sedulously preserved." The libretto for Stanford was the last of the four that Sturgis wrote. He did not live to see the third of them staged. In 1899 he wrote a libretto for Alexander Mackenzie based on, and with the same title as, Dickens's story The Cricket on the Hearth. The text was published in 1901, and Mackenzie set it shortly afterwards. Accounts vary as to why it was not produced at the time. It may have been because the composer and the Carl Rosa Opera Company could not agree on terms, or because another adaptation by Karl Goldmark had been successfully presented too recently for another version to be viable. The piece did not reach the stage until ten years after Sturgis's death. It was given under the composer's baton by students of the Royal Academy of Music in 1914, with future stars of different operatic genres in the cast: Darrell Fancourt and Eva Turner. The critic from The Musical Times wrote of Sturgis's "skill and sympathy. ... He approached his task in the true Dickens spirit and made a good version of the story, strengthening it ... by lyrics of appropriate spirit and refinement." Death Sturgis died at his London house in Knightsbridge on 13 April 1904, aged 55, after a long illness. Sturgis was cremated at Woking Crematorium and his ashes were buried in Compton Cemetery, near his country house in Surrey. Henry James wrote to Sturgis's widow of her husband's "beautiful, noble, stainless memory, without the shadow upon him, or the shadow of a shadow, of a single grossness or meanness or ugliness – the world's dust on the nature of thousands of men. Everything that was high and charming in him comes out as one holds on to him, and when I think of my friendship of so many years with him I see it all as fairness and felicity." Notes and references Notes References Sources 1848 births 1904 deaths 19th-century American dramatists and playwrights 19th-century British dramatists and playwrights Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford American romantic fiction writers American soccer players Association footballers not categorized by position British opera librettists British romantic fiction writers FA Cup Final players Old Etonians F.C. players People associated with Gilbert and Sullivan People educated at Eton College Wanderers F.C. players Writers from Boston Sturgis family