dence of the wealthy men of Montreal—especially of Lord Strathcona [q.v.] and of Sir William Macdonald (1831–1917), the head of the Canadian tobacco industry—and obtained from them buildings and endowments, especially for agriculture, applied science, and medicine. Faculties of law, medicine, commerce, education, and social service were added to the university; but Peterson's constant endeavours to strengthen the faculty of arts found less sympathy in a great commercial city.
As principal of McGill, Peterson continued his own classical studies and publications. In 1901 he discovered in the library of Holkham Hall a ninth-century manuscript (formerly belonging to Cluny) of Cicero's Speeches; and in 1907 he produced an edition of the Verrines, based upon this text. He also took an active part in educational work in Quebec, and throughout Canada and the United States, and was a very distinct personality among the university presidents of the continent. He was for some years chairman of the protestant committee of the council of public instruction in Quebec, and a most influential trustee, and for a time chairman, of the Carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching.
During the European War Peterson spoke and worked unceasingly, and on 12 January 1919, while presiding at a meeting on behalf of the dependents of dead or disabled Scottish soldiers and sailors, he was stricken with paralysis. In May he resigned, and returned to England, dying at Hampstead on 4 January 1921.
Peterson married in 1885 Lisa, eldest daughter of William Ross, shipowner, of Glenearn, Perthshire, and had two sons. He received honorary degrees from many universities, and in 1915 was created K.C.M.G. In politics he was an imperialist, and in his later years spoke and wrote much in favour of the continued and closer connexion between Canada and Great Britain. Though deeply devoted to McGill and to Canada, Peterson always remained half Scot, half cosmopolitan. He could show a salutary hauteur on occasion, and he did not suffer fools gladly, but he had also great personal charm and distinction.
[Cyrus MacMillan, McGill and its story, 1921; personal knowledge.]
PHILLIPS, STEPHEN (1864–1915), poet and dramatist, the eldest child of the Rev. Stephen Phillips, precentor of Peterborough Cathedral, was born at Summertown, near Oxford, 28 July 1864. From his mother, Agatha Sophia (Dockray), who was related to the Wordsworths, he inherited a feeling for poetry, and also a contemplative melancholy which is the keynote of his life and of his poems. From Trinity College School, Stratford-on-Avon, he passed, after six months at the King's School, Peterborough, into Oundle School (1878). In 1883 he was recommended for a minor scholarship in classics at Queens' College, Cambridge. But, formal difficulties precluding residence at Cambridge, he read for the civil service with a London coach, W. B. Scoones, one of whose staff, John Churton Collins [q.v.], helped him to discover that poetry had claims on him. In 1884 Orestes and Other Poems was privately printed. About 1885 he joined the theatrical company of his cousin, (Sir) Frank R. Benson. His only histrionic assets were a six-foot athletic figure, a gift for mimicry, and a genius for speaking verse. But he began to think of writing plays to restore poetic drama to the stage. Nothing came of a play which he submitted to Benson, and there is more of lyric mood than dramatic circumstance in his next two poems, To a Lost Love and A Dream (in Primavera, 1890). Eremus (1894), in theme and texture, anticipates Christ in Hades rather than the dramas.
Leaving the stage in 1892, Phillips lectured on history at an army tutor's, until the success of his Poems (1898) encouraged him to take to letters as a profession. Amongst the contents of this volume are The Apparition and Christ in Hades (both reprinted from a booklet of 1897), Marpessa, and The Wife, four poems, each in its own distinct and non-dramatic form, but all alike illustrating Phillips's gift for charging lyric or narrative matter with dramatic sense. The success of the volume, which was ‘crowned’ by The Academy journal, revived Phillips's ambition to write poetic drama; and for the next ten years this was his chief occupation. In the meantime his fame as a non-dramatic poet stood high, until his next collected volume, New Poems (1908), justified the few sceptics. Its Endymion has less, and its Quest of Edith none, of the dramatic sense which gave vitality to Marpessa; its lyrics are largely topical; and its best poems are those taken over from Orestes and Primavera.
Meanwhile, Phillips gained a stupendous reputation as a dramatic poet. Delays in the staging of his Paolo and Francesca,
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