Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/416

 to periodicals Stephens was a voluminous writer of books. His best-known works are the unfinished 'Catalogue of Prints and Drawings (Personal and Political Satire) in the British Museum' (4 vols. 1870–83), a massive collection of minute detail, and his 'Portfolio' sketch of the work and life of D. G. Rossetti (1894; new edit. 1908), which, though not free from inaccuracies, is of great value as written from personal knowledge. Stephens's anonymous pamphlet, 'William Holman Hunt and his Work' (1860) (on Holman Hunt's 'Christ in the Temple') gives a good idea of the inspiration and methods of the Pre-Raphaelites, and he remained for many years a personal friend of Holman Hunt. But he was more in sympathy with the aims and teaching of Rossetti, whose champion he constituted himself, than with those of the Pre-Raphaelite school. A rupture between him and Holman Hunt took place in their old age, and after the publication of Holman Hunt's 'Pre-Raphaelitism' in 1905 some controversy took place in the press between them over the respective parts that Holman Hunt and Rossetti played in the initiation of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Stephens contended that Rossetti was the moving spirit and Holman Hunt the disciple (cf. The Times, 16 Feb. 1906).

Other of Stephens's more important publications were: 1. 'Masterpieces of Mulready,' 1867, much of which appeared in 'Memorials of William Mulready' in 'Great Artists' series, 1890. 2. 'The Early Works of Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A.,' anon. 1869; re-issued as 'Memoirs of Landseer,' 1874; revised in a volume in 'Great Artists' series, 1880. 3. 'A Memoir of George Cruikshank ' (including an essay by W. M. Thackeray), 1891. He also wrote two works on Norman and Flemish art (1865). He contributed letterpress to illustrations of Reynolds (1866), J. C. Hook (1884), and Alma Tadema (1895), and notes to the catalogues of exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery of the works of Reynolds (1884), Gainsborough (1885), Millais (1886), and Van Dyck (1887). He also penned a prefatory essay to Ernest Rhys's 'Sir Frederic Leighton' (folio, 1895).

In the course of his career Stephens brought together a large collection of prints and drawings at his house in Hammersmith Terrace, where he died of heart disease on 9 March 1907. He married early in 1866. His widow survives with one son, Holman Stephens, a civil engineer, born on 31 Oct. 1868.

Stephens was in his youth remarkably handsome. He was the model for the head of Christ in Ford Madox Brown's 'Christ washing Peter's Feet,' the Ferdinand in Millais's 'Ferdinand and Ariel,' and the servant in the same artist's 'Lorenzo and Isabella.'

 STEPHENS, JAMES (1825–1901), organiser of the Fenian conspiracy, the son of an auctioneer's clerk, was born in the city of Kilkenny either in 1824 (Pall Mall Mag. xxiv. 331) or, more probably, in 1825. Displaying as a boy considerable talent for mathematics, he received a fairly good education with a view to becoming a civil engineer, and at the age of twenty he obtained an appointment on the Limerick and Waterford railway, then in course of construction. He was a protestant, and like many of his class and creed he fell under the influence of the Young Ireland propaganda, but unlike the majority his interests were rather of an active than of a literary sort, and he took a chief part in organising the military clubs which were intended to secure the success of the revolutionary movement. He joined William Smith O'Brien [q. v.] shortly before the Killenaule affair, and acted as a sort of aide-de-camp to him both before and during the affray at Ballingarry on 29 July 1848. He was slightly wounded on that occasion, but by shamming death he managed to elude detection and effect his escape. While wandering about the country from one hiding-place to another he fell in with Michael Doheny of the 'Felon's Track,' and with him planned a daring scheme for kidnapping the prime minister, Lord John Russell, who was at the time visiting Ireland. The plot miscarried, and after several hairbreadth escapes Stephens managed on 24 Sept. to slip out of the country in disguise and eventually to reach Paris.

Here he seems for some years to have earned a scanty livelihood by giving lessons in English; but he was a born plotter, and the atmosphere of conspiracy hung at the time thickly over Europe (cf., Fenians and Fenianism, i. 70, note). A 