little now of his
success as journalist and author. The people who may have tried, as
they read his almost aggressively brilliant articles, to divine
something of the personality behind them, can scarcely have
contrived to picture him accurately. They will not imagine the
silent, undemonstrative person, invariably kind and ready unasked
to do a colleague's work in addition to his own, who dwells in the
memory of the friends of Mr Steevens. They will not understand how
entirely natural it seemed to these friends that when the long
day's work was ended in Ladysmith he should have gone habitually,
until this illness struck him down, to labour among the sick and
wounded for their amusement, and in order to give them the courage
which is as necessary to the soldier facing disease as it is to
his colleague who has to storm a difficult position. Those who
loved him will presently find some consolation in considering the
greatness of his achievement, but nothing that can now be said will
mitigate their grief at his untimely loss."

Another writer says:--

"What Mr Kipling has done for fiction Mr Steevens did for fact. He
was a priest of the Imperialist idea, and the glory of the Empire
was ever uppermost in his writings. That alone would not have
brought him the position he held, for it was part of the age he
lived in. But he was endowed with a curious faculty, an
extraordinary gift for recording his impressions. In a scientific
age his style may be described as cinematographic. He was able to
put vividly before his readers, in a series of smooth-running
little pictures, events exactly as he saw them with his own intense
eyes. It has been said that on occasion his work contained passages
a purist would not have passed. But Mr Steevens wrote for the
people, and he knew it. Deliberately and by consummate skill he
wrote in the words of his average reader; and had he desired to
offer his work for the consideration of a more select class, there
is little doubt that he would have displayed the same felicity. His
mission was not of that order. He set himself the more difficult
task of entertaining the many; and the same thoroughness which made
him captain of the school, Balliol scholar, and the best
note-writer on the 'Pall Mall Gazette' in its brightest days,