lence to mankind," p. 57. He has given up his employments, because "he values no advantages above the conveniences of life, but as they tend to the service of the publick." It seems, he could not "serve the publick" as a pensioner, or commissioner of stamped paper; and therefore gave them up, to sit in parliament, "out of charity to his country, and to contend for liberty," p. 58. He has transcribed the common places of some canting moralist de contemptu mundi, & fuga seculi; and would put them upon you as rules derived from his own practice.
Here is a most miraculous and sudden reformation, which I believe can hardly be matched in history, or legend. And Mr. Steele, not unaware how slow the world was of belief, has thought fit to anticipate all objection; he foresees that "prostituted pens will entertain a pretender to such reformations with a recital of his own faults and infirmities; but he is prepared for such usage, and gives himself up to all nameless authors, to be treated as they please," p. 59.
It is certain, Mr. Bailiff, that no man breathing can pretend to have arrived at such a sublime pitch of virtue, as Mr. Steele, without some tendency in the world to suspend at least their belief of the fact, till time and observation shall determine. But, I hope, few writers will be so prostitute as to trouble themselves with "the faults and infirmities" of Mr. Steele's past life, with what he somewhere else calls "the sins of his youth[1]," and in one of his late pa-
pers,
- ↑ See The Guardian, No 53.
