from having his father’s tendency to abstract speculation, he was (as he says himself) rather “remarked in college for talking of what actually exists in nature or may be put to real practical use.”[971] Though the son had the best of this personal controversy, he would have done well to have responded to his father’s letters in the spirit in which they were written; in one instance at least, his father complains that Robert “drove him back into himself.” But this was rare. His father describes him as an admirable companion, sympathetic and generous, and making everybody easy and amused about him.[972] He was a favourite at home. When the family was removing from the Rookery at Dorking to the Cottage[973] at Albury in 1787, he was told: “You must find your way to us over bricks and tiles and meet with five in a bed and some of us under hedges, but everybody says they will make room for Robert.” It was Robert’s own warm heart that led him to give those years of leisure after the Tripos to studies very different from those of his first plan. Social problems were competing for his attention with scientific. In 1797 he took his Master’s degree. In the same year he got a fellowship at his college; wrote but, on his father’s advice, did not print the _Crisis_;[974] and took a curacy near Albury. If the _Crisis_ did nothing more, it showed how the attention of the man was fixing itself on the subjects that engrossed him during life, and how his character was changing from gay to grave. It is difficult for a reader of the later _Essay_ or the _Political Economy_ to conceive that the writer could ever have been very merry in heart or light in touch; and there is a still wider distance between the pugnacious Don Roberto, never long without a black eye, and the grave gentle host of Miss Martineau at the East India College. The change in style between his early writings and his later was due to a real change in character, produced by the concentration of his thoughts on the problem of poverty. The success of the first _Essay on Population_[975] fixed for him the work of his life. He was to set one neglected truth clearly before the world; and he devoted himself wholly to it, pushing his inquiries not only by study of authorities and facts at home,[976] but by his own[977] and his friends’[978] travels, and by conversation and correspondence with all that were likely to give him anything in conference.[979] He sacrificed to it, fortunately or unfortunately, his youthful buoyancy and freshness of style, though in speculation his opinions passed from pessimism to a moderate optimism, and he was never too old in spirit to unlearn a fault.