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Excerpt from The Life of Richard Steele, Vol. 1 of 2 More than a century and a half have passed since Richard Steele died, and much that is of value has been written about him but it is only recently that any accurate study of the facts of his life has been attempted, and the present work is the first in which an endeavour has been made to-treat the subject exhaustively. Throughout the eighteenth century the more impor tant of Steele's works were widely read, and passed through numerous editions; but it was not until 1786 that John Nichols published an edition of the Tatler in six volumes, with adequate notes. Nichols and those who assisted him wrote while persons who had known Steele were yet living or had only recently died, and many de tails were thus preserved which might otherwise have been lost. But Nichols did not attempt any systematic life of Steele. In I 789 an edition of the Spectator was published, but it was only slightly annotated. Between 1789 and 1791 Nichols again rendered service by issuing several volumes containing many of Steele's less known works, which, apart from their intrinsic worth, possess much interest to the biographer. Steele's Letters were published for the first time inour knowledge in their editions of the Spectator, and Dr. Drake, while making many sensible remarks upon the Periodical Essayists, confined himself in his account of Steele to putting into connected form facts that were already known. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfe