He who can be penitent has ever something lofty in his original nature; but Tostig was remorseless as the tiger, as treacherous and as fierce.

With less intellectual capacities than any of his brothers, he had more personal ambition than all put together.

A kind of effeminate vanity, not uncommon with daring natures (for the bravest races and the bravest soldiers are usually the vainest; the desire to shine is as visible in the fop as in the hero), made him restless both for command and notoriety.

"May I ever be in the mouths of men," was his favourite prayer.

Like his maternal ancestry, the Danes, he curled his long hair, and went as a bridegroom to the feast of the ravens.
Two only of that house had studied the Humane Letters, which were no longer disregarded by the princes of the Continent; they were the sweet sister, the eldest of the family, fading fast in her loveless home, and Harold.
But Harold's mind,--in which what we call common sense was carried to genius,--a mind singularly practical and sagacious, like his father's, cared little for theological learning and priestly legend--for all that poesy of religion in which the Woman was wafted from the sorrows of earth.
Godwin himself was no favourite of the Church, and had seen too much of the abuses of the Saxon priesthood, (perhaps, with few exceptions, the most corrupt and illiterate in all Europe, which is saying much,) to instil into his children that reverence for the spiritual authority which existed abroad; and the enlightenment, which in him was experience in life, was in Harold, betimes, the result of study and reflection.