GEORGE, was born at Steppney, in the county of Middlesex, in 1736. His father, who was a London merchant, and a director of the East India Company, placed his son at a school in Kingston-upon-Thames, where he had Gibbon, the future historian, as his companion. Steevens was subsequently placed on the foundation at Eton, and afterwards became a scholar of King's College, Cambridge, in 1754. His first publication was a four-volume edition of Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare, being the whole number printed in quarto during his lifetime, 1766. On the whole, this reprint was exceedingly faithful; and in several instances of doubtful meaning, the various readings of other editions of the great dramatist were added in the foot-notes. The reputation which Steevens gained by this edition of Shakespeare, for minute, accurate, verbal acquaintance with early English literature, brought him into contact with Johnson and his literary acquaintances, and led to his association with the great lexicographer in the edition of Shakespeare which appeared in 1773 with their joint names. In 1778 Malone had rendered some assistance to Johnson and Steevens in the second edition of the works of Shakespeare, and in 1780 he published by way of Supplement an edition of the doubtful plays and poems of the poet. For this act Steevens, who fancied his vanity was hurt in the most vital part, resolved to be avenged of Malone, and accordingly set to work with an open contempt for all the Malones and their plodding diligence, to give to the English public a new Shakespearian metre, purged alike of “useless and supernumerary syllables, and an occasional supply of such as might fortuitously have been omitted.” So great was his zeal in this new project which he had undertaken, that for eighteen months he went every morning before day-break from his house in Hampstead to his printers in London to correct the proof-sheets. This work was completed in 15 volumes in 1793. His experiment, strange to say, met with great success, and except Malone's edition of 1821, no popular issue of the works of Shakespear attempted anything different till that of Knight appeared in 1838. Steevens, whose ample means put him beyond the necessity of literary labour, published very little else beyond his editions of Shakespear. He assisted Nichols in his Biographical Anecdotes of Hogarth, and Isaac Reid in his Biographia Dramatica, and occasionally ventilated his acute and sarcastic mind in the pages of the St James's Chronicle and the Critical Review. In those journals he made the bitterest attacks on many literary characters to whom, when stripped of the guise of anonymity, he was all smiles, and bows, and courtesy. Whether or not this conduct can be freed from the charge of malignity, and be set down to the less guilty one of mere mischief, as Johnson asserted to Topham Beauclerk, it is at least certain, that if such doings could gratify his sense of power, the soul was a very mean one that could be touched by such base appliances. Among his numerous dirty tricks was his setting up Amner and Collins as literary scape-goats on whom he might father some of his more objectionable annotations, and ascribed a fierce attack on Capell to his less decided and more timid rival, Malone. Steevens died at Hampstead in 1800.