Page:Tex; a chapter in the life of Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (IA texchapterinlife00mcke).pdf/27

 ventional judgements of his new countrymen. He wrote of his neighbours among whom he had lived for more than forty years, with an unaffected sense of remoteness, as "the English"; after his naturalization, he was fond of talking, tongue in cheek, about what "we English" thought and did; but, in the last analysis, he embodied too many various strains to favour any single nationality.

After being educated at the Kensington Catholic Public School and at Beaumont, Teixeira worked for some time in the City and was rescued for literature by J. T. Grein, who made him secretary of the Independent Theatre. By his work as a translator and as the London correspondent of a Dutch paper, he lived precariously until his renderings of Maeterlinck, whose official translator he became with The Double Garden, called public attention to a new quality of scholarship. Though he flirted with journalism, as editor of Dramatic Opinions and of The Candid Friend, and with publishing, in connection with Leonard Smithers, translation was the business of his life until he entered government service. He is best known for his ver-