office of the reporter.  Thus within a few years he hurried through America, bringing back, the greatest of living American journalists tells us, the best and most accurate of all pictures of America.  Thus he saw the face of war with the conquering Turk in Thessaly, and showed us modern Germany and Egypt and British India, and in two Soudanese campaigns rode for days in the saddle in ‘that God-accursed wilderness,’ as though his training had been in a stable, not in the quad of Balliol.  These thirty years were packed with the happiness and success which Matthew Arnold desired for them that must die young.  He not only succeeded, but he took success modestly, and leaves a name for unselfishness and unbumptiousness.  Also he ’did the State some service.’

“‘One paces up and down the shore yet awhile,’ says Thackeray, ’and looks towards the unknown ocean and thinks of the traveller whose boat sailed yesterday.’  And so, thinking of Steevens, we must not altogether repine when, ‘trailing clouds of glory,’ an ’ample, full-blooded spirit shoots into the night.’”

I take this passage from ‘Literature,’ in connection with Steevens, on account of the grave moral which it draws from his life-work:—­

“His career was an object-lesson in the usefulness of those educational endowments which link the humblest with the highest seats of learning in the country.  If he had not been able to win scholarships he would have had to begin life as a clerk in a bank or a house of business.  But he won them, and a good education with them, wherever they were to be won—­at the City of London School, and at Balliol College, Oxford.  He was a first-class man (both in ‘Mods’ and ’Greats’), proxime accessit for the Hertford, and a Fellow of Pembroke.  He learnt German, and specialised in metaphysics.  A review which he wrote of Mr Balfour’s ’Foundations of Religious Belief’ showed how much more deeply than the average journalist he had studied the subjects about which philosophers doubt; and his first book—­’Monologues of the Dead’—­established his claim to scholarship.  Some critics called them vulgar, and they certainly were frivolous.  But they proved two things—­that Mr Steevens had a lively sense of humour, and that he had read the classics to some purpose.  The monologue of Xanthippe—­in which she gave her candid opinion of Socrates—­was, in its way, and within its limits, a masterpiece.

“But it was not by this sort of work that Mr Steevens was to win his wide popularity.  Few writers, when one comes to think of it, do win wide popularity by means of classical jeux d’esprit.  At the time when he was throwing them off, he was also throwing off ’Occ.  Notes’ for the ‘Pall Mall Gazette.’  He was reckoned the humorist par excellence of that journal in the years when, under the editorship of Mr Cust, it was almost entirely written by humorists.  He was one of the seceders on the occasion of Mr Cust’s