Windsor as a cabinet
minister he was informed that a horse was at his disposal. "If her
Majesty wishes to see me ride," he said, "she must order out an
elephant." The only exercise in which he can be said to have excelled
was that of threading crowded streets with his eyes fixed upon a book.
He might be seen in such thoroughfares as Oxford Street, and Cheapside,
walking as fast as other people walked, and reading a great deal faster
than anybody else could read. As a pedestrian he was, indeed, above the
average. Till he had passed fifty he thought nothing of going on foot
from the Albany to Clapham, and from Clapham on to Greenwich; and, while
still in the prime of life, he was for ever on his feet indoors as well
as out. "In those days," says his cousin Mrs. Conybeare, "he walked
rapidly up and down a room as he talked. I remember on one occasion,
when he was making a call, he stopped short in his walk in the midst of
a declamation on some subject, and said, 'You have a brick floor here.'
The hostess confessed that it was true, though she hoped that it had
been disguised by double matting and a thick carpet. He said that his
habit of always walking enabled him to tell accurately the material he
was treading on."

His faults were such as give annoyance to those who dislike a man rather
than anxiety to those who love him. Vehemence, over-confidence, the
inability to recognise that there are two sides to a question or
two people in a dialogue, are defects which during youth are perhaps
inseparable from gifts like those with which he was endowed. Moultrie,
speaking of his undergraduate days, tells us that

"To him
There was no pain like silence--no constraint
So dull as unanimity. He breathed
An atmosphere of argument, nor shrank
From making, where he could not find, excuse
For controversial fight."

At Cambridge he would say of himself that, whenever anybody enunciated
a proposition, all possible answers to it rushed into his mind at once;
and it was said of him by others that he had no politics except the
opposite of those held by the person with whom he was talking. To that
charge, at any rate, he did not long continue liable. He left college a
staunch and vehement Whig, eager to maintain against all comers, and
at any moment, that none but Whig opinions had a leg to stand upon.
His cousin George Babington, a rising surgeon, with whom at one time
he lived in the closest int