He had his father's stature and strength of limb, but some of his mother's qualities had also been inherited by him.

In manner he was neither so austere and taciturn as his father, nor so gentle and amiable as his mother.

He was by no means a scholar, and only the strong hand of his father had kept him as a boy in fear of the penalties incurred by the truant.

Courage and resolution were his distinguishing characteristics.
On one occasion, when rambling over the fells with a company of schoolfellows, a poor blind lamb ran bleating past them, a black cloud of ravens, crows, and owl-eagles flying about it.

The merciless birds had fallen upon the innocent creature as it lay sleeping under the shadow of a tree, had picked at its eyes and fed on them, and now, as the blood trickled in red beads down its nose, they croaked and cried and screamed to drive it to the edge of a precipice and then over to its death in the gulf beneath, there to feast on its carcass.