and it soon became evident that journalism was to be his life-work.  Last February I met him in the Strand, and he was much changed:  no more crush hat, and long hair, and Bohemian manners.  He was back from the East, and a great man now—­married and settled as well—­very spruce, and inclined to be enthusiastic about the Empire.  But still I remarked his old indifference to criticism.  Success had improved him in every way:  this seems a common thing with Britishers.  In September last I knocked up against him at Rennes during the Dreyfus trial.  As I expected, Steevens kept cool:  he could always see the other side of a question.  We discussed the impending war, and he was eagerly looking forward to going with the troops.  I dare not tell his views on the political question of the war.  They would surprise most of his friends and admirers.  On taking leave I bade him be sure to take care of himself.  He said he would.”

What strikes me as being peculiarly significant of a certain aspect of his character appeared in ‘The Nursing and Hospital World.’  It ran in this wise—­I give merely an extract:—­

“Although George Steevens never used his imperial pen for personal purposes, yet it seems almost as if it were a premonition of death by enteric fever which aroused his intense sympathy for our brave soldiers who died like flies in the Soudan from this terrible scourge, owing to lack of trained nursing skill, during the late war.  This sympathy he expressed to those in power, and we believe that it was owing to his representations that one of the most splendid offers of help for our soldiers ever suggested was made by his chief, the editor of the ‘Daily Mail,’ when he proposed to equip, regardless of expense, an ambulance to the Soudan, organised on lines which would secure, for our sick and wounded, skilled nursing on modern lines, such nursing as the system in vogue at the War Office denies to them.

“The fact that the War Office refused this enlightened and generous offer, and that dozens of valuable lives were sacrificed in consequence, is only part of the monstrous incompetence of its management.  Who can tell!  If Mr Alfred Harmsworth’s offer had been accepted in the last war, might not army nursing reform have, to a certain extent, been effected ere we came to blows with the Transvaal, and many of the brave men who have died for us long lingering deaths from enteric and dysentery have been spared to those of whom they are beloved?”

Another writer in the ’Outlook’:—­

“As we turn over the astonishing record of George Warrington Steevens’s thirty years, we are divided between the balance of loss and gain.  The loss to his own intimates must be intolerable.  From that, indeed, we somewhat hastily avert our eyes.  Remains the loss to the great reading public, which we believe that Steevens must have done a vast deal to educate, not to literature so much as to a pride in our