I have no wish to bowdlerize Sir Richard Steele, his ways and words.  He wrote to Prue at night when the burgundy had been too much for him, and in the morning after.  He announces that he is coming to her “within a pint of wine.”  One of his gayest letters—­a love-letter before the marriage, addressed to “dear lovely Mrs. Scurlock”—­confesses candidly that he had been pledging her too well:  “I have been in very good company, where your health, under the character of the woman I loved best, has been often drunk; so that I may say that I am dead drunk for your sake, which is more than I die for you.”

Steele obviously drank burgundy wildly, as did his “good company”; as did also the admirable Addison, who was so solitary in character and so serene in temperament.  But no one has, for this fault, the right to put a railing accusation into the mouth of Prue.  Every woman has a right to her own silence, whether her silence be hers of set purpose or by accident.  And every creature has a right to security from the banterings peculiar to the humourists of a succeeding age.  To every century its own ironies, to every century its own vulgarities.  In Steele’s time they had theirs.  They might have rallied Prue more coarsely, but it would have been with a different rallying.  Writers of the nineteenth century went about to rob her of her grace.

She kept some four hundred of these little letters of her lord’s.  It was a loyal keeping.  But what does Thackeray call it?  His word is “thrifty.”  He says:  “There are four hundred letters of Dick Steele’s to his wife, which that thrifty woman preserved accurately.”

“Thrifty” is a hard word to apply to her whom Steele styled, in the year before her death, his “charming little insolent.”  She was ill in Wales, and he, at home, wept upon her pillow, and “took it to be a sin to go to sleep.”  Thrifty they may call her, and accurate if they will; but she lies in Westminster Abbey, and Steele called her “your Prueship.”

MRS. JOHNSON

This paper shall not be headed “Tetty.”  What may be a graceful enough freedom with the wives of other men shall be prohibited in the case of Johnson’s, she with whose name no writer until now has scrupled to take freedoms whereto all graces were lacking.  “Tetty” it should not be, if for no other reason, for this—­that the chance of writing “Tetty” as a title is a kind of facile literary opportunity; it shall be denied.  The Essay owes thus much amends of deliberate care to Dr. Johnson’s wife.  But, indeed, the reason is graver.  What wish would he have had but that the language in the making whereof he took no ignoble part should somewhere, at some time, treat his only friend with ordinary honour?