Part 7

“I had not been long in the room, however, when I heard Mr. J---- announced, and as I had not seen him for some time, resolved to stay, and if possible, enjoy a little of his conversation in some corner.... I have seldom seen a man more nice in his exterior than Mr. J---- now seemed to be. His little person looked very neat in the way he had now adorned it. He had a very well-cut blue coat,--evidently not after the design of any Edinburgh artist,--light kerseymere breeches and ribbed silk stockings, a pair of elegant buckles, white kid gloves, and a tricolour watch-ribbon. He held his hat under his arm in a very _dégagée_ manner--and altogether he was certainly one of the last men in the assembly, whom a stranger would have guessed to be either a great lawyer or a great reviewer. In short, he was more of a dandy than any great author I ever saw--always excepting Tom Moore and David Williams.”

[Sidenote: _New Monthly Magazine_, 1831.]

“He is of low stature, but his figure is elegant and well proportioned. The face is rather elongated, the chin deficient, the mouth well formed, with a mingled expression of determination, sentiment, and arch mockery; the nose is slightly curved; the eye is the most peculiar feature of the countenance; it is large and sparkling. He has two tones in his voice--the one harsh and grating, the other rich and clear.”--1831.

DOUGLAS JERROLD

1803-1857

[Sidenote: Hodder’s _Personal Reminiscences_.]

“To my great delight, ... I had not been in the room many minutes before I was introduced to Douglas Jerrold, who was flitting about with that peculiar restlessness of eye, speech, and demeanour, which was amongst his most marked characteristics. I confess I was not surprised to find him a man of small stature, as I had heard before that his proportions were rather those of Tydeus than of Alcides; but I was a little astonished when I saw in the author of _Black-eyed Susan_, _The Rent Day_, and _The Wedding Gown_, (all of which pieces and many others he had then produced), an amount of boyish gaiety and a rapidity of movement which one could hardly expect from a writer who had risen to high rank as a moralist and censor.”

[Sidenote: W. B. Jerrold’s _Life of Douglas Jerrold_.]

“He had none of the airs of success or reputation, none of the affectations, either personal or social, which are rife everywhere. He was manly and natural; free and off-handed to the verge of eccentricity. Independence and marked character seemed to breathe from the little, rather bowed figure, crowned with a lion-like head and falling light hair--to glow in the keen, eager, blue eyes glancing on either side as he walked along. Nothing could be less commonplace, nothing less conventional, than his appearance in a room or in the streets.”

[Sidenote: S. C. Hall’s _Memories of Great Men_.]

“He was a very short man, but with breadth enough, and a back excessively bent--bowed almost to deformity; very gray hair, and a face and expression of remarkable briskness and intelligence. His profile came out pretty boldly, and his eyes had the prominence that indicates, I believe, volubility of speech; nor did he fail to talk from the instant of his appearance; and in the tone of his voice, and in his glance, and in the whole man, there was something racy--a flavour of the humourist. His step was that of an aged man, and he put his stick down very decidedly at every foot-fall; though, as he afterwards told me, he was only fifty-two, he need not yet have been infirm.”--1856.

SAMUEL JOHNSON

1709-1784

[Sidenote: Boswell’s _Life of Dr. Johnson_.]

“Miss Porter told me, that when he was first introduced to her mother, his appearance was very forbidding; he was then lean and lank, so that his immense structure of bones was hideously striking to the eye, and the scars of the scrofula were deeply visible. He also wore his hair, which was straight and stiff, and separated behind; and he often had, seemingly, convulsive starts and odd gesticulations, which tended to excite at once surprise and ridicule. Mrs. Porter was so much engaged by his conversation that she overlooked all these external disadvantages, and said to her daughter, ‘This is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life.’”--1731.

[Sidenote: Boswell’s _Life of Dr. Johnson_.]

“His chambers were on the first floor of No. 1 Inner Temple Lane.... He received me very courteously; but it must be confessed that his apartment and furniture and morning dress was sufficiently uncouth. His brown suit of clothes looked very rusty; he had on a little old shrivelled unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head; his shirt neck and knees of his breeches were loose, his black worsted stockings ill drawn up, and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers. But all these slovenly peculiarities were forgotten the moment he began to talk.”--1763.

[Sidenote: Croker’s _Johnsoniana_.]

“The day after I wrote my last letter to you I was introduced to Mr. Johnson by a friend. We passed through three very dirty rooms to a little one that looked like an old counting-house, where this great man was sat at breakfast.... I was very much struck with Mr. Johnson’s appearance, and could hardly help thinking him a madman for some time, as he sat waving over his breakfast like a lunatic. He is a very large man, and was dressed in a dirty brown coat and waistcoat, with breeches that were brown also (although they had been crimson), and an old black wig; his shirt collar and sleeves were unbuttoned; his stockings were down about his feet, which had on them, by way of slippers, an old pair of shoes.... We had been with him some time before he began to talk, but at length he began, and, faith, to some purpose; everything he says is as _correct_ as a _second edition_; ’tis almost impossible to argue with him, he is so sententious and so knowing.”--1764.

BEN JONSON

1574-1637

[Sidenote: Aubrey’s _Lives of Eminent Persons_. *]

“He was (or rather had been) of a clear and faire skin, his habit was very plaine. I have heard Mr. Lacy, the player, say that he was wont to weare a coate like a coach-man’s coate with slitts under the arme-pitts. He would many times exceed in drinke. Canarie was his beloved liquer.... Ben Jonson had one eie lower than t’other and bigger, like Clun, the player.”

[Sidenote: Anderson’s _Poets of Great Britain_. *]

“The character of Jonson, like that of most celebrated wits, has been drawn with great diversity of lights and shades, according as affection or envy guided the pencil. His person, as he has himself told us, was corpulent and large. His disposition seems to have been reserved and saturnine, and sometimes not a little oppressed with the gloom of a splenetic imagination.... Stern and rigid as his virtue was, he was easy and social in the convivial meetings of his friends; and the laws of his _Symposia_, inscribed over the chimney of the Apollo, a room in the Devil Tavern, near Temple Bar, where he kept his club, show that he was neither averse to the pleasures of conversation, nor ignorant of what would render it agreeable and improving.”

[Sidenote: Lafond, _Notice sur Ben Jonson_. *]

“Il est clair pour nous que Ben Jonson avait une nature violente dans un corps robuste et athlétique; son portrait nous le montre avec une énorme face, une vigoureuse mâchoire, des yeux profonds et durs, un cou de taureau. Sa peau avait été, de bonne heure, couturée par le scorbut; et lui-même dit quelque part qu’il eut, dans le milieu de sa vie, une montagne pour ventre et un dandinement disgracieux pour démarche. Tous ses traits fortement accentués, anguleux ou carrés, dénoncent l’énergie, l’orgueil et l’amour des luttes de toute nature. Il aimait la bonne chère et le vin; sa prédilection pour le vin des Canaries avait, disait il, pour excuse la nécessité de sa constitution scorbutique. Il avait l’esprit semblable au corps; malgré ses études classiques, il était loin d’être un Athénien, c’était un Anglo-Saxon enté sur un Romain de la décadence. Généreux, libéral, prodigue, il tint toujours table ouverte, même lorsque la misère était devenue l’hôte de son foyer.”

JOHN KEATS

1795-1821

[Sidenote: Bryan Procter’s _Recollections of Men of Letters_.]

“I was first introduced to him (Keats), by Leigh Hunt, and found him very pleasant, and free from all affectation in manner and opinion. Indeed it would be difficult to discover a man with a more bright and open countenance.... I can only say that I never encountered a more manly and simple young man. In person he was short, and had eyes large and wonderfully luminous, and a resolute bearing, not defiant but well sustained.”

[Sidenote: Monckton Milnes’s _Life of Keats_.]

“His eyes were large and blue, his hair auburn, he wore it divided down the centre, and it fell in rich masses on each side his face, his mouth was full, and less intellectual than his other features. His countenance lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness,--it had an expression as if he had been looking on some glorious sight. The shape of his face had not the squareness of a man’s, but more like some women’s faces I have seen--it was so wide over the forehead, and so small at the chin. He seemed in perfect health, and with life offering all things that were precious to him.”--1818.

[Sidenote: The Cowden Clarkes’ _Recollections of Writers_.]

_In reviewing this portrait, Mrs. Cowden Clarke, while admitting that much of it is_ “excellent” _and_ “true,” _goes on to add these words_: “But when our artist pronounces that ‘his eyes were large and _blue_,’ and that ‘his hair was _auburn_,’ I am naturally reminded of the ‘Chameleon’ fable--‘they were _brown_, ma’am--_brown_, I assure you!’... Reader, alter, in your copy of the _Life of Keats_, vol. i. page 103, ‘eyes’ light hazel, ‘hair’ _lightish brown and wavy_.”

[Sidenote: Leigh Hunt’s _Autobiography_.]

“Keats, when he died, had just completed his four and twentieth year. He was under the middle height, and his lower limbs were small in comparison with the upper, but neat and well-turned. His shoulders were very broad for his size; he had a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed up; an eager power, checked and made patient by ill-health. Every feature was at once strongly cut, and delicately alive. If there was any faulty expression, it was in the mouth, which was not without something of a character of pugnacity. His face was rather long than otherwise; the upper lip projected a little over the under; the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the eyes are mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a noble action, or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled. In this there was ill-health as well as imagination, for he did not like these betrayals of emotion; and he had great personal as well as moral courage. He once chastised a butcher, who had been insolent, by a regular stand-up fight. His hair, of a brown colour, was fine, and hung in natural ringlets. The head was a puzzle for the phrenologists, being remarkably small in the skull--a singularity which he had in common with Byron and Shelley, whose hats I could not get on. Keats was sensible of the disproportion above noticed between his upper and lower extremities, and he would look at his hand, which was faded, and swollen in the veins, and say it was the hand of a man of fifty.”--1826.

JOHN KEBLE

1792-1866

[Sidenote: J. Coleridge’s _Memoir of the Rev. John Keble_.]

“To me both the portraits are full of deep interest” (_these portraits of Keble, the one in the prime of manhood and the other in old age, were drawn by Richmond_), “the earlier and the later both--each brings him back to me as he was; in the earlier, he has some of the merry defiance he could assume in argument; in the latter, I see the sad tenderness of his advanced years. Keble had not regular features; he could not be called a handsome man, but he was one to be noticed anywhere, and remembered long; his forehead and hair beautiful in all ages; his eyes, full of play, intelligence, and emotion, followed you while you spoke; and they lighted up, especially with pleasure, or indignation, as it might be, when he answered you. The most pleasing photograph is one in which he is standing by Mrs. Keble’s side; she is sitting with a book in her hand. The later photographs are to me very unpleasant. I will attempt no more particular description, for I feel how little definite I can convey in writing.”

[Sidenote: _The Christian Observer_, 1871.]

“Mr. Keble greeted us, emerging from his little study, the door of which, as I afterwards noticed, oftener than not, stood open.... His features, indeed, were familiar to us, as to most people, from the engraving of Richmond’s first portrait of him, taken in middle life for Sir John Coleridge. Now the original stood before me, and I saw at a glance that face and figure had been faithfully portrayed. The forehead was pale and serene, the hair silvery; doubtless this token of advancing years must have helped to give softness and refinement to the features; eyebrows, sprinkled with white, shaded eyes of singular brilliancy and depth of expression, as ready (I afterwards well knew) to light up with mirth and mischief while playful talk was going on, as they were to melt into mournful earnestness when graver topics were broached. He habitually wore glasses, but used often to take them off and hold them in his hand when conversing with animation. A dear and old friend of his has told me that he ‘looked almost boyish till about fifty, and after that rapidly aged in personal appearance.’ At this time he was in his sixty-first year, healthy and strong and active.... In appearance he was quite one’s ideal of an old-fashioned country clergyman, but of one whose Oxford days were still fresh in his mind; there was a touch of _vieille cour_ in his manner, which added, I think, to its charm. His voice in speaking was rather low, and especially so when the subject of conversation was very near his heart. It often struck me, when listening to him, that without the slightest effort or aim at effect, he always hit upon the most suitable and telling words, (and the shortest), in which to clothe his ideas. This unconscious beauty of language, coupled with the originality and wisdom of the ideas themselves, riveted them in one’s memory; the look, too, with which they were uttered, could not be forgotten, and rises as vividly before my mind’s eye ‘through the golden mist of years’ as though it belonged to the present, instead of the ‘long ago.’”--1852.

[Sidenote: L. A. Huntingford: private letter.]

“People who went to look at Mr. Keble as a ‘lion’ were, I think, disappointed to see a very simple old-fashioned clerical gentleman, with very little manner, and so completely unconscious of self that as he talked of common things, they were inclined to think as little of him as he thought of himself. He used to come down early and stand writing at a side-table till it was quite time for prayers and breakfast, and then sit down anywhere and, with a little peculiar jerk of the head and shoulders, read a short ‘Instruction,’ almost as if he were reading it to himself. Certain people even called his reading bad, for his voice was weak, and he had a slight cough which never wholly left him; but he brought out the meaning of Holy Scripture in a manner which I never heard surpassed. Mr. Keble was of middle height, very thin, with a splendid forehead, bright eyes which were rather hidden by his spectacles, and a sweet merry smile. Those who knew him well must remember the way in which he used to pull himself together, as if he were a boy obeying a well-known rule to ‘hold up his head.’ His manner was nervous, so much so that people who were not intimately acquainted with him were rarely quite at their ease when in his presence. The two pictures of Mr. Keble by Richmond are both good likenesses; but the lithograph of the head which was taken from the then-unfinished picture which, in its completed form, now hangs in Keble College, Oxford, has caught the peculiar intelligence of the eyes when lighted up with the eager brightness his friends knew so well. He had the unusual power of being able to write upon one subject and listen to the discussion of another at the same time; and he would often glance up from the paper in which he was apparently immersed, and pushing up his spectacles join eagerly in the conversation.”

CHARLES KINGSLEY

1812-1875

[Sidenote: Caroline Fox’s _Journals and Letters_.]

“Torquay, _January 30th_.--Charles Kingsley called, but we missed him.

“_February 3d._--We paid him and his wife a very happy call; he fraternising at once, and stuttering pleasant and discriminating things concerning F. D. Maurice, Coleridge and others. He looks sunburnt with dredging all the morning, has a piercing eye under an overhanging brow, and his voice is most melodious and his pronunciation exquisite. He is strangely attractive.”--1854.

[Sidenote: _The Galaxy_, 1872.]

“I was present at a meeting not long since where Mr. Kingsley was one of the principal speakers. The meeting was held in London, the audience was a peculiarly Cockney audience, and Charles Kingsley is personally little known to the public of the metropolis. Therefore when he began to speak there was quite a little thrill of wonder and something like incredulity through the listening benches. Could that, people near me asked, really be Charles Kingsley, the novelist, the poet, the scholar, the aristocrat, the gentleman, the pulpit-orator, the ‘soldier--priest,’ the apostle of muscular Christianity? Yes, that was indeed he. Rather tall, very angular, surprisingly awkward, with thin staggering legs, a hatchet face adorned with scraggy gray whiskers, a faculty for falling into the most ungainly attitudes, and making the most hideous contortions of visage and frame; with a rough provincial accent and an uncouth way of speaking which would be set down for absurd caricature on the boards of a comic theatre. Such was the appearance which the author of _Glaucus_ and _Hypatia_ presented to his startled audience. Since Brougham’s time nothing so ungainly, odd, and ludicrous had been displayed upon an English platform. Needless to say, Charles Kingsley has not the eloquence of Brougham. But he has a robust and energetic plain-speaking which soon struck home to the heart of the meeting. He conquered his audience. Those who at first could hardly keep from laughing, those who, not knowing the speaker, wondered whether he was not mad or in liquor, those who heartily disliked his general principles and his public attitude, were alike won over, long before he had finished, by his bluff and blunt earnestness and his transparent sincerity.”

[Sidenote: _Fraser’s Magazine_, 1877.]

“For nine years the portrait of Kingsley, close to that of John Parker, has looked down from the wall of the room in which I write. It is a large photograph, taken, while he was on a visit to the house, by an amateur of extraordinary ability, the late Dr. Adamson of St. Andrews. It is the best and most lifelike portrait of Kingsley known to me. It has the stern expression, which came partly of the effort, never quite ceasing, to express himself through that characteristic stammer which quite left him in public speaking, and which in private added to the effect of his wonderful talk. Photography caught him easily. Those who look at the portrait prefixed to Volume I. of the _Life_ see the man as he lived. Mr. Woolner’s bust, shown at the beginning of Volume II., shows him aged and shrunken, not more than he was but more than he ought to have been; and the removal of all hair from the face is a marked difference from the fact in life; yet the likeness is perfect too. That somewhat severe face belied one of the kindest hearts that ever beat: yet the handsome and chivalrous features unworthily expressed one of the truest, bravest, and noblest of souls. Kingsley could not have done a mean or false thing: by his make it was as impossible as that water should run uphill.”

CHARLES LAMB

1775-1834

[Sidenote: de Quincey’s _Life and Writings_.]

“Lamb, at this period of his life, then passed regularly, after taking wine, under a brief eclipse of sleep. It descended upon him as soft as a shadow. In a gross person laden with superfluous flesh, and sleeping heavily, this would have been disagreeable; but in Lamb, thin even to meagreness, spare and wiry as an Arab of the desert, or as Thomas Aquinas, wasted by scholastic vigils, the affection of sleep seemed rather a net-work of aerial gossamer than of earthly cobweb,--more like a golden haze falling upon him gently from the heavens than a cloud exhaling upwards from the flesh. Motionless in his chair as a bust, breathing so gently as scarcely to seem entirely alive, he presented the image of repose midway between life and death like the repose of sculpture, and to one who knew his history, a repose contrasting with the calamities and internal storms of his life. I have heard more persons than I can now distinctly recall, observe of Lamb when sleeping, that his countenance in that state assumed an expression almost seraphic, from its intellectual beauty of outline, its childlike simplicity, and its benignity. It could not be called a transfiguration that sleep worked in his face; for the features wore essentially the same expression when waking; but sleep spiritualised that expression, exalted it, and also harmonised it. Much of the change lay in that last process. The eyes it was that disturbed the unity of effect in Lamb’s waking face. They gave a restlessness to the character of his intellect, shifting, like northern lights, through every mode of combination with fantastic playfulness; and sometimes by fiery gleams obliterating for the moment that pure light of benignity which was the predominant reading on his features.”--1822.

[Sidenote: Froude’s _Life of Carlyle_.]

“He was the leanest of mankind; tiny black breeches buttoned to the knee-cap and no further, surmounting spindle-legs also in black, face and head fineish, black, bony, lean, and of a Jew type rather; in the eyes a kind of smoky brightness, or confused sharpness; spoke with a stutter; in walking tottered and shuffled, emblem of imbecility, bodily and spiritual (something of real insanity, I have understood), and yet something, too, of human, ingenuous, pathetic, sportfully much enduring. Poor Lamb! he was infinitely astonished at my wife, and her quiet encounter of his too ghastly London wit by a cheerful native ditto. Adieu! poor Lamb!”

[Sidenote: Talfourd’s _Reminiscence of Charles Lamb_.]