A beautiful tolerance of the various actions of all other people is perhaps the most comprehensive statement of the virtue we admired in him so zealously. An ingenuously boastful boy of twelve would find in him a ready admirer of his most cherished deeds, and he appeared to really appreciate the condescension of the youth of eighteen who saw fit to confide in him, and to take their opinionated selves with decent ceremony where others among their elders would have been merely annoyed or else distressingly amused. People you had always regarded as obviously undesirable, you found him praising--not in the manner of one who champions the weaker side on principle, but because he actually found strange things to like about them. But he was not one of the quiet, gentle, charitable type whose humanity seems the result almost of a want of character, and as such a questionable asset: he relished things with the eager tastes of a performer rather than an onlooker, being blessed also with a watchful and sometimes bursting sense of humor which was as his religion, making him deal with events in the guise of a priestly buffoon and people with a surgery as incisive as it was good-natured. He was a connoisseur of people--a connoisseur of the happier type who does not simply make a few things his own and damn the unfortunate rest, but who finds that all food for the soul is good food, after all. Thus he used to pick up all sorts of people and become tremendously fond of them overnight. Any genuine person--whether a self-centered young man or a despicable old one, or his gardener’s wife--was of the greatest importance in his eyes. A trace of sentiment or pomposity in one of the subjects of his observations was to him an intellectual emetic as regards that person, but practically all other forms of human failing delighted him quite as much, if not more than the most inspiring strength. You felt that he, for one, had attained to a perfect freedom from himself, so that he could sit back, unlike the rest of us, and be entertained by the diverse abnormalities of his companions: that he found his own passions wholly in the understanding perusal of those of other people.