acter, integrity, insight. A man of much weight. But he saw there
was much to be learned and observed about life, and his instinct was to
go slow, and quietly study its problems. "Instead," you say, "of
immediately solving them like other young men!" But instead, too,--for
such was his instinct--of _handling_ the problems. He wished to know
more and feel wiser before he dealt with them. He had the preparatory
attitude.

The trouble with the preparatory attitude is there's no end to it. There
is so much to learn in this world that it won't do to wait. If you wait
to fit yourself before acting, you never will act. You will somehow lose
the habit of acting. Study too conscientiously the one hundred best
books on swimming, and of course you'll learn a great deal about it, but
you never will swim.

This was Grandfather's type. If he had been kicked out alone into the
world and found every one fighting him, and if he had had to fight back,
and fight hard, from his boyhood, it would have taught him the one thing
he needed--more force for his powers.

As it was, he remained in the Admiralty. Studying life.

[Illustration: The Preparatory Attitude]

Grandfather was thirty-seven years old when Great-grandfather died. He
(Grandfather) had been writing for the magazines for quite a long
time,--he was only twenty-six when the Quarterly Review editors began to
speak highly of him.

He now bought the London Athenaeum, which, though just born, was dying.
Under Grandfather's editorship it became an important authority. It was
known all over the world soon. But Grandfather wasn't. He never signed
one of his articles, not even pseudonymously. And during the sixteen
years in which he had control of the paper, this remarkable man withdrew
altogether from general society, in order, he said, to avoid making
literary acquaintances which might either prove annoying to him, or be
supposed to compromise the integrity of his journal.

That rings hollow, that reason. He doubtless thought it true; but it
wasn't. He withdrew from society, probably, because he liked
withdrawing. With the gifts of a great man he didn't have a great man's
robustness. Some kink in him held him back, and kept him from jousting
and tournaments. He should have been psychoanalyzed. It may have been
such a small kink.

I doubt if he ever would have married, but it happened quite young. He
was under nineteen, and the pretty girl he married still younger. Maybe
she ma