“Weep for the dead, for his light hath failed; weep but a little for the dead, for he is at rest.”  Ecclesiasticus came to my mind when the news of his death came to my knowledge.  Who would not weep over the extinction of a career set in a promise so golden, in an accomplishment so rare and splendid?  Sad enough thought it is that he is at rest; still—­he rests.  “Under the wide and starry sky,” words which, as I have heard him say, in his casual, unambitious manner of speech, he was wont to repeat to himself in the open deserts of the Soudan—­“Under the wide and starry sky” the grave has been dug, and “let me lie.”

    “Glad did I live, and gladly die,
    And I laid me down with a will.”

The personality of George Steevens was one which might have been complex and obscure to the ordinary acquaintance, were it not for one shining, one golden key which fitted every ward of his temperament, his conduct, his policy, his work.  He was the soul of honour.  I use the words in no vague sense, in no mere spirit of phrase-making.  How could that be possible at this hour?  They are words which explain him, which are the commentary of his life, which summarise and enlighten every act of every day, his momentary impulses and his acquired habits.  “In Spain,” a great and noble writer has said, “was the point put upon honour.”  The point of honour was with George Steevens his helmet, his shield, his armour, his flag.  That it was which made his lightest word a law, his vaguest promise a necessity in act, his most facile acceptance an engagement as fixed as the laws of motion.  In old, old days I well remember how it came to be a complacent certainty with everybody associated with Steevens that if he promised an article, an occasional note, a review—­whatever it might be—­at two, three, four, five in the morning, at that hour the work would be ready.  He never flinched; he never made excuses, for the obvious reason that there was never any necessity for excuse.  Truthful, clean-minded, nobly unselfish as he was, all these things played but the parts of planets revolving around the sun of his life—­the sun of honour.  To that point I always return:  but a man can be conceived who shall be splendidly honourable, yet not lovable—­a man who might repel friendship.  Steevens was not of that race.  Not a friend of his but loved him with a great and serious affection for those qualities which are too often separable from the austerity of a fine character, the honour of an upright man.  His sweetness was exquisite, and this partly because it was so unexpected.  A somewhat shy and quiet manner did not prepare men for the urbanity, the tolerance, the magnanimity that lay at the back of his heart.  Generosity in thought—­the rarest form of generosity that is reared among the flowers of this sorrowful earth—­was with him habitual.  He could, and did, resent at every point the qualities in men that ran counter to his principles of honour, and he did not spare his keen irony when such things crossed his path; but, on the other side, he loved his friends with a whole and simple heart.  I think that very few men who came under his influence refused him their love, none their admiration.