country’s imperial destiny.  Where the elect chiefly admired a scarcely exampled grasp and power of literary impressionism, the man in the street was learning the scope and aspect of his and our imperial heritage, and gaining a new view of his duties as a British citizen.

“A potent influence is thus withdrawn.  The pen that had taught us to see and comprehend India and Egypt and the reconquest of the Soudan would have burned in on the most heedless the line which duty marks out for us in South Africa.  Men who know South Africa are pretty well united.  Now Steevens would have taken all England to South Africa.  Nay, more, we are no longer able to blink the truth that all is not for the best in the best of all possible armies, and the one satisfaction in our reverses is that, when the war is over, no Government will dare to resist a vigorous programme of reform.  Steevens would not have been too technical for his readers; he would have given his huge public just as many prominent facts and headings as had been good for them, and his return from South Africa with the materials of a book must have strengthened the hands of the intelligent reformer.  That journalism which, in a word, really is a living influence in the State is infinitely the poorer.  And so we believe is literature.  There is much literature in his journalism, but it is in his ‘Monologues of the Dead’ that you get the rare achievement and rarer promise which made one positive that, his wanderings once over, he would settle down to write something of great and permanent value.  Only one impediment could we have foreseen to such a consummation:  he might have been drawn into public life.  For he spoke far better than the majority of even distinguished contemporary politicians, and to a man of his knowledge of affairs, influence over others, and clearness of conviction, anything might have been open.

“Well! he is dead at Ladysmith of enteric fever.  Turning over the pages of his famous war-book we find it written of the Soudan:  ’Of the men who escaped with their lives, hundreds more will bear the mark of its fangs till they die; hardly one of them but will die the sooner for the Soudan.’  And so he is dead ’the sooner for the Soudan.’  It seems bitter, unjust, a quite superfluous dispensation; and then one’s eye falls on the next sentence—­’What have we to show in return?’ In the answer is set forth the balance of gain, for we love ‘to show in return’ a wellnigh ideal career.  Fame, happiness, friendship, and that which transcends friendship, all came to George Steevens before he was thirty.  He did everything, and everything well.  He bridged a gulf which was deemed impassable, for from being a head-boy at school and the youngest Balliol scholar and a Fellow of his College and the very type of rising pedagogue, with a career secure to him in these dusty meadows, he chose to step forth into a world where these things were accounted lightly, to glorify the hitherto contemned