however. Honours and death As an important public figure, Reitz was honoured and remembered in different ways. In 1923, Reitz the University of Stellenbosch bestowed on him an honorary doctorate in law for his public services. Already in 1889, a village was named after him in the Orange Free State. In 1894 one also named a village after his second wife, Cornelia. A ship named after him, the President Reitz, sank off Port Elizabeth in 1947. The Jubilee Diamond, found in the Free State village of Jagersfontein in 1895 was originally named the Reitz Diamond, but renamed in honour of the sixtieth anniversary of the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1897. When he finally retired from public life, Reitz moved to Gordon's Bay, but returned to Cape Town several years later, where he had a house in Tamboerskloof and was taken care of by his daughter Bessie, a medical doctor. He remained active to the end with writing and translating. Reitz died at his house Botuin on 27 March 1934, and received a state funeral three days later, with a funeral service at the Grote Kerk. He was buried at the Woltemade cemetery at Maitland. Cultural figure Reitz was an important figure in Afrikaner cultural life. He was a poet and published many poems in Afrikaans, which made him a progenitor of the development of Afrikaans as a cultural language. As such he sympathised with the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners (Society of Real Afrikaners), established in the Cape Colony in 1875. Although he never became a member himself, he was an active contributor to the society's journal, Die Suid-Afrikaansche Patriot. With his literary work, Reitz was solidly anchored in the so-called First Afrikaans Language Movement, although he was less interested in the didactic drive of that movement than in writing in Afrikaans as a purely cultural activity. Much of his work was based on English texts, which he translated, edited, and adapted. In the process he produced completely new works of art. For Reitz, Afrikaans was predominantly a language of culture, not of government, where he propagated the use of the official language of the Boer republics, Dutch. During his presidency of the Orange Free State, where the use of English was significant among the burghers, he strongly promoted the use of Dutch, against politicians like John G. Fraser and others who were in favour of English. Institutionally, Reitz promoted