of friends civil and kind. He was one of the foremost in exposing the Chatterton-Rowley and the Ireland forgeries. He wrote an entirely fictitious account of the Java upas tree, derived from an imaginary Dutch traveller, which imposed on Erasmus Darwin, and he hoaxed the Society of Antiquaries with the tombstone of Hardicanute, supposed to have been dug up in Kennington, but really engraved with an Anglo-Saxon inscription of his own invention. He died at Hampstead on the 22nd of January 1800. A monument to his memory by Flaxman, with an inscription commemorating his Shakespearian labours, was erected in Poplar Chapel. The sale catalogue of his valuable library is in the British Museum.
Steevens’s Shakespeare was re-issued by Isaac Reed in 1803, in 21 volumes, with additional notes left by Steevens. This, which is known as the “first variorum” edition, was reprinted in 1813. Steevens’s notes are also incorporated in the edition of 1821, begun by Edmund Malone and completed by James Boswell the younger.
STEEVENS, GEORGE WARRINGTON (1860–1900), English journalist, was born at Sydenham, near London, on the 10th of December 1869, and was educated at the City of London School and Balliol College, Oxford, of which he was a scholar. He first began to write in undergraduate periodicals. In 1893 he was elected a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, and in the same year spent some time at Cambridge, editing a weekly periodical, the Cambridge Observer, and becoming a contributor to the National Observer, then edited by Mr W. E. Henley. He then married and went to London, and joined the staff of the Pall Mall Gazette, contributing also to the New Review and Blackwood’s Magazine. Some of his articles were reprinted in Monologues of the Dead. In 1896 he joined the staff of the London Daily Mail, then just started, and went on various special missions for that paper, which resulted in more than one series of articles, afterwards turned into books. In this way he published The Land of the Dollar (1897), With the Conquering Turk (1897), Egypt in 1898, and With Kitchener to Khartoum (1899). In September 1899 he went to South Africa and joined Sir George White’s force in Natal as war-correspondent, being subsequently besieged in Ladysmith. He died during the siege, of enteric fever, on the 15th of January 1900. The articles he had sent home from South Africa were published posthumously in a volume called From Capetown to Ladysmith. Steevens had a remarkable gift of seizing the salient facts and principal characteristics in anything he wished to describe, and putting them in a vivid and readable way. His early death removed an interesting personality in English journalism.
STEFANIE, Basso Naebor, or Chuwaha, a lake of East
Africa, lying in 37° E., between 4° 25′ and 5° N., and measuring
some 40 m. by 15. It is the southernmost and lowest (1880 ft.)
of a series of lakes which lie in what appears to be a north-easterly
continuation of the great East African rift valley, although this
loses its clearly marked character in about 3° N. There is, however,
a well defined watershed extending from the hills east of
Stefanie to the Harrar range. The character of the lake, which
has no outlet, varies greatly according to the amount of water
brought down by its principal feeder, the Dulei, which enters
at its north end, being there a fairly rapid stream 50 yds. wide
and 3½ ft. deep. At low water the western part of the lake is
dry. The Dulei, which rises north of 6° N., is joined in about
36° 55′ E., 5° 8′ N. by the Galana Sagan or Galana Amara. The
Sagan in times of flood receives the overflow of the next lake in
the series, Chambo or Ganjule, which lies, at a height of 3460 ft.,
70 m. north-north-east of Stefanie. Chambo in turn receives
the waters of a larger lake—Abai, Abaya, Pagade or Regina
Margherita—through the river Walo, across a plain only 2 m.
wide. Abai lies 4200 ft. above the sea, is 45 m. long and 18 m.
across at its greatest width. It is cut by 38° E. There are a
number of islands on the lake. All the lakes of the series are
shut in by high mountains, those surrounding Lake Abai, together
with the islands with which its surface is broken, being
clothed with luxuriant vegetation. The chief feeder of Abai,
the Bilate, rises in about 8° N. North-east of Abai are several
smaller lakes unconnected with the more southerly system.
Lake Stefanie was discovered by Count Samuel Teleki in 1881, and has since, with others of the series, been explored by Donaldson Smith, V. Bottego, M. S. Welby, Oscar Neumann and others. J. J. Harrison in 1899 found the lake quite dried up, and two years later Count Wickenburg found water only in the northern part. An agreement of 1907 with Great Britain recognized the lake as within the Abyssinian Empire.
See Geographical Journal (Sept. 1896, Sept. and Dec. 1900, Sept. 1901, Oct. 1902). L. von Höhnel, Discovery of Lakes Rudolf and Stefanie (London, 1894); L. Vannutelli and C. Citerni, L’Omo (Milan, 1899) ; British War Office map, Africa, sheet 79.
STEFFANI, AGOSTINO (1653–1728), Italian ecclesiastic, diplomatist and musical composer, was born at Castelfranco on the 25th of July 1653. At a very early age he was admitted as a chorister at St Mark’s, Venice. In 1667 the beauty of his voice attracted the attention of Count Tattenbach, by whom he was taken to Munich, where his education was completed at the expense of Ferdinand Maria, elector of Bavaria, who appointed him “Churfürstlicher Kammer- und Hofmusikus” and granted him a liberal salary. After receiving instruction from Johann Kaspar Kerl, in whose charge he lived, he was sent in 1673 to study in Rome, where Ercole Bernabei was his master, and among other works he composed six motets, the original manuscripts of which are now in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. On his return to Munich in 1674 he published his first work, Psalmodia vespertina, a part of which was reprinted in Martini’s Saggio di contrappunto in 1674. In 1675 he was appointed court organist. The date when he was ordained priest, with the title of Abbate of Lepsing, is not precisely known. His ecclesiastical status did not prevent him from turning his attention to the stage, for which, at different periods of his life, he composed work which undoubtedly exercised a potent influence upon the dramatic music of the period. Of his first opera, Marco Aurelio, written for the carnival and produced at Munich in 1681, the only copy known to exist is a manuscript score preserved in the royal library at Buckingham Palace. It was followed by Solone in 1685, by Audacia e rispetto, prerogative d’amore and Servio Tullio in 1686, by Alarico in 1687, and by Niobe in 1688; but of these works no trace can now be discovered. Notwithstanding the favour shown to him by the elector Maximilian Emanuel, he accepted in 1688 the appointment of Kapellmeister at the court of Hanover, where he speedily improved an acquaintance dating from 1681 with Ernest Augustus, duke of Brunswick-Luneburg (afterwards elector of Hanover), winning also a pleasant footing with the duchess Sophia Charlotte (afterwards electress of Brandenburg), the philosopher Leibnitz, the Abbate Ortensio Mauro, and many men of letters and intelligence, and where, in 1710, he showed great kindness to Handel, who was then just entering upon his glorious career. He inaugurated a long series of triumphs in Hanover by composing, for the opening of the new opera house in 1689, an opera called Enrico il Leone, which was produced with extraordinary splendour and achieved an immense reputation. For the same theatre he composed La Lotta d’Ercole con Achilleo in 1689, La Superbia d’Alessandro in 1690, Orlando generoso in 1691, Le Rivali concordi in 1692, La Libertà contenta in 1693, I Trionfi del fato and I Baccanali in 1695, and Briseide in 1696. The libretto of Briseide is by Palmieri. Those of most if not all the others are by the Abbate Mauro. The scores are preserved at Buckingham Palace, where, in company with five volumes of songs and three of duets, they form part of the collection brought to England by the elector of Hanover in 1714. But it was not only as a musician that Steffani distinguished himself in his new home. The elevation of Ernest Augustus to the electorate in 1692 led to difficulties, for the arrangement of which it was necessary that an ambassador should visit the various German courts, armed with a considerable amount of diplomatic power. The accomplished abbate was sent on this delicate mission in 1696, with the title of envoy extraordinary, and he fulfilled his difficult task so well that Pope Innocent XL, in recognition of certain privileges he had secured for the Hanoverian Catholics, consecrated him bishop of Spiga in the Spanish West Indies.
