“There were some people whom my father never understood, good, generous and high-minded as he was:  the fanatic with eyes turned to no known order of things filled him with electric impatience; he did not care for priests, poets or philosophers; anything like indecision, change of plans, want of order, method or punctuality, forgetfulness or carelessness—­even hesitation of voice and manner—­drove him mad; his temperament was like a fuse which a touch will explode, but the bomb did not kill, it hurt the uninitiated but it consumed its own sparks.  My papa had no self-control, no possibility of learning it:  it was an unknown science, like geometry or algebra, to him; and he had very little imagination.  It was this combination—­want of self-control and want of imagination—­which prevented him from being a thinker.

“He had great character, minute observation, a fine memory and all his instincts were charged with almost superhuman vitality, but no one could argue with him.  Had the foundation of his character been as unreasonable and unreliable as his temperament, he would have made neither friends nor money; but he was fundamentally sound, ultimately serene and high-minded in the truest sense of the word.  He was a man of intellect, but not an intellectual man; he did not really know anything about the great writers or thinkers, although he had read odds and ends.  He was essentially a man of action and a man of will; this is why I call him a man of intellect.  He made up his mind in a flash, partly from instinct and partly from will.

“He had the courage for life and the enterprise to spend his fortune on it.  He was kind and impulsively generous, but too hasty for disease to accost or death to delay.  For him they were interruptions, not abiding sorrows.

“He knew nothing of rancour, remorse, regret; they conveyed much the same to him as if he had been told to walk backwards and received neither sympathy nor courtesy from him.

“He was an artist with the gift of admiration.  He had a good eye and could not buy an ugly or even moderately beautiful thing; but he was no discoverer in art.  Here I will add to make myself clear that I am thinking of men like Frances Horner’s father, old Mr. Graham, [Footnote:  Lady Horner, of Mells, Frome.] who discovered and promoted Burne-Jones and Frederick Walker; or Lord Battersea, who was the first to patronise Cecil Lawson; or my sister, Lucy Graham Smith, who was a fine judge of every picture and recognised and appreciated all schools of painting.  My father’s judgment was warped by constantly comparing his own things with other people’s.