less.' And that was true. He was always
a great walker. He walked from Montrose, some thirteen or fourteen miles
off, in two hours and three quarters, and another time he does six miles
in seventy minutes. Nor does he ever walk with an unobserving mind. At
Lochnagar: 'Saw Highland women from Strathspey coming down for harvest
with heavy loads, some with babies, over these wild rough paths through
wind and storm. Ah, with what labour does a large portion of mankind
subsist, while we fare sumptuously every day!' This was the ready
susceptibility to humane impression in the common circumstance of life,
the eye stirring the emotions of the feeling heart, that nourished in
him the soul of true oratory, to say nothing of feeding the roots of
statesmanship. His bookmindedness is unabated. He began with a
resolution to work at least two hours every morning before breakfast,
and the resolution seems to have been manfully kept, without prejudice
to systematic reading for a good many hours of the day besides. For the
first time, rather strange to say, he read St. Augustine's
_Confessions_, and with the delight that might have been expected. He
finds in that famous composition 'a good deal of prolix and fanciful,
though acute speculation, but the practical parts of the book have a
wonderful force, and inimitable sweetness and simplicity.' In other
departments of religion, he read Archbishop Leighton's life and Hannah
More's, Arnold's Sermons and Milner's _Church History_ and Whewells
_Bridgewater Treatise_. Once more he analyses the _Novum Organum_ and
the _Advancement of Learning_, and he reads or re-reads Locke's _Essay_.
He studies political science in the two great manuals of the old world
and the new, in the _Politics_ of Aristotle and the _Prince_ of
Machiavelli. He goes through three or four plays of Schiller; also
Manzoni, and Petrarch, and Dante at the patient rate of a couple of
cantos a day; then Boccaccio, from whom, after a half-dozen of the days,
he willingly parts company, only interested in him as showing a strange
state of manners and how religion can be dissociated from conduct. In
modern politics he reads the memoirs of Chatham, and Brougham on
Colonial Policy, of which he says that 'eccentricity, paradox, fast and
loose reasoning and (much more) sentiment, appear to have entered most
deeply into the essence of this remarkable man when he wrote his
Colonial Policy, as now; with the rarest power of _expressing_ his