 leaning toward everything intellectual.
He loved books, never going to sea without a newly replenished library, compact
but of the best. The isolated leisure, in some cases so wearisome, falling at
intervals to commanders even during a war-cruise, never was tedious to Captain
Vere. With nothing of that literary taste which less heeds the thing conveyed
than the vehicle, his bias was toward those books to which every serious mind of
superior order occupying any active post of authority in the world, naturally
inclines; books treating of actual men and events, no matter of what era -
history, biography, and unconventional writers who, free from cant and
convention, like Montaigne, honestly, and in the spirit of common sense,
philosophise upon realities.
    In this love of reading he found confirmation of his own more reserved
thoughts - confirmation which he had vainly sought in social converse, so that
as touching most fundamental topics, there had got to be established in him some
positive convictions which he felt would abide in him essentially unmodified so
long as his intelligent part remained unimpaired. In view of the humbled period
in which his lot was cast, this was well for him. His settled convictions were
as a dyke against those invading waters of novel opinion, social, political, and
otherwise, which carried away as in a torrent no few minds in those days, minds
by nature not inferior to his own. While other members of that aristocracy to
which by birth he belonged were incensed at the innovators mainly because their
theories were inimical to the privileged classes, Captain Vere disinterestedly
opposed them not alone because they seemed to him incapable of embodiment in
lasting institutions, but at war with the world and the peace of mankind.
    With minds less stored than his and less earnest, some officers of his rank,
with whom at times he would necessarily consort, found him lacking in the
companionable quality, a dry and bookish gentleman as they deemed. Upon any
chance withdrawal from their company one would be apt to say to another
something like this! »Vere is a noble fellow, Starry Vere. 'Spite the Gazettes
Sir Horatio is at bottom scarce a better seaman or fighter. But between you and
me now, don't you think there is a queer streak of the pedantic running through
him? Yes, like the King's yarn in a coil of navy-rope.«
    Some apparent ground there was for this sort of confidential criticism,
since not only did the captain's discourse never fall into the jocosely
familiar, but in illustrating any point touching the stirring personages and
events of the time, he
