aped 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 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