in a bad humour, and once complains that he owes her eight hundred pounds, advising him to take care of his soul; he gives her the same advice and denies the debt. Old Mrs. Scurlock died, and there may have been some amelioration of their affairs; but Steele was bound to make his fortune to please his wife, and, in order to gain that end, threw a large sum of money in a plan for bringing fish to London alive. Salmon was then about five shillings a pound when it could be got in the Thames; the attempt was made to bring it from the Irish rivers, but the fish dashed themselves to pieces in the transit, and the thing was a failure: it shared the fate of his early efforts after the philosopher's stone.

Lady Steele, to whom we hope we have done justice, returned to him, and they seem to have been happy together. Steele had previously been in Edinburgh, where he had been well received. In 1718 we find him at Blenheim with the Duke of Marlborough; on the 20th of December, 1718, Lady Steele died, he having, with all his faults of commission and omission, been as much a lover as a husband to her until the last. She was only forty when she died, he being about forty-eight: much as she may have had to undergo from her husband's carelessness in money matters, he never gave her one moment's uneasiness on the score of jealousy.

The loss of the woman he loved so dearly was quickly followed by the estrangement of the dearest friend he had ever known. Lord Sunderland introduced a bill limiting the number of the House of Peers, that is to say, preventing the creation of fresh peers by the sovereign for the purpose of carrying any political measure through the Upper House. Steele was furious at the measure, and published a paper called the 'Plebeian,' in which he argued that the limiting of the number of the peers gave them an almost overwhelming power, for they became an oligarchy almost under the power of the court, whereas, by giving the sovereign the power of creating a majority in their chamber, they were more dependent on the will of the nation as represented by the sovereign. He does not seem to notice the fact that the House of Lords exists only by the will of the sovereign, that is, in reality, by the will of the ministry, for no nobleman can take his seat in the House of Lords without a call from the Crown. Addison took an entirely opposite view from Steele in the 'Old Whig.' The end was a quarrel, in which we think Steele, though he was right in his argument, was wrong in his conduct: he should have been more respectful to Addison. The bill was lost, and the privilege of the Crown remains; but it was a bitter victory for Steele, living as he did by the breath of the ministry. His persecution by the Duke of Newcastle, his loss of fortune, his quiet retirement to Carmarthen, where he forgot his quarrel with Dennis, with Addison-everything-in a quiet and peaceable end, our space gives us

no room to narrate. At the end he had no enemies save Swift and Dennis. Vast sums of money for those times must have passed through his hands. Adams considers that the loss of his patent as Governor of the Comedians amounted to a fine of £10,000! In 1722, when his 'Conscious Lovers' was acted, the King sent him £500. Little seems to have remained. The early mass of debt was too overwhelming. A good man, and a very clever one. He had one great blessing in life, the friendship of Addison; he had one great misfortune, a posthumous reputation greater than his own. He lived with Addison, worked with Addison, and is always spoken of in comparison with him. Addison was so greatly his superior, that Richard Steele will suffer for all time by enforced comparison with a much grander man.

Philip Leigh.

CHAPTER I.

DARTMOOR.

"The love of liberty with life is given,

And life itself th' inferior gift of Heaven."-DRYden.

THE Autumn sun was sinking slowly and gloriously behind the western Tors; the land lay still and quiet. A glorious calm, a sense of freedom, a feeling as of heaven near at hand pervaded the scene, as Philip Leigh and I sat on a great Tor watching the glories of the setting sun. All round us stretched the open moor, wild and free; doubly free to us, escaped but for a moment from the toil and bustle, heat and strife, of London. That morning we had left Princetown behind us, that melancholy place penetrated with prison atmosphere, a dungeon town among the free moorland; we had seen the last band of scowling convicts labouring painfully to win a niggard harvest from the barren soil, seen the last warder-an innocent prisoner sharing, for the sake of daily bread, the loneliness and almost the punishment of crime-pacing to and fro on the portion of wall which it was his duty to guard; passed the last field enclosed by that long stretch of granite wall, the boundary of the prison ground; all these we had passed hours ago, yet their memory haunted me still.

A prison doubly a prison, for it looked not on walls and houses and roads (those prison bonds which we make for ourselves), but on the giant Tors, on the great moor, the wild marsh; and gazing I first understood how it is that the dwellers in barren lands often love them so well, why the Highlander loves his mountains and the Arab his sandy wastes. For the wilderness has a beauty of its own, and there are eyes to which the outline of the hills, now grey, now blue, now purple, the gleam of water far away, the passing shadow of clouds over the land, are dearer far than swelling meadows and stately woods.

There lay the moors boundless (as far as eye could reach) as the ocean itself. Some such thoughts as these had surely crossed the mind of Philip, for he rose to his feet, took off his hat and said reverently:

"Thank God for freedom!" then stood awhile facing the west wind, drinking in deep draughts of it as it blew past us, laden with the rich sweet scent of the heather and furze. Oh! that was a day of beauty, of rest, of peace, of liberty, a satisfying of every sense almost to overflowing, a day that goes and comes not again. Such days come to

most through life, days in which when we look back on them we live again. So it is with me; I think upon that day and in a moment of time I stand again on the purple heather, the huge granite blocks frown behind me, the scent of the furze comes wafted on the breath of the wind, the Dart gleams far away, the great white clouds chasing each other through the vault of heaven cast their shadows on the moor, and Philip Leigh stands by my side. Ah true friend! ah happy time!

Slowly and reluctantly Philip turned away as the last glimpse of the sun disappeared behind the hills. "Come Ned, we must walk fast if we wish to get to Ashburton to-night," he said, and we resumed our road.

Though seemingly surrounded on all sides by the moor, we had in fact been close to its eastern bounds, and soon we neared the cultivated land on its borders, and walked along its edge. Far below us lay a long green valley, and farther off still the woods of Holne Chase and Buckland, close to which stood out the bold Beacon, clothed near its base with young wood, but barren at its summit.

"I wish we could find a spring or come across a cottage," said Philip, as we hastened over the good moor road; "I am so thirsty."

His wish was almost immediately fulfilled; a turn in the road brought us in sight of a cottage, built, as is usual in the moor, of granite and pitched or painted black. As we came near it was easy to see that the inhabitants took more pride in their dwelling than is often seen thereabouts. A'small garden in front of the cottage was carefully kept, and screened from the prevailing wind by a row of the ribes or flowering currant. Behind the house was a vegetable garden, with one of those wonderful walls made of uncut stones, without mortar or cement, full of holes, and seemingly certain to fall in the next gale, yet which, strange to say, stand from one generation to another the storms of the stormiest part of the West of England.

On knocking at the door a low voice bade us enter. We did so, and found the sole occupants of the room to be a young and pretty country-woman, who sat in a rude armchair near the fire, and an infant, apparently a few weeks old, which she held in her arms.

The room was furnished solidly (everything is solid on the moor) with a large table-on which were laid preparations for supper-oak chairs and an oak dresser. The floor was of rough stone, yet the place was cheerful enough; the peat-fire blazed, the hearth was swept up, the kettle sang over the fire, the furniture was clean, the woman herself carefully and neatly dressed. Our appearance seemed to cause her some alarm; what with our knapsacks, our fishing-rods, and our clothes (not improved by a fortnight's roughing), we certainly did look rather wild. But Philip's voice, as he made his request for some milk or some water, reassured her instantly.

"Some milk, sir? oh yes;" then raising her voice she called: Conny, Conny! bring in a pitcher of milk! be quick, child!” In a minute the child entered. Philip and I looked at each other in mute amazement. We had seen many hundred specimens of Devonshire children-clean and dirty, clever and stupid, but never onelike this one. She was perfectly lovely-I say it advisedly-exquisitely fair, with large eyes the colour of the violet, and long curling hair of a golden brown. She was in no way disconcerted at our appearance, unexpected as it must have been, but came forward with her pitcher of milk with a graceful self-possession seldom seen among women, rare indeed in a child.

"Take down two glasses, Conny," said the woman by the fire. The child set down her pitcher on the floor and moved towards a chair, for the glasses were above her reach; but Philip, stepping quickly forward, took them down from the dresser and placed them on the table.

"Thank you," said the child, in a clear sweet voice, the accent of which was certainly not Devonshire.

She filled my glass first, then Philip's; after which she set her pitcher on the table, and remained standing by his knee. Philip had always plenty to say to children; they never puzzled him as they do so many grown persons; he knew their ways and entered into their feelings. In a minute he and Conny were deep in conversation. I think it was over the merits of a rabbit.

"Black and white, you know, with one ear up and the other down.” I turned to the woman and asked was the child her sister?

"Oh no, sir; she is no relation." Then seeing me look curious, she said:

"It's a singular story, sir, but there's nothing but what any one is welcome to know. It happened like this: my mother had a house at Chagford, just outside you know, with a tidy bit of garden, as pretty a little place as one could wish to see. But it was too large for us, there was only mother and me, so she took in lodgers, gentlemen down for some fishing, or ladies who went about on donkeys, sketching as they call it. Just like that, never more than two at a time. One day there came over a lady from Newton-it must be four years agone this summer-she came to look for lodgings for herself and one little girl; very quiet she was, and dressed all in black; well, mother she took a fancy to her, she seemed quiet and gentle like, so they agreed about the rooms, and next day she came to stay, and brought the child along with her. I did think she was the prettiest child ever I saw, like a picture-pretty much as she is now, don't you think so, sir?" She glanced with a good deal of pride and affection at the child, who was chattering away to Philip as if they had been the oldest of friends.