Life of Sir George Grey: Governor, High commissioner, and Premier. An Historical Biography.
His Culture
His Culture.
Like many imaginative men, he was not deep in reflection or formidable in argument. His culture was tinged with dilletantism. He had the taste for Italian poetry more characteristic of his generation than of ours. He had learnt German at Sandhurst, and been intoxicated with Schiller, like German students of a bygone time, but with neither that nor any other literature was his acquaintance extensive or exact. In earlier years he must have read or rather gleaned abundantly, but in later years he read practically nothing. Proud of his long-sightedness, he must have made a vow, like Swift, that he would never use spectacles, and though he so far condescended to infirmity as to use a magnifying glass, on most occasions he depended on his unarmed eyes, and they increasingly ceased to serve him. More and more, he was therefore, like Swift and Herbert Spencer, thrown back on his own thoughts, and he was often thus, like them, plunged into hypochondria.
His knowledge of men was wide and deep, yet in one instance a conspiracy that for ever excluded him from political office was matured under his unperceiving eyes. It is not that, like Wallenstein, in a similar case, he was too magnanimous to be suspicious. The experience of a long life had made him all eyes to his fellows' treachery; but, for once, he was misled by his belief in one who played him false. Either he did not always accurately measure the men he had to cope with and the environment he was placed in, or else he was blinded by passion. His conversation was witty, genial, discursive, interminable: he talked on for ever, and you wished him to talk on for ever. It was literary, political, egotistical; a score of times over he must have talked his auto-biography right through. On rare occasions it would blaze out into wild revolutionary schemes that might have emanated from Bedlam.