military and naval problems was dictated by the consideration of the best
means under existing conditions to obtain that end for England.

Yet to imagine that his life was all work would be to wrong the balance of
his nature. He turned from letters and papers to his fencing bout, his
morning gallop, or his morning scull on the river, with equal enthusiasm,
and his great resonant boyish laugh sounded across the reach at Dockett or
echoed through the house after a successful "touch." His keenness for
athletic exercises, dating from his early Cambridge days, lasted, as his
work did, to the end. In spite of the warnings of an overtaxed heart, he
sculled each morning of the last summer at Dockett, and in Paris he handed
over his foils to his fencing-school only a month before his death,
leaving, like Mr. Valiant-for-Truth before he crossed the river, his arms
to those who could wield them. It was well for him; he could not have
borne long years of failing strength and ebbing mental energy. Anything
less than life at its full was death to him.

Released from work, he was intensely gay, and his tastes were sufficiently
simple for him to find enjoyment everywhere. He loved all beautiful
things, and, though he had seen everything, the gleam of the sinking sun
through the pine aisles at his Pyrford cottage would hold him spellbound;
and in summer he would spend hours trying to distinguish the bird notes,
naming the river flora, or watching the creature life upon the river
banks. So in the Forest of Dean, that constituency which he loved well and
which well deserved his love, his greatest pleasure was to set himself as
guide to all its pleasant places, rehearsing the name of each blue hill on
the far horizon, tracing the windings and meeting of the rivers, loving
all best, I think, when the ground was like a sea of bluebells and
anemones in the early year. He watched eagerly each season for the first
signs of spring, and when he was very ill he told me that it must ever be