em, for his boyhood reading of romances had
evidently fired him with the conceits of the past chivalric period. This
imported into his conduct something inflated and something elevated.
And, besides, with all his enormous conceit, he had a stratum of
practical good sense, a shrewd wit, and the salt of humor.

If Shakespeare had known him, as he might have done, he would have had
a character ready to his hand that would have added one of the most
amusing and interesting portraits to his gallery. He faintly suggests
a moral Falstaff, if we can imagine a Falstaff without vices. As a
narrator he has the swagger of a Captain Dalghetty, but his actions
are marked by honesty and sincerity. He appears to have had none of the
small vices of the gallants of his time. His chivalric attitude toward
certain ladies who appear in his adventures, must have been sufficiently
amusing to his associates. There is about his virtue a certain antique
flavor which must have seemed strange to the adventurers and court
hangers-on in London. Not improbably his assumptions were offensive
to the ungodly, and his ingenuous boastings made him the object of
amusement to the skeptics. Their ridicule would naturally appear to him
to arise from envy. We read between the lines of his own eulogies of
himself, that there was a widespread skepticism about his greatness and
his achievements, which he attributed to jealousy. Perhaps his obtrusive
virtues made him enemies, and his rectitude was a standing offense to
his associates.

It is certain he got on well with scarcely anybody with whom he was
thrown in his enterprises. He was of common origin, and always carried
with him the need of assertion in an insecure position. He appears to us
always self-conscious and ill at ease with gentlemen born. The captains
of his own station resented his assumptions of superiority, and while
he did not try to win them by an affectation of comradeship, he probably
repelled those of better breeding by a swaggering manner. No doubt his
want of advancement was partly due to want of influence, which better
birth would have given him; but the plain truth is that he had a talent
for making himself disagreeable to his associates. Unfortunately he
never engaged in any enterprise with any one on earth who was so capable
of conducting it as himself, and this fact he always made plain to his
comrades. Skill he had in managing savages, but with his equals among
whites he lacked tact,