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Sir Richard Steele.

It was Addison who, on reading the first two cantos of the ‘Rape of the Lock,’ pronounced it ‘a delicious little thing’; ‘it was merum sal,’ he said, but when Pope resolved to recast the whole poem, and asked Addison’s advice, and the latter entreated him not to run the risk of spoiling it, in doing so he affronted the morbidly jaundiced mind of the poet, who, on the altered poem proving a success, called Addison’s counsel insidious, and accused the amiable giver of it of baseness.[39]

It is a pleasant recollection not only to have seen Steele’s cottage, but to have stood with my friend, Eliza Meteyard, in the room to the right where some of those witty, playful, clever papers were composed, in which the follies and vices of the times are mirrored with graphic power in the pages of the now too rarely read Spectator and Guardian.

To

My Lov’d Tutour Dʳ. Ellis

With Secret impulse thus do Streams return

To that Capacious Ocean whence they’re born:

Oh Would but Fortune come wᵗʰ. bounty fraught