intimates must be intolerable. From
that, indeed, we somewhat hastily avert our eyes. Remains the loss
to the great reading public, which we believe that Steevens must
have done a vast deal to educate, not to literature so much as to a
pride in our country's imperial destiny. Where the elect chiefly
admired a scarcely exampled grasp and power of literary
impressionism, the man in the street was learning the scope and
aspect of his and our imperial heritage, and gaining a new view of
his duties as a British citizen.

"A potent influence is thus withdrawn. The pen that had taught us
to see and comprehend India and Egypt and the reconquest of the
Soudan would have burned in on the most heedless the line which
duty marks out for us in South Africa. Men who know South Africa
are pretty well united. Now Steevens would have taken all England
to South Africa. Nay, more, we are no longer able to blink the
truth that all is not for the best in the best of all possible
armies, and the one satisfaction in our reverses is that, when the
war is over, no Government will dare to resist a vigorous programme
of reform. Steevens would not have been too technical for his
readers; he would have given his huge public just as many prominent
facts and headings as had been good for them, and his return from
South Africa with the materials of a book must have strengthened
the hands of the intelligent reformer. That journalism which, in a
word, really is a living influence in the State is infinitely the
poorer. And so we believe is literature. There is much literature
in his journalism, but it is in his 'Monologues of the Dead' that
you get the rare achievement and rarer promise which made one
positive that, his wanderings once over, he would settle down to
write something of great and permanent value. Only one impediment
could we have foreseen to such a consummation: he might have been
drawn into public life. For he spoke far better than the majority
of even distinguished contemporary politicians, and to a man of his
knowledge of affairs, influence over others, and clearness of
conviction, anything might have been open.

"Well! he is dead at Ladysmith of enteric fever. Turning over the
pages of his famous war-book we find it written of the Soudan: 'Of
the men who esc