Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Life of Sir George Grey: Governor, High commissioner, and Premier. An Historical Biography.

His Sympathies

His Sympathies.

His sensitiveness to the changing humours of the populace may have sprung out of the keenness of his sympathies. The sight of injustice or oppression roused him almost to madness. Distress in every shape excited his compassion. There may have been some affectation in carrying medicines to a sick man at ten o'clock at night, but there was none in walking a long distance day after day to visit an invalid, at a time when his bodily strength was failing and he looked frail indeed, though the iron will of old remained indomitable. His generosity did not, as a rule, take a commonplace form, save when, as in the Queensland floods of 1890, the object appealed to his imagination. But, like Bessarion and other celibates, he had a costly passion for founding great libraries, and the philological library that he presented to the Cape places him of right, in the opinion of Max Müller, by the side of Sir Thomas Bodley.