When he
competed for the prize of the Academy of Stockholm, it was to go to
the poor of Sweden. If nobody got anything from any one of these
enterprises, the fault at all events was not his. With his
extraordinary power of forgetting disappointments, he was prepared
at each successive failure to start afresh, as if each had been a
triumph. I shall have to delineate this peculiarity as strongly in
the last half as in the first half of his life, and it was certainly
an amiable one. He was ready at all times to set aside, out of his
own possessions, something for somebody who might please him for the
time; and when frailties of temper and tongue are noted, this other
eccentricity should not be omitted. He desired eagerly the love as
well as the good opinion of those whom for the time he esteemed, and
no one was more affectionate while under such influences. It is not
a small virtue to feel such genuine pleasure, as he always did in
giving and receiving pleasure. His generosity, too, was bestowed
chiefly on those who could make small acknowledgment in thanks and
no return in kind."
Some of his earlier contemporaries may have thought him a vain man.
Most assuredly he was not, in the common acceptation of the term.
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