He was a precocious, very serious little boy; he turned steadily into an astonishingly learned teenager, tall, well built, with long hair and an early, bright red beard that added to his grave and forbidding appearance. “Knowledge is power,” he declared on the flyleaf of his school exercise book, and added—for as well as having a working knowledge by the time he was fifteen of French, Italian, German, and Greek, he, like all educated children then, knew Latin—“Nihil est melius quam vita diligentissima” (Nothing is better than a most diligent life).
