the beleaguered city--a wail in what contrast to the humour, the
vitality, the quickness, the impulse, the eagerness of expectation with
which his toil in South Africa began!--wherein he wrote: "Beyond is the
world--war and love. Clery marching on Colenso, and all that a man holds
dear in a little island under the north star.... To your world and to
yourself you are every bit as good as dead--except that dead men have no
time to fill in." And now he is dead. And I have undertaken the most
difficult task, at the command--for in such a case the timorous
suggestion, hooped round by poignant apologies, is no less than a
command--of that human creature whom, in the little island under the
north star, he held most dear of all--his wife, to set a copingstone, a
mere nothing in the air, upon the last work that came from his pen. I
will prefer to begin with my own summary, my own intimate view of George
Steevens, as he wandered in and out, visible and invisible, of the paths
of my life.

"Weep for the dead, for his light hath failed; weep but a little for the
dead, for he is at rest." Ecclesiasticus came to my mind when the news
of his death came to my knowledge. Who would not weep over the
extinction of a career set in a promise so golden, in an accomplishment
so rare and splendid? Sad enough thought it is that he is at rest;
still--he rests. "Under the wide and starry sky," words which, as I have
heard him say, in his casual, unambitious manner of speech, he was wont
to repeat to himself in the open deserts of the Soudan--"Under the wide
and starry sky" the grave has been dug, and "let me lie."

"Glad did I live, and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will."

The personality of George Steevens was one which might have been complex
and obscure to the ordinary acquaintance, were it not for one shining,
one golden key which fitted every ward of his temperament, his conduct,
his policy, his work. He was the soul of honour. I use the words in no
vague sense, in no mere spirit of phrase-making. How could that be
possible at this hour? They are words which explain him, which are the
commentary of his life, which summarise and enlighten every act of every
day, his momentary impulses and his acquired habits. "In Spain," a great
and noble writer has said, "was the point put upon honour." The point
of honour was with George Steevens his helmet, his shield, his armour,
his flag. That it was which made his lightest word a law