rt from top to bottom at his house, Yoxall
Lodge, saying 'Now, Mrs. Stephen, you _must_ buy a new dress.' She
calmly stitched it together and appeared in it next day. She made her
stepchildren read Butler's 'Analogy' before they were seven.[13] But in
spite of her oddities and severities, she seems to have been both
respected and beloved by her nearest relations.

The marriage probably marked Stephen's final adhesion to the Evangelical
party. He maintained till his death the closest and most affectionate
alliance with his brother-in-law Wilberforce. The nature of their
relations may be inferred from Wilberforce's 'Life and Letters.'
Wilberforce owed much of his influence to the singular sweetness of his
disposition and the urbanity of his manners. His wide sympathies
interested him in many causes, and even his antagonists were not
enemies. Stephen, on the other hand, as Mr. Henry Adams says, was a
'high-minded fanatic.' To be interested in any but the great cause was
to rouse his suspicions. 'If you,' he once wrote to Wilberforce, 'were
Wellington, and I were Massena, I should beat you by distracting your
attention from the main point.' Any courtesies shown by Wilberforce to
his opponents or to his old friend Pitt seemed to his ardent coadjutor
to be concessions to the evil principle. The Continental war, he held,
was a Divine punishment inflicted upon England for maintaining the slave
trade; and he expounded this doctrine in various pamphlets, the first of
which, 'The Crisis of the Sugar Colonies,' appeared in 1802.

Yet Stephen owes a small niche in history to another cause, upon which
he bestowed no little energy. His professional practice had made him
familiar with the course of the neutral trade. In October 1805, almost
on the day of the battle of Trafalgar, he published a pamphlet called
'War in Disguise.' The point of this, put very briefly, was to denounce
a practice by which our operations against France and Spain were
impeded. American ships, or ships protected by a fraudulent use of the
American flag, sailed from the hostile colonies, ostensibly for an
American port, and then made a nominally distinct but really continuous
voyage to Europe. Thus the mother countries were still able to draw
supplies from the colonies. The remedy suggested in Stephen's pamphlet
was to revive the claims made by England in the Seven Years' War which
entitled us to suppress the trade altogether. The policy thus suggested
was soon