He took pleasure beyond all question in himself; in the strictest sense of the word he enjoyed himself.

But his conception of himself was never that of the intellectual.

He conceived himself rather as a sanguine and strenuous man, a great fighter.

"I was ever," as he says, "a fighter." His faults, a certain occasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are counted as virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men.

His virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a love of plain words and things are the virtues which are counted as vices among the aesthetic prigs who pay him the greatest honour.