 Engels's interests included poetry, fox hunting, and hosting regular Sunday parties for London's left-wing intelligentsia where, as one regular put it, "no one left before two or three in the morning".His stated personal motto was "take it easy", while "jollity" was listed as his favourite virtue.Of Engels’ personality and appearance, Robert Heilbroner in The Worldly Philosophers described him as "tall and fair and rather elegant, he had the figure of a man who liked to fence and to ride to hounds and who had once swum the Weser River four times without a break."