Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 54.djvu/165

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warmly; he was presented with a purse of one thousand guineas, raised by public subscription, and his bust was placed in the chamber of the legislative council. He was lieutenant-governor from November 1875 till 1891. In this capacity he had on four occasions to discharge the functions of governor in the absence of the incumbent. He was also president of the first legislative council, 1856–7, and again a member of the council from 1875 to 1890. He was on the council of education from November 1873 till its suppression in 1882, and on the senate of the university and the councils of many other public institutions. He received a knighthood in 1846, was made C.B. in 1862, K.C.M.G. in 1874, G.C.M.G. in 1884, and a privy councillor in 1893, being the second Australian upon whom that honour was conferred. He took a very important part in colonial legislation. In 1870 he was president of a commission for revising the statute law of the colony. It recommended three measures, one of which, drafted by the commissioners, was for a consolidation of the criminal law. After various delays, this was finally passed into law in 1883, and a ‘Manual’ comprising the act was published by Sir Alfred and Mr. A. Oliver in the same year. In 1879 he opposed a divorce bill introduced in the legislature; but observation of the numerous cases of hardship caused by the desertion of wives led him to alter his opinion, and in 1886 he introduced a bill permitting divorce under certain conditions. He replied to Mr. Gladstone upon this question in the ‘Contemporary Review’ for June 1891. In spite of a strong opposition, especially from the clergy, he finally carried the measure through the legislature in 1890, when beginning his eighty-ninth year.

Stephen visited England in 1860, but otherwise never left the colony, where the vigour of intellect which he retained till the end and his charm of character gave him the position of a venerated patriarch. His frame was spare and very active. It is stated that he would on occasion sit in court till 6 A.M. and begin a summing-up at 4 A.M. with a perfectly fresh memory. In his last years he wrote some interesting ‘Jottings from Memory’ (privately printed, 1889 and 1891) describing his early life. He kept up his reading, was full of intellectual interests, and welcomed many distinguished visitors to Australia. Robert Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke), when a barrister in Australia, was a friend of Stephen, who afterwards allowed some letters written to him by Lowe from England to appear in the ‘National Review’ (July 1894). Froude, in ‘Oceana,’ describes a visit to Stephen. He kept up a close correspondence to the last with his English relations. He led a retired life in later years, but was still interested in many charities, and especially in an institution for the blind. His strength gradually failed in the last few weeks before his death at Sydney on 15 Oct. 1894. He was buried at St. Jude's churchyard amid many demonstrations of respect.

Stephen had by his first wife five sons and four daughters, and by his second wife, who died before him, four sons and five daughters. His descendants at the time of his death were over a hundred. One of his sons, Alfred, was a canon of the Anglican Cathedral in Sydney, and another, Matthew Henry, is now a judge of the supreme court in the colony.

[Information from the family; Stephen's Jottings from Memory (see above); Obituary notices in the Sydney papers of 1894, and the ‘Times,’ 16 Oct. 1894; there is also a full notice in the ‘Cosmos’ for September 1894; Heaton's Australian Dates.]

L. S.


STEPHEN, EDWARD (1822–1885), Welsh musician, generally known as ‘Tanymarian,’ was the son of Robert and Jane Stephen of Rhydysarn, near Llan Ffestiniog, Merionethshire, where he was born in November 1822. After a few years' attendance at the local national school, he was apprenticed to a tailor, but about 1841 he commenced to preach, and some three years later entered the Independent College at Bala, where he remained three years. In 1847 he was ordained pastor of Horeb (independent) church at Dwygyfylchi, near Penmaenmawr; but in November 1856 he removed to take charge of another pastorate at Llanllechid, Bangor, where he lived at a house called ‘Tanymarian,’ by which name he was thereafter chiefly known. He died on 10 May 1885, leaving behind him a widow and several children.

In music, Stephen was entirely self-taught. A series of articles on music which he contributed to ‘Y Cronicl’ in 1848–9 raised him into sudden popularity, which he further increased by delivering lectures on the subject, interspersed with vocal illustrations of his own rendering. In 1851–2 he composed his first important work, which was also the masterpiece of his life, namely, an oratorio entitled ‘Ystorm Tiberias’ (‘The Storm of Tiberias’), which was published at Bethesda in seven parts, the last appearing in 1855. This was the first work of the kind by a Welsh composer, whence Stephen has been styled ‘the father of the oratorio in Wales,’ but it has no distinctively Welsh charac-