When he did get an urge to do something, he could apply himself to it with energy. ‘I stand up well32 under hard work; but I do so only if I go to it of my own will, and as much as my desire leads me to it.’ He hated exerting himself doing things that bored him. In eighteen years of running the estate, he wrote, he had never managed to study a title deed or scrutinise a contract properly. He was a mass of inabilities and reluctances:
