Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/19

 with any more specific statement; and, although no gentleman is called upon to plead pedigree in abatement of abuse levelled at his early history, yet his friends can always put in that plea for him when proper data are to be obtained. Delicacy in the days of Dennis, Curl, Tutchin, Ridpath, Roper, Wagstaffe, Savage, Mrs. Manley, Pope, and Swift, could not in the least have restrained his friends; for the secrets of private life were marshalled and made public for party purposes, on both sides of every question, with lavish coarseness. Yet the necessary information can nowhere be picked out of the voluminous legacies left by Steele's contemporaries. Even Death, which breaks the seals of many mysteries, revealed nothing but perplexity. In no immediate notice of Steele's demise are his birth and parentage distinctly set forth. Curl, in a memoir published a year after that event, hits the mark no nearer than this: "Being descended from English parents, he used to call himself an Englishman born in Dublin."

The further Time floats us away from the sources of evidence, the fewer doubts remain. Open any biographical essay, dictionary, or any cyclopædia, and you will find it stated, without qualification, that Richard Steele's father was an Irish councillor-at-law and private secretary to James, first Duke of Ormond, and that his mother's name was Gascoigne. The date of his birth has never been so confidently stated. Every year has received that honour from 1671 to 1676. The General Dictionary of Birch and Lockman gives no date; the Biographia Britannica mentions 1676; Nathan Drake, 1675; and 1672 has been noted down more than once: 1671 has remained the fashion since the publication, by Nichols, of Steele's Epistolary Correspondence, for a reason which will be set forth presently.

Thanks to Sir Bernard Burke—the present successor both of Steele's uncle, Gascoigne, and of his friend Addison, as keeper of the Birmingham Record Tower in Dublin Castle—the lists of counsel in the Four Courts have been searched. No one named Steele appears in them within the required period; but a Richard Steele was admitted a member of the King's Inns as an attorney, in 1667. Again, no gentleman named Steele served James, first Duke of Ormond, as private secretary. Neither in the records of Kilkenny Castle, nor in the papers abstracted thence by Carte (when he wrote the life of Marlborough's rival) and deposited them in the Bodleian Library, does the name of Steele occur in any official matter but once, and then it belonged to a lawyer's clerk, who was paid a small sum of money on account of his master. Henry Gascoigne, Dick Steele's uncle, succeeded Sir George Lane as the duke's secretary in 1674.

The earliest authentic notice of the date of Steele's birth is thus recorded in the registers of the London Charter House, for November 17th, 1684:

"Richard Steel admitted for the Duke of Ormond, in the room of Phillip Burrell—aged 13 years 12th March next."

Reckoning that 12th day of March, according to the old style, to be still in the year 1684, the date of Steele's birth would thus be fixed in 1671. It happens that an entry exists in the registers of St. Bride's Church, Dublin, which coincides exactly—too exactly, perhaps—with this register:

"Chrissenings commencing from the 25th of March, 1671. March ye 12th, Richard, sonn of Richard Steele, baptised."

This date, therefore, has been generally adopted as Steele's birthday, ever since the above document was made known by Nichols, in his preface to Steele's Epistolary Correspondence. A copy of it, certified by a clergyman and two churchwardens, appears amongst Steele's loose papers in the British Museum, at the back of a calculation of the profits of Drury Lane Theatre in 1721, something in cypher about The Fishpool, and the address of a chemist in Westminster. Why it was obtained, or whether acknowledged by Steele as certifying his own date of birth, can never be ascertained. It sets forth, in fact, no more than the date of a baptism performed—if it record the baptism of Sir Richard—before the baby was a day old. This slender improbability got over, the two documents harmonise sufficiently to set doubt at rest. But a third memorandum, in the register of matriculations of the University of Oxford, revives it:

"Ter o Hilarii 1689. Mar. 13. Ric. Steele 16. R. S. Dublin Gen."

Expanded and translated reading thus: "On the 13th of March, in Hiliary Term, 1689 Richard Steele, of Christ Church, sixteen years of age, son of Richard Steele of Dublin, gentleman." Had the father been a barrister, he would have been designated "esquire."

If Steele completed his sixteenth year only at the above date, he must have been born in the year 1673. This entry, and that at the Charter House, are equally authentic, and equally contradictory of each other; but does it matter to the world at large whether Steele's father was English or Irish, a councillor, the private secretary to a duke, or not; or in what year Steele himself was born? These doubts will not lessen Sir Richard's value to posterity as a genial humourist, a kind sympathetic censor, and a sound politician. They can neither dim nor brighten the lustre of his fame—and they are only put forward here to illustrate some of Steele's early letters, which now see the light in print for the first time.

By the courtesy of the Marquis of Ormonde, the present writer has been granted access to the archives of Kilkenny Castle, where the following characteristic letters were discovered amidst a dazzling treasury of historical documents dating from Brian Boroihm downwards. They are addressed to Dick's "uncle," Henry Gascoigne, the then Duke of Ormond's private secretary. They are printed exactly as written. Jan. 5 [1690] Sir,—My Tutour has received ye Certificate for seven pound, for which I most humbly