STEPHEN. 551 STEPHEN. Chronicle says: "In this King's time all was dis- sension and evil and rapine. . . . Tliou miglitest go a whole daj-'s journey and not find a man sitting in a town or an acre of land tilled. The poor died of hunger and those who had been men well-to-do begged for bread. To till the ground was to plow the sands of the sea." "Men said openly that Christ and His saints slept." In 1141 Stephen was taken pris- oner at the battle of Lincoln, and was deposed by a Church council, Matilda being chosen Queen. She soon alienated her supporters by her harsh government, and Stephen, who had been released in exchange for Robert of Gloucester, was de- clared the lawful King by a second Church coun- cil and was crowned on Christmas Day. In 1148 Matilda left England; Robert of Gloucester was now dead and the struggle was henceforth car- ried on by Henrj', the son of Matilda and Geof- frey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, who in 1151 succeeded his father and by his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, the divorced wife of Louis VII. of France, became one of the richest princes in Europe. Stephen's son, Eustace, died in 11.53, and in November of the same year Stephen and Henry concluded the Treaty of Wallingford, by which the former remained King, while the suc- cession was vested in Henry. Stephen died Oc- tober 25, 1154. Consult: Stubbs, Constitutional Histoni, vol. i. (6th ed., Oxford, 1.S96) ; id., The Early Plantarienets (5th ed., London, 1880). STEPHEN, Henky John (1787-1864). An English jurist. He was born at Saint Chris- topher's, West Indies, studied for a time at Saint John's College, Cambridge, and in 1815 was called to the bar. His legal treatises have given him a permanent place among English jurists. In 1824 appeared his Treatise on the Principles of Pleading in Civil Actions, which is a model of form and clearness, and was styled by Kent "the best book that was ever written in explanation of the science." His New Commentaries on the Laics of England (1S41) enjoyed great con- temporary popularity. He also published a Sam man/ of the Criminal Law at Its Present Stale (18.34). Consult L. Stephen, Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (London, 1895). STEPHEN, Sir Jame.? Fitzjames (1820-04). An eminent English jurist and writer on legal subjects, liorn in London. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was admitted to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1854. He was re- corder of Newark-on-Trent in 1859-69, and was le- gal member of the Legislative Council of the Gov- ernor-General of India in 1869-72, doing much to consolidate, abbreviate, and simplify the Indian law of crimes and of evidence, it being due to his efl'orts that the Indian Evidence Act was passed in 1872, He returned to England in 1872 and employed his time until 1875 in the work of codifying the law of evidence and criminal law of England, He was appointed professor of common law to the Inns of Court in 1875, and in 1879 was appointed a judge of the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court, which position he held until 1891, when he was disabled by ner- vous trouble resulting in insanity. His greatest work was his History of the Criminal Law of England (1883), It is the best work upon the subject for the period it cov- ers, although marked by a certain bias due to his peculiar temperament; and his Digest of the Law of Evidence ( 1876) is widely used in Eng- land and the United States. He also pulilished: Essays uf a Jiarrister (1862) ; Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (1873); Digest of the Criminal Law (1877); A 'icw of the Criminal Law in ■ England (1863). Consult Leslie Stephen, Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (London, 1895). STEPHEN, James Kennktii (1859-92). An English verse-writer, born in London. At King's College, Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1882, he was .elected to the Whewell scholarship in international law, and to a fellowship (1885), In 1884 he was called to the bar at Uie Inner Temple, and in 1S8S he was ap- pointed clerk of assize for the South Wales Cir- cuit. Two years later he resigned to return to Cambridge as tutor. In the meantime he had contributed to the Saint James Gazette and had conducted a weekly journal called The Reflector. The year before his death Stephen published two slender volumes of light verse, Lapsus Calami and Quo, Musa, Tcndisf which met with instant success. In recent verse there is noth- ing cleverer than some of the parodies, as those on Browning, Wordsworth, Clough, Whitman, and especially Kipling. To the one on Browning there is a noble apologj'. Other poems .show a keen critic of contemporary life. STEPHEN, Sir Leslie ( 1832-1904) . An Eng- lish biographer and critic, son of Sir James Ste- phen. He was born in London and was educated at Eton and at King's College, London, and Trin- ity Hall, Cambridge, w'here he graduated in 1854 (M. A. 1857) and remained as fellow and tutor until 1864. In that year he went to London and engaged in literary work, writing much for lead- ing periodicals. His first wife (died 1875) was a daughter of Thackeray. In 1865 he published Sketches from Cambridge, reprinted from the Pall Mall Gazette, and in 1871 became editor of the Cornhill Magazine, the reputation of which he maintained by securing such contributors as Stevenson, Hardy, and Henry James. He re- signed this post in 1882 to undertake the editor- ship of the Dictionary of National Biography, which, though ill health forced Iiul. to hand the management over to Sidney Lee in 1801, will always be a monument to his scholarship and judgment. He wrote nearly four hundred of the articles himself, including Addison, Burns, By- ron, Carlyle, Coleridge, Dickens, George Eliot, Fielding, Gibbon, Hume, Johnson, Milton, Pope, Scott, Swift, Thackeray, and Wordsworth. Prac- tically all his work on the Dictionary was excel- lent, but his type of mind and literary method achieved the happier results, perliaps, with the eighteenth-century subjects. For a year (188.3) he held the Clark lectureship in English litera- ture at Cambridge, In addition to biography and literature Stephen showed a keen interest in phi- losophy and ethics. In this field he was utilitarian and fortified his position with an irony, a subtle- ty of thought, and a trenchantly critical method that won him high regard among literary men and scholars at the expense, perhaps, of pop-alar- ity. His works include: Boars in a Library (three series, 1874-76-79) , able and impartial criticisms about which there plays a deli,ghtful humor: The History of English Thovght in the Eighteenth Century (1876, new ed. 1002): Es- says on Freethinking and Plain Speaking (1879) The Science of Ethics (1882), widely used as a
