Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/413

 reasonably liberal limits were of primary importance to the Dictionary, and he refused mercy to contributors who offered him vague conjecture or sentimental eulogy instead of unembroidered fact. To the selection of contributors, to the revision of manuscripts, to the heavy correspondence, to the clerical organisation, he gave at the outset anxious attention. But he never quite reconciled himself to office routine, and his steady application soon developed a nervous depression. The first volume of the Dictionary appeared under his editorship in January 1885, and the stipulated issue of the succeeding volumes at quarterly intervals was never interrupted. But Stephen's health soon rendered periodic rests necessary. At the end of 1886 he spent the Christmas vacation in Switzerland, and he revisited the Alps in the winters of 1888, 1889, and 1890. In 1889 a serious breakdown compelled a year's retirement from the editorship, in the course of which he paid a third visit to America and received the degree of LL.D. from Harvard. A recurrence of illness led to his resignation of his editorial office in April 1891, after more than eight years' tenure. He was succeeded by the present writer, who had become his assistant in March 1883, and was joint editor from the beginning of 1890. The twenty-sixth volume of the original issue of the Dictionary is the last bearing Stephen's name on the title-page. But Stephen had been from the outset a chief contributor to the work as well as editor, and re-established health enabled him to write important articles for the Dictionary until the close of the first supplement in 1901. To the substantive work he contributed 378 articles, covering 1000 pages, and dealing with such names as Addison, Burns, Byron, Carlyle, Coleridge, Defoe, Dickens, Dryden, Goldsmith, Hume, Landor, Macaulay, the Mills, Milton, Pope, Scott, Swift, Thackeray, and Wordsworth. Although in letters to friends Stephen repeatedly complained of the ‘drudgery’ of his editorial task, and frequently avowed regret at his enforced withdrawal from speculative inquiry, he expressed every satisfaction in living to see the work completed.

While Stephen was actively engaged in editorial labours he yet found time for other literary work. In 1883 he was chosen the first Clark lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, and delivered a course of lectures on eighteenth-century literature, but he resigned the post at the end of the year. In 1885 he wrote a sympathetic biography of Henry Fawcett, his intimate friend from Cambridge days, who had died on 6 Nov. 1884. On his retirement from the editorship of the Dictionary in 1891 he reverted to a plan which had long occupied his mind—of extending to the nineteenth century his ‘History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century.’ But his scheme underwent many vicissitudes, and after long delay the work took the limited shape of an account of ‘The English Utilitarians,’ which was published in three volumes in 1900. Although somewhat discursive, the work abounds in happy characterisation of movements and men.

Stephen, although little of a propagandist, was never indifferent to the growth in the number of adherents to his ethical and religious views. The movement for forming ethical societies with Sunday services in various parts of London found in him an active supporter. He became president of the Ethical Societies of London, and in that capacity he delivered many lectures, which he collected in two volumes, entitled ‘Social Rights and Duties’ (1896). At the same time he continued to write on biography, criticism, and philosophy in the magazines with all his old zest and point, and as was his wont he collected these efforts from time to time. A volume named ‘An Agnostic's Apology,’ after the opening paper, which was reprinted from the ‘Fortnightly’ of June 1876, came out in 1893, and ‘Studies of a Biographer,’ in two series, each in two volumes, in 1899 and 1902.

Loss of friends and kinsfolk deeply tried Stephen's affectionate nature towards the end of his life. With James Russell Lowell, while he was United States ambassador in London, Stephen's relations grew very close (1880–7), and after Lowell's death on 12 Aug. 1891 Stephen organised with his wife's aid the presentation of a stained glass memorial window to the chapter-house at Westminster. The death of George Croom Robertson [q. v.] in 1892 and of James Dykes Campbell [q. v. Suppl. I] in 1895 removed two very congenial associates. Of his friends Henry Sidgwick and James Payn he wrote in the first supplement of this Dictionary. But a severer blow was the death on 11 March 1894 of his elder brother, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen [q. v.], of whom he prepared with great rapidity a full memoir between November 1894 and January 1895. The death, on 5 May 1895, of his second wife, to whose devotion he owed much, caused him poignant grief, from which he recovered slowly. Yet in spite of private sorrows and of the growing infirmity