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In print, paper, and cover, and in abundant pertinent illustrations from authentic portraits of Steele, his wife, his mother-in-law, and his charming children, these volumes leave nothing to be desired. They are enriched with a very copious bibliography of the original and all subsequent editions of Steele's separate and collected works, and also of their translations, German, French, and Italian, published in all sorts of places,—in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, in Paris, Rouen, Luynes, in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the Hague and Hamburg, Dresden, Leipsic, Frankfort, Bâle, New York, Boston, and Cincinnati. There is a list of the chief volumes of biography and criticism upon Steele, *THE LIFE OF RICHARD STEELE. In Two Volumes. By George A. Aitken. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. of magazine criticism and contemporary pamphlets concerning him, of books dedicated to him, and the yet more flattering endless imitations of his work in all lands and tongues. There are the imitations by Sir R. Blackmore and Bishop Middleton and Leigh Hunt, by Van Effen and Bodmer and Gottsched and Kramer, by Marivaux and Granet, La Croix and Malte Brun, De Foëre and Manent and Guizot. They are published in London and Paris, in Hanover and Gottingen, in Leyden and Copenhagen, in Fleneburg and Berlin and Milan, in Melbourne and in Honolulu. There has been a Danish, a Belgian, a French, a Swiss, a Dutch, a Prussian, an Italian Spectator; a European and an American Spectator; a Catholic Spectator and a Protestant Guardian; a Female Spectator and a Juvenile Spectator; a French Spectator at the National Assembly, a Spectator during the Revolution, a Spectator under the Royal Government; a Female Tatler and Fairy Tatler, a Tatler Revived, and Der Poetische Tadler; a Spectatrice, a Spettatore, a Babler, a Babillard, and a Babbelaer! Surely it is a sounding fame which has such multitudinous echoes. Mr. Aitkin would seem to have caught and recorded, as on a phonographic cylinder, each farthest reverberation, each last dying cadence along the verge of the horizon. From London to Honolulu is a far cry! It was Steele died September 1, 1729. more than half a century later when John Nichols published an edition of "The Tatler," with notes in which many biographic details were embedded. The Correspondence of Steele, with literary and historical anecdotes by the same editor, was issued the following year, 1787. Bisset and Chalmers added little to our knowledge. Dr. Drake only gave the old facts a re-setting. Macaulay, in his essay on Addison, used Steele as a foil to relieve the greater essayist, a sharp black to heighten the lights of his artful portraiture, and bitterly assailed his character. Thackeray handled him with a half-loving, half-contemptuous compassion, as for a kindly fellow one couldn't help liking, without overmuch respecting. Foster, in the Quarterly," came to the rescue, and asserted Steele's genius and character against both the pity and the scorn. There was a life by Mr. H. R. Montgomery, in 1865, padded with sketches of all Steele's famous contemporaries. 66 Lately Mr. Austin Dobson has published a volume of well-chosen selections from Steele's essays, with a luminous introduction, and also a brief life of the essayist, "charmingly written, containing many new facts, as well as others set in a fresh light." or more successfully for every shred and particle of material, relevant and irrelevant, than he has done. Nobody is likely to dive deeper, or, it must be confessed, come up drier, than he. If anywhere a modest and shrinking fact has eluded his gaze in some forgotten archives, let it not prematurely congratulate itself on its Mr. Aitken is sure to pounce upon it presently and book it for his next edition. May it not be a wife's cousin's pedigree, nor a legal pleading, nor a business assignment, for with these the present volumes are already overweighted. Mr. Aitken's scrupulous method may be illustrated by his details of several last wills of a family of Fords in St. Michael's Par escape. And now comes Mr. Aitken, gleaning everywhere, in the remotest and unlikeliest corners of the field, turning up the very stones for the chance of an overlooked grain or two of matter, and bringing us these eight or nine hundred closely printed pages as the result. He has searched the Public Record office, the Probate Registry, the College of Arms, the VicarGeneral's office, Doctors' Commons, the Board of Green Cloth, the Lord Chamberlain's De-ish, Barbados, with his grave comment, “I do partment, in London. The Public Record office at Dublin and the Records at Birmingham have been ransacked. The British Museum, the South Kensington Museum, the Bodleian and Lambeth, the libraries of Berlin, Munich, and Paris, the College Books at Oxford, the Parish and District Registers at Carmarthen, have all been rummaged to some purpose. New letters and manuscripts have been found. Private collections have yielded copies for publication. Original family portraits in private hands have been submitted to the photographer. Sources of information have been exactly indicated, to the great comfort of future explorers. In Steele's own manuscripts the cancelled words have been noted, so that we may catch the writer's thoughts in the very moment of their birth, observe the winged folly as it flies, and discern the mental processes by which one phrase or idea was preferred to another. In one sense, this must be the definitive biography of Steele. These handsome volumes are such externally as the somewhat modish and coxcombical subject of them would have relished as the court dress in which he should make his bow to the fastidious monarch, Posterity. Not curled wig and lace ruffles and jewelled rapier could better become the Christian Hero of Lord Lucas's regiment, or the M.P. from Stockbridge Hants, or Boroughbridge, Yorkshire. Whoever would know to the full Captain Steele of the Coldstream Guards, or Sir Richard Steele of the Tatler and Spectator and Englishman and Lover and Reader and Plebeian and Spinster, the author of the Ode on the Duke of Marlborough, of the Conscious Lovers and the Tender Husband, must give his days and his nights to the study of Mr. Aitken. Nobody after him is likely to search more painfully not believe they were related to the family to which Margaret Ford [Steele's first wife] belonged." Could anything be less in point? It is not Steele's will, nor Margaret Ford's will, nor even the will of a presumable cousin, near or far, of Margaret Ford, but simply the will or wills of several other Fords, resident, indeed, in the same island, but not in the same parish or neighborhood. Had the biographer possessed a saving trace of the humor of his subject he would have lessened the bulk of his work by a good many tedious pages. We have sometimes said we should be willing to read Thackeray's notes of his weekly interviews with his laundress, not from any undue interest in the contents of her basket, nor unworthy curiosity as to the condition of a great man's wardrobe, but for the sheer charm that Thackeray's pen would give to the most trivial or unsavory details. So Steele's briefest note to his dear Prue, with its delicate cajoleries, its memoranda of seven pennyworth of walnuts at five to the penny, with the guilty postscript, "There are but twenty-nine walnuts," leaving us vainly to conjecture the fate of the missing half-dozen, had he cracked and eaten them? or had the vender at the street-corner scanted his measure?—and the subsequent note, with its remorseful propitiative offering of a larger quantity of walnuts, which we trust reached his dear Prue untampered with,-notes like these we cannot have in excess. They may mere glow-worm illuminations, but they do brighten the picture. But interpose an attor ney between us and the author; give us his breathless, unpunctuated, so-much-a-line-on-thelargest-foolscap record, and, as Marie Bashkirtseff said of reading Dumas in the absence of a New Testament, "it is not the same thing." The least critical of readers detects the differ be |