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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 August 2013
By the death of Dr. Steele of Florence on the sixteenth day of July 1917, in the eighty-second year of his age, the British School of Archaeology in Rome has lost one of its earliest and most generous benefactors. It is therefore fitting that a grateful tribute to his memory should find a place among the Papers of the School.
James Peddie Steele was born at Dalkeith on 4 May, 1836. He was the son of the Rev. Peter Steele, for some time Rector of Dalkeith Grammar School. As a boy of fourteen he won a prize for an English poem on the Laocoon. At the University of Edinburgh, where he took the degree of B.A. in 1859, his earliest distinctions were won in the field of the Greek and Latin Classics, in which he found a never failing source of inspiration and recreation during a large part of his long life. He attended the lectures of John Stuart Blackie, who, on his election to the Chair of Greek in 1853, was permitted to appoint an assistant lecturer to relieve him in some of the duties of his professorship. About 1860 the appointment was held for a short time by Steele, who was also associated with the ‘Hellenic Society’ founded among the younger men by Blackie, who ‘held weekly meetings in the evening for reading through the Greek classics…for pure delight, and not for minute critical exercise.’ I am informed that Professor J. A. Stewart, of Oxford, who knew Dr. Steele, had as a boy heard William Veitch, one of the most accurate Greek scholars of Scotland, express a high opinion of his scholarship. Most of his energies were, however, devoted to preparation for his future profession, and, with this aim in view, he became an M.D. and an L.R.C.S. of Edinburgh in 1861.
page 1 note 1 Born 15 February, 1794; in the Rector's class of the Edinburgh High School until the death of Dr. Adam in 1809; teacher of a subscription school at Eccles, Berwickshire, ‘where he taught Greek, Latin and English,’ 1809–11; A.M. Edinburgh, 1818, in which year he produced in Edinburgh a revised and enlarged edition of Schrevelius, , Lexicon manuale gr. lat. et lat. gr., originally published at Leyden in 1661–70Google Scholar. He was familiar with Passow's Greek-German lexicon (ed. 1831) twelve years before the publication of the first edition of Liddell and Scott in 1843. As candidate for the Rectorship of Dalkeith Grammar School in 1826, he is described as ‘fully qualified to fill the chairs of Latin, Greek, or Hebrew in any of our Universities,’ and as already married (in 1825) to ‘a wife of pleasing manners.’ Her name was Eliza Peddie, the eldest daughter of James Peddie, architect (son of John Peddie, officer of excise, and Margaret Nicoll), born at Dundee 1776, died at Inverkeithing 1837. Some of these details I owe to one of Dr. Steele's friends in Florence, Mr. Walter Ashburner, who found them in a thin volume of certificates and testimonials among Dr. Steele's papers. We.thus have proof of the varied learning of his father, and the ‘pleasing manners’ of his mother, and of the fact that it was to his mother's father that he owed his first two names, James Peddie.
His mother died in December, 1866. Notices of his father (privately reprinted by Dr. Steele) from the Edinburgh Evening Courant, 5 April, and Daily Review, 6 April, 1871 (lent to me by one of his nieces, Miss M. M. Hutton), show that at the Disruption, in 1843, the Rev. Peter Steele joined the Free Church and, having been ejected from the Rectorship of the School, opened an Academy at Dalkeith. In 1848 he became classical teacher at the Moray House Training College, Edinburgh, where he made himself master of Anglo-Saxon and of Norman-French in 1855, and also lectured on English literature. He died on 3 April, 1871. Of his seven children, the four who then survived were Mrs. Pietrocola-Rossetti (Mrs. L. B. Cole) in Florence; Mrs. James Browning, in St. Andrews; Mrs. David Hutton, in Liverpool; and Dr. Steele.
page 2 note 1 J. S. Blackie, Notes of a Life, ed. A. Stodart Walker (1910), p. 137.
page 3 note 1 In 1874 his London address was 13 Charlotte Street, Buckingham Gate, S.W. It was not until 1880 that his Roman address (21 Via Condotti) actually appeared in the Medical Directory.
page 4 note 1 Information derived from Miss Elliott, now living at Clones, Co. Monaghan, Ulster.
page 4 note 2 Stoddart, Anna M., John Stuart Blackie, Edinburgh, ed. 1896, pp. 339—341Google Scholar.
page 6 note 1 P. 130 f. Lady Harriet Kavanagh died in July, 1885 (ib. p. 261 f.).
page 6 note 2 A few miles S.E. of Florence.
page 7 note 1 Among the large number of books presented by Dr. and Mrs. Steele was a copy of Littré' great edition of Hippocrates in ten volumes. Naturally it was not so much in demand as works closely connected with Roman archaeology. My informant, Mr. W. F. Smith, ‘ found it in solitary grandeur on the topmost shelf of a book-case,’ and was told, by way of consolation for the trouble he took to reach it in its almost inaccessible position, that Boni and he ‘were the only people who had ever consulted it.’ My own feeling is that this fact fully justifies the gift (J.E.S.).
page 8 note 1 The Lancet, 17 Dec., 1892, p. 1417, quoted in note to Orationes et Epistolae Cantabrigienses, No. 548.
page 8 note 2 The Lancet, 10 September, 1898, p. 723, quoted ibid. No. 296.
page 8 note 3 See also The Lancet for 7 September, 1912, p. 705 f. (on the honorary degrees of 19 July).
page 11 note 1 Cp., in general, my letter on ‘Dr. Steeie of Florence,’ in the Literary Supplementof The Times for 2 August, 1917, p. 369.
page 12 note 1 The introduction of the word ‘Dome’ is possibly due to the influence of a passage in Eustace, 's Classical Tour (iii, 28Google Scholar), but it is the view of Florence from Fiesole, and not that of Fiesole from Florence, which, is meant by Eustace in the words :—‘Above these rises the dome of the cathedral.’ The cathedral of Fiesole has a tall and slender tower but no ‘dome.’ Gray's own word is Aedes, which suggests ‘Fane’ rather than ‘Dome.’
page 13 note 1 Text on p. 24, ed. Michele Scherillo, Milan, 1914.
page 13 note 2 View facing p. 156 (1904).
page 13 note 3 The Fourth Generation, Reminiscences, 1912, pp. 287—9.
page 15 note 1 Information derived from Miss Elliott.
page 15 note 2 Memoir of the Rev. Peter Steele, p. 19.