PAPERS OF THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ROME.
Vol. IX. No. i.

JAMES PEDDIE STEELE.
(4 May, 1836—16 July, 1917.)
By Sir JOHN EDWIN SANDYS, Litt.D., F.B.A.
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 Archae-
ology 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.1 As a boy of fourteen he won a prize for an English poem on
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
manuals gr. lat. el lat. gr., originally published at Leyden in 1661—70. 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

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