Their clouded beauties speak man's gaudy strife, The glittering miseries of human life.
I yet see, Steele adds, this queen passing to her coronation in the place whither she now is carried to her grave. On the way, through acclamations of her people, to receive her crown,
She unconcerned and careless all the while Rewards their loud applauses with a smile, With easy Majesty and humble State Smiles at the trifle Power, and knows its date.
What hands commit the beauteous, good, and just, The dearer part of William, to the dust? In her his vital heat, his glory lies, In her the Monarch lived, in her he dies. ... No form of state makes the Great Man forego The task due to her love and to his woe; Since his kind frame can't the large suffering bear In pity to his People, he's not here: For to the mighty loss we now receive The next affliction were to see him grieve.
If we look from these serious strains of their youth to the literary expression of the gayer side of character in the two friends, we find Addison sheltering his taste for playful writing behind a Roman Wall of hexameter. For among his Latin poems in the Oxford 'Musæ Anglicanæ' are eighty or ninety lines of resonant Latin verse upon 'Machinæ Gesticulantes, 'anglice' A Puppet-show.' Steele, taking life as he found it, and expressing mirth in his own way of conversation, wrote an English comedy, and took the word of a College friend that it was valueless. There were two paths in life then open to an English writer. One was the smooth and level way of patronage; the other a rough up-hill track for men who struggled in the service of the people. The way of patronage was honourable. The age had been made so very discerning by the Romans and the French that a true understanding of the beauties of literature was confined to the select few who had been taught what to admire. Fine writing was beyond the rude appreciation of the multitude. Had, therefore, the reading public been much larger than it was, men of fastidious taste, who paid as much deference to polite opinion as Addison did in his youth, could have expected only audience fit but few, and would have been without encouragement to the pursuit of letters unless patronage rewarded merit. The other way had charms only for the stout-hearted pioneer who foresaw where the road was to be made that now is the great highway of our literature. Addison went out into the world by the way of his time; Steele by the way of ours.