Picture the man. Tall, gaunt, with sharp intellectual features, and
eyes of singular beauty, the face of an enthusiast--under given
circumstances, of a hero. Poorly clad, of course, but with rigorous
self-respect; his boots polished, ~propria manu~, to the point of
perfection; his linen washed and ironed by the indefatigable wife.
Of simplest tastes, of most frugal habits, a few books the only
luxury which he deemed indispensable; yet a most difficult man to
live with, for to him applied precisely the description which Robert
Burns gave of his own father; he was 'of stubborn, ungainly
integrity and headlong irascibility'.

Ungainly, for his strong impulses towards culture were powerless to
obliterate the traces of his rude origin. Born in a London alley,
the son of a labourer burdened with a large family, he had made his
way by sheer force of character to a position which would have
seemed proud success but for the difficulty with which he kept
himself alive. His parents were dead. Of his brothers, two had
disappeared in the abyss, and one, Andrew, earned a hard livelihood
as a journeyman baker; the elder of his sisters had married poorly,
and the younger was his blind pensioner. Nicholas had found a wife
of better birth than his own, a young woman with country kindred in
decent circumstances, though she herself served as nursemaid in the
house of the medical man who employed her future husband. He had
taught himself the English language, so far as grammar went, but
could not cast off the London accent; Mrs. Peak was fortunate enough
to speak with nothing worse than the note of the Midlands.

His bent led him to the study of history, politics, economics, and
in that time of military outbreak he was frenzied by the conflict of