited the ire of all the sharpers, duellists, rakes, mohocks, sots, and swearers extant. The more prominent ruffians of gentle blood retorted upon him the withering non sequitur that nobody could find out who his father was. When he insisted, in his famous Crisis, that Dunkirk should be demolished according to treaty, Dr. Wagstaffe thought he had demolished Steele, by logically declaring that "he was ashamed of his name," and that he owed "his birth and condition to a place more barbarous than Carrickfergus." As a convincing argument against reinstating him in the governorship of Drury Lane Theatre, Dennis taunted him with being "descended from a trooper's horse;" the elegant sentence finishing with such a fling at his colleague, Cibber, as unmistakably directed the venom against Steele's birth, and not against a well-known incident in his youthful career. The authors of the Examiner, of the Female Tatler, and other scandalisers flung—with more dirt—doubts at his origin, and Steele cleared it all off, except that which defiled his name. If he had been once for all explicit on that head, his foes would have ceased to trouble him, and the doubt would have ceased to trouble his friends. It manifestly did trouble them. In the last number of the Englishman, Steele wrote thus: "In compliance to the prepossessions of others, rather than, as I think it a matter of consideration myself, I assert (that no nice man of my acquaintance may think himself polluted by conversing with me) that whoever talks to me is speaking to a gentleman born." No more. Neither in Steele's private correspondence, nor in his public writings is this assertion coupled