|The quickness of his intellect.| The next striking peculiarity about the Prince was his extreme quickness—intellectually speaking. He was one of those men who seem always to have all their powers of thought at hand, and all their knowledge readily producible.
|His merits in conversa-tion.| In serious conversation he was perhaps the first man of his day. He was a very sincere person in his way of talking; so that, when he spoke at all upon any subject, he never played with it: he never took one side of a question because the person he was conversing with had taken the other: and, in fact, earnest discussion was one of his greatest enjoyments. He was very patient |His tolerance of contra-diction.| in bearing criticism and contradiction; and, indeed, rather liked to be opposed, so that from opposition he might elicit truth, which was always his first object.
|Fond of wit and humour.| He delighted in wit and humour; and, in his narration of what was ludicrous, threw just so much of imitation into it as would enable you to bring the scene vividly before you, without at the same time making his imitation in the least degree ungraceful.
|His love of freedom.| There have been few men who have had a greater love of freedom, in its deepest and in its widest sense, than the Prince Consort. Indeed, in this respect he was even more English than the English themselves.
|His sense of duty.| A strong characteristic of the Prince’s mind was its sense of duty. He was sure to go rigidly through anything he had undertaken to do; and he was one of those few men into whose minds questions of self-interest never enter, or are absolutely ignored, when the paramount obligation of duty is presented to them. If he had been a sovereign prince, and, in a moment of peril, had adopted a form of constitution which was opposed to his inclination or his judgment, he would still have abided by it strictly when quiet times came; and the change, if change there was to be, must have come from the other parties to the contract, and not from him. He was too great a man to wish to rule, if the power was to be purchased by anything having the reality, or even the semblance, of dishonour. It is not too much to say, that, if he had been placed in the position of Washington, he could have played the part of Washington, taking what honour and power his fellow-citizens were pleased to give him, and not asking, or scheming, for any more. He must have sympathized much with the late Duke of Wellington, whose main idea seemed to be to get through life justly and creditably, taking the full measure of responsibility put upon him, and not seeking to have his soul burdened with any more. Such men are absolutely of a different order of mind from the commonplace seekers after power and self-glorification.
The Prince, as all know, was a man of many pursuits and of various accomplishments, with an ardent admiration for the |The Prince gradually gave up some of his favourite pursuits.| beautiful both in Nature and in Art. Gradually, however, he gave up pursuits that he was fond of, such as the cultivation of music and drawing; not that he relished these pursuits less than heretofore, but that he felt it was incumbent upon him to attend more and more to business. He was not to employ himself upon what specially delighted him, but to attend to what it was his duty to attend to. And there was not time for both.