Annual Report.] 212 [May 1, 



steady work, but escaped in an irregular and fitful way, in 

 self-appointed tasks, shrewdly planned and admirably exe- 

 cuted, so far as they were executed at all, but undertaken, 

 avoided, or drojjped rather as whim or chance might dictate, 

 than of any settled purpose. 



Ill-health had, no doubt, much to do with this. But the 

 waste of force was aggravated by something deeper than 

 mere bodily disturbances. His insufficiently balanced en- 

 ergy made him hard to please with any attainable results of 

 his own or others, not from censoriousness, for there was not 

 a grain of malice or sourness in him, but with the necessary 

 effect, often, to leave him to take ujj with something inferior 

 merely as less inviting attack. 



He dearly loved thoroughness, and insisted \ipon it in all 

 that he did or directed, and in himself or in others could 

 more easily tolerate omission than slack performance. His 

 acute logical intellect took nothing for granted and received 

 nothing upon hearsay or second-hand assurance. This love 

 of exactness, however, was no love of quiddling, but he 

 looked always to substantial, and readily seized the point of 

 real importance. Hence it was, no doubt, that with all his 

 tenacity of purpose he always gained and kept the respect 

 and attachment of those with whom he had to do, for they 

 felt that it had in it nothing of fussiness or self-importance, 

 but came only from an uncompromising adherence to a really 

 elevated standard. He was true as steel, through and 

 through genuine, and with far more kindliness and far wider 

 comprehensiveness and sympathy than he ever liked to 

 show. 



In his dealings with others, his intellectual honesty and 

 clearness of sight, his horror of fallacies and conventionali- 

 ties, together with his recklessness of appearances and of 

 consequences made him impatient of any suspension of judg- 

 ment, and needlessly intolerant of those buffers of sentiment 

 which between most peoj^le ease off the shocks that human 

 infirmities render inevitable. He must go straight to the 

 end that happened at the moment to be before him, and the 

 consequence was a certain want of poise and of breadth of 

 view. Upon these obstructions he wasted too much of his 



