The Princess Sophia, aged eighty-four, died of apoplexy, on the 28th of May; and her son George, Elector of Hanover, or rather of Brunswick and Lüneburg, aged fifty-four, then became heir apparent. Queen Anne had a stroke of apoplexy on the 30th of July, and died on the 1st of August; so the Hanoverian became King George I.

CHAPTER XII.

FROM ANNE TO VICTORIA.

I. AT the beginning of the reign of George I. (1714—1727) the oldest living writer was Thomas d'Urfey (ch. x. § 26), aged about eighty-six, who lived on to within a few years of a hundred. John Locke had been dead ten years, Sir Isaac Newton, aged seventy-two, was still living, and lived to the close of the reign of George I., dying March 20th, 1727, two or three months before the king. Bishop Ken had been dead three years. Bishop Sprat three months, Gilbert Burnet (ch. xi. § 9), whom William III. had made Bishop of Salisbury, was seventy-one years old, and died in the next year. Jeremy Collier (ch. xi. § 15) was sixty-four. He published in the year of Queen Anne's death the second of the two folio volumes of his Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, chiefly of England, from the First Planting of Christianity to the End of the Reign of Charles the Second, with a brief Account of the Affairs of Religion in Ireland, collected from the best Ancient Historians. In 1721 appeared the original supplement to his translation of Moreri's Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical Dictionary, which he had issued in three volumes folio in 1701 and 1706. Jeremy Collier died in 1727, at the close of the reign of George I. But Joseph Butler, whose "Analogy of Religion" appeared in the reign of George II., was a young man of twenty-two at the accession of George I., and John Wesley was a boy of eleven. William Wycherley (ch. x. § 38) was then seventy-four years old, and had but a year to live. Elkanah Settle (ch. x. § 26) was sixty-six, with ten years of a life of poverty before him. Thomas Southern was fifty-five. Farquhar had died in the middle of Queen Anne's reign. Congreve (ch. xi. § 14) was forty-four, and lived through the reign of George I., dying in 1729. Colley

A.D. 1714.]

ACCESSION OF George the FIRST.

795

Cibber was forty-three, Vanbrugh forty-two, and died the year before the king. Nicholas Rowe was forty-one, and had four years to live. Richard Bentley (ch. xi. § 23) was fifty-two. The critic, Thomas Rymer, died in the year before Queen Anne, having chiefly spent his time during her reign in publishing the great collection of public treaties, known as Rymer's Fœdera. The first of the ten folios issued by him appeared in 1704. Critic John Dennis (ch. xi. § 19) was fifty-seven; Charles Gildon, born in 1665, of a Roman Catholic family in Dorsetshire, who failed as an actor, and became critic of the narrowest French school, was forty-nine, and produced, in the reign of George I., his Complete Art of Poetry (1718), a Satirical Life of Defoe (1719), and The Laws of Poetry (1720). He died in 1724. Daniel Defoe (ch. xi. § 24, 30) was about fifty, of like age with Matthew Prior (ch. xi. § 25). Jonathan Swift (ch. xi. § 32), and Samuel Garth (ch. xi. § 18), who was knighted at the accession of George I., were both forty-seven years old; Steele and Addison both fortytwo; Gay and Pope both twenty-six ; James Thomson and John Dyer both fourteen. John Oldmixon (ch. xi. § 19) was forty-one, and had begun to take especial interest in history. He produced, early in the reign of George I., Memoirs of North Britain and Memoirs of Ireland from the Restoration, and he began, towards the end of the reign, A Critical History of England. Among friends and helpers of Pope, John Arbuthnot was thirty-nine, Thomas Parnell thirty-five, Elijah Fenton thirty-one. Addison's friend, who became also his secretary, Thomas Tickell, was twentyeight, Samuel Richardson, the future novelist, was twenty-five, and Henry Fielding, seven, at the accession of George I., when Edward Young was thirty, Allan Ramsay twenty-nine, Richard Savage sixteen, Samuel Johnson a child five years old, David Hume three, Lawrence Sterne but a year old, and Shenstone newly born.

2. The chief writings of the reign of George I. were Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1719), and the novels of his that followed it; Swift's "Drapier's Letters" (1724), and his Gulliver's Travels" (1726); Pope's "Iliad” (1715—1720), and "Odyssey" (1723-5); Allan Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd" (1725), and Thomson's "Winter," and Dyer's "Grongar Hill," which were both published at the close of the reign, in 1726, and represented in the work of young men a reviving sense of nature. There were some indications, also, of coming social changes in Mandeville's "Fable of the Bees" (1723).

3. Joseph Addison, on the death of Queen Anne, was made secretary to the Regency, until the arrival of George I. Then Marlborough's son-in-law, the Earl of Sunderland, being made Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, appointed Addison Chief Secretary. Richard Steele had, only the day before the last number of the Englishman appeared, started, February 14th, 1714, a paper called the Lover, dedicated to Garth as "the bestnatured man," and published three times a week until its close, on the 27th of May. Whilst that was running he published nine numbers of another paper, called the Reader, through which he replied to the Examiner. Steele wrote, also, another pamphlet upon the Dunkirk question, and one on behalf of religious toleration, after his expulsion from the House of Commons.

The accession of George I. brought the Whigs again into power. Steele was made surveyor of the royal stables at Hampton Court, and a deputy-lieutenant in the Commission of the Peace for Middlesex. Through the death of the sovereign, the licence of the royal company at Drury Lane required renewal. Steele was applied to; his name was, at their request, inserted in the patent as Governor of the Company, and, in kindly relation with the players, he began to receive an income of six hundred a year from the theatre. He was returned also to the first Parliament of George I., as member for Boroughbridge in Yorkshire; and in April, 1715, he was one of three deputy-lieutenants who were knighted upon going up to the king with an address.

In this year Steele published a translation of an Italian book on The State of Roman Catholic Religion throughout the World, with an ironical dedication to the pope. At Drury Lane he produced his friend Addison's one comedy, The Drummer, written some years before. It was not successful, and is noticeable chiefly as another illustration of the religious feeling that was a mainspring of the literary work of Steele and Addison. A mock ghost of a drummer brings out a lively dread of the supernatural from below the surface of a fop who sets up for an atheist.

In September, 1715, rebellion in favour of the Pretender, James Stuart, broke out in the North. It was suppressed, but there were many Jacobites of the party that had felt its strength during the last years of Queen Anne, and Addison was chosen by the Ministry to maintain the cause now identified with the Hanoverian Succession. He did this in a series of fifty-five

TO A.D. 1721. ADDISON. STEELE. SUSANNA CENTLIVRE. 797

papers called the Freeholder, which appeared between December 23rd, 1715, and June 29th, 1716. In August, 1716, the Earl of Sunderland resigned his office of Lord Lieutenant, and Addison ceased to be the Irish Chief Secretary after ten months' tenure of office. In the same month Addison married the Countess Dowager of Warwick (ch. xi. § 31), and thenceforth he lived chiefly at Holland House, in Kensington. In April, 1717, Addison's steady friend, Lord Sunderland, became Secretary of State, and made Addison his colleague. Failure of health caused Addison to remain in office only eleven months. He resigned in March, 1718. In 1719 the Ministry to which he had belonged brought in a Peerage Bill, limiting the king's prerogative in establishing new peerages, except to replace such as should become extinct. The strong objections to such a measure were felt by many of the Whigs; and Sir Richard Steele attacked it in papers connected by the name of the Plebeian. Addison, then near his death from asthma, replied as the Old Whig.

Sir Richard Steele, appointed one of the Commissioners for Forfeited Estates, had a hearty welcome at Edinburgh, in November, 1717. He had a patent device, called The Fishpool, for bringing salmon and other fish alive from Ireland to the London market, and published an account of it in 1718. In December, 1718, Steele's wife died, aged forty, leaving him with a son and two daughters. Then came, in 1719, on the 14th of March, the first number of his Plebeian, against the Peerage Bill. Addison, on the 19th, replied with the Old Whig. On the 6th of April appeared the fourth and last number of the Plebeian; and Addison died on the 17th of June, aged fortyseven, leaving one daughter, who did not marry.

4. Susanna Centlivre (b. about 1680, d. 1723), was the daughter of a Mr. Freeman, of Holbeach, in Lincolnshire, who was ruined by resistance to the Stuarts. She was married at sixteen to a husband who died in a twelvemonth, then to an officer who, after eighteen months, was killed in a duel; then she supported herself by writing plays and acting. As actress she fascinated Mr. Joseph Centlivre, the king's head cook, who married and survived her. She wrote, between 1700 and 1721, nineteen lively plays, with good plots and frequent expression of her political feeling as a hearty Whig. The most successful of her plays were The Busy Body (1709), The Wonder (1713), and 4 Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718).

5. To punish Steele for his opposition to the defeated Peerage Bill, his patent at Drury Lane was threatened by the Government, and he started a paper called the Theatre, continued from January 2nd to April 5th, 1720, to protect his own interests and those of the stage. Stecle's patent was revoked, whereby he was deprived of his £600 a year, and three years' continuance of that income after his death. This act proceeded chiefly from the ill-will of the Duke of Newcastle, who was Lord Chamberlain. In May, 1721, Steele was restored to his office by the good-will of Robert Walpole, then at the head of the Treasury; and in the following year, 1722-the year of the death of his only son, Eugene--he produced, with very great success, his fourth and last comedy, The Conscious Lovers. This was founded upon Terence's "Andria," designed, Steele said in the preface, "to be an innocent performance," and written chiefly for the sake of a scene in the fourth act, in which the younger Bevil so deals with a challenge from a friend as to enforce once more Steele's doctrine that Christian duty rises far above, and utterly condemns, the point of honour worshipped by the duellists. The old tenderness of Steele's love for Addison appeared also this year in a letter to Congreve, prefixed to a new edition of Addison's comedy of "The Drummer." Steele began two more comedies, "The School of Action" and "The Gentleman," but his health failed. He withdrew from London to the West of England, and about 1726 settled on a mortgaged estate of his, derived from the Scurlock family, at Llangunnor, near Carmarthen. There he was at home, with failing health and struck with palsy, at the end of the reign of George I. One who knew him, and received kindness from him in his last days, said of Steele, "I was told he retained his cheerful sweetness of temper to the last, and would often be carried out of a summer's evening where the country lads and lasses were assembled at their rural sports, and with his pencil give an order on his agent, the mercer, for a new gown to the best dancer." Steele died on the 1st of September, 1729, having survived Addison about ten years. Of his two daughters, the younger died in 1730, of consumption; the other married a Welsh judge, who became Lord Trevor of Bromham. Steele had paid every creditor before his death, and his children were not left in want. He had been a tender husband, a good father, a devoted friend, was open and kindly, wnile imprudently generous in the fellowship of men; and taking his place in