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He read for the pleasure of knowing what he did not know
before; his mind was unusually receptive because, he said, he respected
the laws which governed his body. Facts were his prey. He threw himself
into them with a kind of piratical ardour; took them by the throat,
wallowed in them, worried them like a terrier, and finally assimilated
them. They gave him food for what he liked best on earth:
"disinterested thought." They "formed a rich loam." He had an
encyclopaeic turn of mind; his head, as somebody once remarked, was a
lumber-room of useless information. He could tell you how many public
baths exited in Geneva in pre-Reformation days, what was the colour of
Mehemet Ali's whiskers, why the manuscript of Virgil's friend Gallius
had not been handed down to posterity, and in what year, and what
month, the decimal system was introduced into Finland. Such aimless
incursions into knowledge were a puzzle to his friends, but not to
himself. They helped him to build up a harmonious scheme of life--to
round himself off.


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