, his vaguest
promise a necessity in act, his most facile acceptance an engagement as
fixed as the laws of motion. In old, old days I well remember how it
came to be a complacent certainty with everybody associated with
Steevens that if he promised an article, an occasional note, a
review--whatever it might be--at two, three, four, five in the morning,
at that hour the work would be ready. He never flinched; he never made
excuses, for the obvious reason that there was never any necessity for
excuse. Truthful, clean-minded, nobly unselfish as he was, all these
things played but the parts of planets revolving around the sun of his
life--the sun of honour. To that point I always return: but a man can be
conceived who shall be splendidly honourable, yet not lovable--a man who
might repel friendship. Steevens was not of that race. Not a friend of
his but loved him with a great and serious affection for those
qualities which are too often separable from the austerity of a fine
character, the honour of an upright man. His sweetness was exquisite,
and this partly because it was so unexpected. A somewhat shy and quiet
manner did not prepare men for the urbanity, the tolerance, the
magnanimity that lay at the back of his heart. Generosity in
thought--the rarest form of generosity that is reared among the flowers
of this sorrowful earth--was with him habitual. He could, and did,
resent at every point the qualities in men that ran counter to his
principles of honour, and he did not spare his keen irony when such
things crossed his path; but, on the other side, he loved his friends
with a whole and simple heart. I think that very few men who came under
his influence refused him their love, none their admiration.

Into all that he wrote--and I shall deal later with that point in
detail--his true and candid spirit was infused. Just as in his life, in
his daily actions, you were continually surprised by his tenderness
turning round the corner of his austere reserve, so in his work his
sentiment came with a curious appeal, with tender surprises, with an
emotion that was all the keener on account of the contrast that it made
with the courage, the hope, and the fine manliness of all his thought
and all his word. Children, helplessness of all kinds, touched always
that merciful heart. I can scarcely think of him as a man of the world,
although he had had in his few and glorious days experience enough to
harden the spirit of any man. He cou