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STKKLK 



HTKEN 



questions. But the moment was not favourable 

 to restraint, even for less earnest men. From hU 

 youth he had been an anlent adherent "i iln- Ke\o 

 lution, and now, as it was thought, the Hanoverian 

 succession was iu jeopardy. Before April 1713 he 

 was involved in a bitter quarrel with Swift. Thru 

 the disquieting rumours that the demolition of the 

 Dunkirk fortifications, which was provided for 

 by the treaty of Utrecht, would not be in>i-t>-d 

 on drew from him an indignant pamphlet entitled 

 The Importance of Dunk-irk coiisider'd, to which 

 Swift, on the other side, grimly retorted with The 

 Importance of the ' Guardian ' consider'tl. Steele in 

 the meantime had resigned his commissionership of 

 stamps, and entered parliament as member for Stock - 

 bridge, concurrently dropping the Gwinlian for the 

 professedly political Englishman. Shortly after- 

 wards he published The Crisis ( 1714), a pamphlet on 

 the Hanoverian succession, to which Swift replied 

 with matchless irony by The Publick Spirit of the 

 Whigs. When Steele actually entered upon his 

 duties in the House he found he was a marked 

 man. He was promptly impeached for seditious 

 utterances in The Crisis, and, although he made a 

 capable defence, was expelled. But with Anne's 

 death, a few months subsequently, his party came 

 into power and his troubles ended. In his best 

 pamphlet, Mr Steele's Apology for Himself and his 

 Writings (1714), he has given his own account of 

 this part of his career. 



That career, as far as literature is concerned, 

 practically closed at this point. He again became 

 a member of parliament, being returned for 

 Boroughbridge ; and a little later, upon presenta- 

 tion of an address to King George I., was Knighted. 

 He continued to produce periodicals and pam- 

 phlets, none of which are of great importance, 

 though one of them, The Plebeian, had the effect 

 of involving him in a painful controversy with 

 his friend Addboa. He was made a patentee of 

 Drury Lane Theatre, where in 1722 he produced 

 The Conscious Lovers, his best comedy. He also 

 established the Censorittm, a sort of a-sthetic music- 

 hall ; and he devised an impracticable 'fish-pool' 

 or well-boat for bringing salmon alive from Ire- 

 land. In December 17 IS he lost his wife. He sur- 

 vived her for nearly eleven years, dying ultimately, 

 1st September 1729, at Carmarthen, where he was 

 buried in St Peter's Church. Of his four children 

 only two were living at his death. His daughter 

 Mary soon followed lier father ; and the remaining 

 and eldest child, Elizabeth, married a Welsh judge, 

 afterwards the thin! Lord Trevor of Bromham. 



Steele's character has suffered from various 

 causes, among which may be reckoned the ani- 

 mosity aroused by his political writings, the care- 

 less candour of his own admissions of frailty, and 

 the habitual comparison of his weaknesses with 

 the colder and more equable goodness of Addison. 

 He has been specially branded as intemperate, but 

 there is no sufficient evidence why in this respect 

 he should be singled out from his contemporaries. 

 That he was incurably sanguine, and that he con- 

 stantly mistook his expectations for his means, is 

 manifest from his lifelong embarrassments. But 

 these were the result of an improvident tempera- 

 ment and an uncertain income rather than of a 

 vicious habit of mind ; and he made a noble and 

 successful attempt to pay his debts before he died. 

 Upon the whole he was a warm-hearted and bene- 

 volent man, a devoted Im-hand (some of his letters 

 to his wife are among the most unfeigned in the 

 language), a loving father, and a loyal friend. 



As a literary man he may be more exactly esti- 

 mated. Though he wrot verse, he has no claims 

 as a poet. His plays are commendable efforts in 

 the direction of the stage-purification advocated by 

 Jeremy Collier ; but their feeling for humorous 



character is more notable than their stage-craft, 

 and they have never kept the hoards. Ill- political 

 pamphlets were honest and straightforward, hut 

 not effectively polemical ; and he had a terrible 

 enemy in Swift, who as a former friend had learned 

 his adversary's weakest side. His fame resto 

 almost wholly upon his performances as an essay- 

 ist. And here he was by no means the colourless 

 colleague of Addison that is sometimes supposed. 

 On the contrary, he was nearly always the fore- 

 running and projecting spirit, and his" ready sym- 

 pathies and quick enthusiasm occasionally carried 

 him to an altitude which Addison never attained. 

 If he wanted Addison's restraint, his distinction, 

 his exquisite art, he nevertheless rallied folly with 

 admirable good-humour, rebuked vice with un- 

 varying courage and dignity, and earned for himself 

 the lasting gratitude of the ' l>eautiful sex,' as he 

 called them, by the chivalry, the manliness, and 

 the genuine respect with wliich, almost alone in 

 his age, he spoke of women. 



Steele hu been written of by Macaulay (Edinburyk 

 Reriew, 1843) and Thackeray (Englitk Humourists, 

 1863 ), but most sympathetically by John Forster ( Quar- 

 terly Reriew, 1855). In 1886 a Memoir of him, con- 

 taining gome new facts, was issued by the present 

 writer in the ' English Worthies ' series ; and in 1889 

 followed a detailed Biography by Mr O. A. Aitken, 

 embodying the results of prolonged and minute re- 

 searches. A selection from Steele's Essays, with note*, 

 was issued in 1885 by the Clarendon Fran. 



Stroll. SIR JOHN, U.S.A.. sculptor, was bom 

 at Aberdeen in 1804, the son of a carver and 

 gilder. He received his education as an artist 

 at the Edinburgh Academy, and afterwards at 

 Rome. In 1832 he modelled 'Alexander and 

 Bucephalus,' which, however, was not cast in bronze 

 until 1883, being erected in Edinburgh the year 

 after. The promise of this early work he subse- 

 quently fulfilled. Most of his chief works are in 

 Edinburgh : the colossal figure of the Queen crown- 

 ing the front of the Royal Institution, which pro- 

 cured him the honorary appointment of Sculptor to 

 Her Majesty in Scotland ; the statue of Scott in the 

 Scott Monument ; the equestrian statue of the 

 Duke of Wellington (1852); statues of Professor 

 Wilson, Allan Ramsay (1865), and Dr Chalmers 

 ( 1878) ; and the equestrian statue of Prince Alliert, 

 at the inauguration of which in 1876 Steell was 

 knighted. Other works, in bronze or marble, 

 are statues of Admiral Saiimarez in Greenwich 

 Hospital ; of the Marquis of Dalhonsie at Calcutta ; 

 of Sir Walter Scott (1872) at New York ; and of 

 Bums at New York (1873), Dundee, and London. 

 He died 15th September 1891. 



Slrcllon, a borough of Pennsylvania, on the 

 Susquehanna River, 4 miles by rail SE. of Harris- 

 burg, with large Bessemer steel- works. Pop. (1880) 

 2447; (1890)9250. 



Steelyard. See BALANCE. 



Siren, JAN, Dutch painter, the son of a Leyden 

 brewer, was horn in that city in 1626, went (it is 

 believed) to Haarlem about 1644 and studied under 

 Adrian van Ostade, joined the Leyden guild of 

 painters in 1648, for some time carried on the 

 trade of a brewer at Delft, and died in his native 

 city in 1679. Steen was a painter of the same 

 stamp as Rembrandt. A sympathetic observer of 

 human life, he painted genre-pictures from every 

 plane of life, the lowest as well as the highest. 

 Although there is a decided ethic leaven in his 

 work, it is softened by the spirit of sympathetic 

 toleration and lightened by tne play of comedy. 

 The grave humour of his style is best seen in such 

 pictures as the 'Doctor Visiting his Patient,' a 

 Cavalier giving Lessons on the Guitar to a Lady,' 

 'Domestic Life,' 'Tavern Company,' 'The Oyster 

 Girl,' ' Work and Idleness,' ' Bad Company,' ' Old 



