any desire to be pedantic, but because Steevens had a classical way with him which would out, disguise it how he might—­Pope, I say, in his “Essay on Criticism,” had before made the same remark.) Then again you have in his chapter on Aliwal the curiously intimate sketch of the Boer character—­“A people hard to arouse, but, you would say, very hard to subdue.”  Well, it is by the objective side of life that we have to judge him.  The futility of death makes that an absolute necessity; but I like to think of a possible George Steevens who, when the dust and sand of campaigns and daily journalism had been wiped away from his shoon, would have combined in a great and single-hearted career all the various powers of his fine mind.

His death, as none needs to be told, came as a great shock and with almost staggering surprise to the world; and it is for his memory’s sake that I put on record a few of the words that were written of him by responsible people.  An Oxford contemporary has written of him:—­

“I first met him at a meeting of the Russell Club at Oxford.  He was a great light there, being hon. sec.  It was in 1890, and Steevens had been head-boy of the City of London School, and then Senior Scholar at Balliol.  Even at the Russell Club, then, he was regarded as a great man.  The membership was, I think, limited to twenty—­all Radical stalwarts.  I well remember his witty comments on a paper advocating Women’s Rights.  He was at his best when opening the debate after some such paper.  Little did that band of ardent souls imagine their leader would, in a few short years, be winning fame for a Tory halfpenny paper.

“He sat next me at dinner, just before he graduated, and he was in one of those pensive moods which sometimes came over him.  I believe he hardly spoke.  In ’92 he entered himself as a candidate for a Fellowship at Pembroke.  I recollect his dropping into the examination-room half an hour late, while all the rest had been eagerly waiting outside the doors to start their papers at once.  But what odds?  He was miles ahead of them all—­an easy first.  It was rumoured in Pembroke that the new Fellow had been seen smoking (a pipe, too) in the quad—­that the Dean had said it was really shocking, such a bad example to the undergraduates, and against all college rules.  How could we expect undergraduates to be moral if Mr Steevens did such things?  How, indeed?  Then came Mr Oscar Browning from Cambridge, and carried off” Steevens to the ’second university in the kingdom,’ so that we saw but little of him.  Some worshipped, others denounced him.  The Cambridge papers took sides.  One spoke of ‘The Shadow’ or ‘The Fetish,’ au contraire:  another would praise the great Oxford genius.  Whereas at Balliol Steevens was boldly criticised, at Cambridge he was hated or adored.

“A few initiated friends knew that Steevens was writing for the ‘Pall Mall’ and the ‘Cambridge Observer,’