Character
Wolfe was renowned by his troops for being demanding on himself and on them. Although he was prone to illness, Wolfe was an active and restless figure. Amherst reported that Wolfe seemed to be everywhere at once. There was a story that when someone in the British Court branded the young Brigadier mad, King George II retorted, "Mad, is he? Then I hope he will bite some of my other generals." Some biographers, including Richard Garrett have suggested Wolfe may have been a repressed homosexual, although his behavioral patterns were fairly typical of the noblemen of the time. He was once reprimanded by his father for an incident involving a very handsome young lieutenant (around early 1750s), after which he seems to have abstained from sexual activity. In a letter to his mother in 1751 he admitted he would probably never marry, and stated that he believed people could easily live without marrying. A cultured man, in 1759 during the Seven Years War, before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham Wolfe is said to have recited Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard to his officers, adding: "Gentlemen, I would rather have written that poem than take Quebec tomorrow". After his death a miniature of Katherine Lowther, daughter of Robert Lowther (1681–1745), was given to Wolfe's mother and later returned to Katherine Lowther Duchess of Bolton.
Read more about this topic: James Wolfe
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“The man who pretends that the distribution of income in this country reflects the distribution of ability or character is an ignoramus. The man who says that it could by any possible political device be made to do so is an unpractical visionary. But the man who says that it ought to do so is something worse than an ignoramous and more disastrous than a visionary: he is, in the profoundest Scriptural sense of the word, a fool.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“An interesting play cannot in the nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personal importance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)