Sir RICHARD, was born at Dublin in the year 1671. One branch of the family was possessed of a considerable estate in the county of Wexford. His father, a counsellor-at-law in Dublin, was private secretary to James duke of Ormond; but he was of English extraction; and his son, while very young, being carried to London, he put him to school at the Charter-House, whence he was removed to Merton College in Oxford. He left the university without taking any degree, in the full resolution to enter the army. This step was highly displeasing to his friends; but the ardour of his passion for a military life rendered him deaf to any other proposal. Not being able to procure a better station, he entered as a private gentleman in the Horse Guards, notwithstanding he thus lost the succession to his Irish estate. However, as he had a flow of good-nature, a generous openness and frankness of spirit, and a sparkling vivacity of wit, these qualities rendered him the delight of the soldiery, and procured him an ensign's commission in the guards. In the meantime, as he had made choice of a profession which set him free from all the ordinary restraints of youth, he spared not to indulge his inclinations in the wildest excesses. Yet his gaieties and revels did not pass without some cool hours of reflection; it was in these that he drew up his little treatise entitled The Christian Hero, with a design, if we may believe himself, to be a check upon his passions. For this purpose it had lain for some time by him, when he printed it in 1701, with a dedication to Lord Cutts, who had not only appointed him his private secretary, but procured for him a company in Lord Lucas's regiment of fusiliers.

During the same year he brought out his comedy, called The Funeral, or Grief à la Mode. This play procured him the notice of King William, who resolved to give him some essential marks of his favour; and though, upon that prince's death, his hopes were disappointed, yet, in the beginning of Queen Anne's reign, he was appointed to the profitable place of gazetteer. This post he owed to the friendship of Lord Halifax and the Earl of Sunderland, to whom he had been recommended by his school-fellow Mr Addison. That gentleman also lent him a helping hand in promoting the comedy called The Tender Husband, which was acted in 1704 with great success. But his next play, The Lying Lover, had a very different fate. Upon this rebuff from the stage, he turned the same humorous current into another channel; and early in the year 1709, he began to publish the Tatler, in concert with Dr Swift. His reputation was perfectly established by this work; and, during the course of it, he was made a commissioner of the stamp-duties in 1710. Upon the change of the ministry the same year, he joined the Duke of Marlborough, who had several years entertained a friendship for him; and upon his Grace's dismission from all employments in 1711, Mr Steele addressed a letter of thanks to him for the services which he had rendered to his country. As, however, he still continued to hold his place in the stamp-office under the new administration, he wisely declined the discussion of political subjects; and, adhering more closely to Addison, he dropped the Tatler, and afterwards, by the assistance chiefly of that steady friend, he carried on the same plan, much improved, under the title of the Spectator. The success of this paper was equal to that of the former; and before the close of it, he was thus encouraged to proceed upon the same design in the character of the Guardian. This was begun in the beginning of 1713, and was laid down in the ensuing October. But in the course of the year his thoughts took a stronger turn to politics; he engaged with great warmth against the ministry; and being determined to prosecute his views by procuring a seat in the House of Commons, he immediately removed all the obstacles that stood in his way. For that purpose he took care to prevent a forcible dismission from his post in the stamp-office, by a timely resignation of it to the Earl of Oxford; and at the same time gave up a pension which had hitherto been paid to him by the Queen as a servant to the late Prince George of Denmark. He now wrote the famous paper in the Guardian upon the demolition of Dunkirk. It was published August 7, 1713; and the parliament being dissolved next day, the same journal was soon followed by several other warm political tracts against the administration. Upon the meeting of the new parliament, Steele having been returned a member for the borough of Stockbridge in Hampshire, took his seat accordingly in the House of Commons; but was expelled in the course of a few days, for writing a paper called the "Englishman," and another entitled the "Cries." Presently after his expulsion, he published proposals for writing the history of the Duke of Marlborough. At the same time he also wrote the Spinster; and in opposition to the Examiner, he set up a paper called the Reader, and continued publishing several other papers and tracts in the same spirit till the death of the queen. As a reward for these services, he was immediately taken into favour by her successor to the throne, King George I.; was appointed surveyor of the royal stables at Hampton Court, and governor of the royal company of comedians, was put into the commission of the peace for the county of Middlesex, and in 1715 received the honour of knighthood. In the first parliament of that king, he was chosen member for Boroughbridge in Yorkshire; and, after the suppression of the rebellion in the north, was appointed one of the commissioners of the forfeited estates in Scotland. In 1718, he buried his second wife, who had brought him a handsome fortune with a good estate in Wales; but neither this, nor the ample addition lately made to his income, was sufficient to answer his demands. The thoughtless vivacity of his spirit often reduced him to little shifts of wit for its support; and he was constantly engaged in speculative projects that generally ended in failure.

The following year he opposed the remarkable peerage bill in the House of Commons; and, during the course of this opposition to the court, his license for acting plays was revoked, and his patent rendered ineffectual at the instance of the Lord Chamberlain. He did his utmost to prevent so great a loss; and finding every direct avenue of approach to his royal master effectually barred against him by his powerful adversary, he had recourse to the method of applying to the public, in hopes that his complaints would reach the ears of his sovereign, though in an indirect course, by that channel. In this spirit he formed the plan of a periodical paper, to be published twice a-week, under the title of the Theatre; the first number of which appeared on the 2d of January 1719-20. In the meantime, the misfortune of being out of favour at court, like other misfortunes, drew after it a train of more. During the course of this paper, in which he had assumed the feigned name of Sir John Edgar, he was outrageously attacked by Dennis, the notorious critic, in a very abusive pamphlet, entitled The Character and Conduct of Sir John Edgar. To this insult he made a humorous reply in the Theatre.

While he was struggling with all his might to save himself from ruin, he found time to turn his pen against the mischievous South Sea scheme, which had nearly brought the nation to ruin in 1720; and the next year he was restored to his office and authority in the play-house in Drury Lane. Of this it was not long before he made an additional advantage, by bringing his celebrated comedy called the Conscious Lovers upon that stage, where it was acted with prodigious success; so that the receipt there must have been very considerable, besides the profits accruing by the sale of the copy, and a purse of L500 given to him by the king, to whom he dedicated it. Yet notwithstanding these ample supplies, about the year following, being reduced to the utmost extremity, he sold his share in the play-house; and soon after commenced a lawsuit with the managers, which, in 1726, was decided against him. Having now again, for the last time, brought himself by the most heedless profusion into a desperate condition, he was rendered altogether incapable of retrieving the loss, by being seized with a paralytic disorder, which greatly impaired his understanding. In these unhappy circumstances, he retired to his seat at Llangunnor near Caerarthen in Wales, where he died on the 1st of September 1729, and, according to his own desire, was privately interred in the church of Caerarthen. Among his papers were found the manuscripts of two plays, one called The Gentleman, founded upon the Eunuch of Terence, and the other entitled The School of Action, both nearly finished.

Sir Richard was a man of undiminished and extensive benevolence, a friend to the friendless, and, as far as his circumstances would permit, the father of every orphan. His works are chaste and manly. He was a stranger to the most distant appearance of envy or malevolence; never jealous of any man's growing reputation; and so far from arrogating any praise to himself from his conjunction with Addison, that he was the first who desired him to distinguish his papers. His great fault was want of economy; and it has been said of him, he was certainly the most agreeable and the most innocent rake that ever trod the rounds of dissipation.

Thackeray, in his Lectures on the English Humorists, 1858, winds up his remarks on Steele in these words—“We are living in the nineteenth century, and poor Dick Steele stumbled and got up again; and got into jail and out again; and sinned and repented; and loved and suffered; and lived and died scores of years ago. Peace be with him! Let us think gently of one who was so gentle; let us speak kindly of one whose own breast exuberated with human kindness.”