serious look. He had a large nose and mouth, thick lips, a swarthy complexion and large black eye-brows by the play of which he made his physiognomy very comic. Newton again was a short compact man much like Plato;* but of Bacon's stature, the author is driven by the absence of any accounts to confess his entire ignorance. Mr. Hepworth Dixon describes him as slight in build, rosy and round in flesh; he also speaks of him as being handsome, with a straight strong nose of the pure english type. Wren was thin and low in person. When the House of Commons, in one of the many infamous persecutions De Foe suffered, resolved to burn one of his books† by the agency of the common hangman, they described him in the proclamation as a middle-sized spare man of a brown complexion and dark-coloured hair, a hooked nose, sharp chin, and grey eyes; features in which he remarkably resembled his illustrious friend William the Third. Voltaire was a thin puny being. John Hunter one of the greatest of men, who really foresaw not only the germ but almost the mature fruit of the sublime doctrines sketched out by Carus, Goethe, and St. Hilaire, "was a little sturdy fellow" like Hogarth, while his illustrious brother Dr. William Hunter was not only short but slender also, and strange to say his almost equally illustrious brother-in-law Matthew Ballie was in person below the middle size. Sir Joshua Reynolds is said by Northcote to have been rather under the common height. Goethe, more a philosopher than * Sir David Brewster's Life of Newton, vol. ii. p. 413. a poet, was of medium stature if we may trust Schiller in such a matter-Mr. Lewes makes him an inch or two over this. He had the front of Jove himself, a fine aquiline nose, arched lip, and magnificent lustrous brown eyes, being extremely handsome. He has been described as rather tall, and is said to have looked so, but this is explained by his having such a commanding presence. Like many such persons he was extremely sensitive to atmospheric influences. Jenner, "dieser Britte unsterbliches Andenkens," was rather under the middle size, "his person was robust, but active and well-formed."* Milton was of the same low compact build as Burns. Pope was a weakly being so low in stature that to bring him to a level with common tables it was necessary to raise his seat, and Moore was very like him, being "a little, a very little man." Thomson like Byron was just above the common size, being five feet eight and-a-half, and both inclined to get fat. Savage, Johnson tells us, and he knew him well, was of middle stature and a thin habit of body. Bloomfield when a boy of fifteen was not bigger than lads generally are at twelve. Of Mozart, the biographer in the "Penny Cyclopædia" says, "in bestowing on Mozart so abundant a share of genius and such exquisite sensibility, nature seems to have thought she had been sufficiently bountiful. Physical strength she denied him; small in stature, slight in construction, and feeble in constitution, he was not calculated to reach even the middle period of life." Beethoven just attained the middle size, and was stout and of a strong looking figure; with him we must close the list not for want of matter but of space. Baron's Life of Jenner. Again; deformities are no passport to the enchanted land of genius. An occasional limp is rather an advantage than otherwise, as in the case of Scott and Byron. Pope, too, was not a fine figure, nor was Johnson, but nature seems to have in general steered clear of embarking such a precious cargo as genius in a warped and twisted craft. Very great ugliness is always objectionable, though intruders of this class have been allowed, especially when the disfigurement took place after birth. There certainly have been some singular looking mortals among great men, but it was some slight eccentricity of feature that distinguished them rather than downright ugliness. In person, Virgil is said to have had a clownish appearance, and to have been very shy and diffident and of feeble health. William Taylor, the old barber who used to shave Thomson the poet and dress his wig, told the Earl of Buchan that the author of "The Seasons" had a face as long as a horse, and that his hair was as soft as that of a camel, "yet it grew so remarkably that if it was but an inch long it stood upright an end from his head like a brush." The wig was certainly a monstrous invention, an absurdity worthy of the age which first saw it, the age which matured the growth of a wretched degraded burlesque of greek architecture with all its tawdry gilding, hideous statues and gin-palace pilasters, but even the huge full-buttoned periwig of Anne's day must have been something better than hair like a camel's and standing up like a brush. Thomson also stooped, perspired enormously and was rather corpulent, so that when he and Pope were together they must have been a strange-looking pair, Pope being little, thin, ill-made, and grotesquely dressed. Schiller too was a most singular-looking mortal. His legs says Scharfenstein were nearly the same size all the way down to his ankles, his neck was long, his face pale, his eyes small, and encircled with a red rim: then to see his uncouth head stuck full of curl papers and a huge queue dangling from it, in addition to which Emil Palleske admits that he had red hair and freckles with an extremely shrill voice, that he was short-sighted, that his limbs failed in elasticity, and that at first sight the (his) face had something of a bird, of an oriental aspect in it. When he was "packed into a uniform of the old Prussian cut, particularly stiff and ugly for surgeons; on one side of his face three formal pipe-clayed rolls representing curls, a small military hat scarcely covering the crown of his head, from which was suspended an enormous queue," and his long throat strangled in a narrow horse-hair stock, he must have looked a genuine original. "His feet were particularly curious, and owing to the thick white felt that lined his gaiters, his legs were like two cylinders and of a larger diameter than his thighs which were compressed into tight-fitting breeches. In these gaiters and boots, thickly coated with blacking, he moved stiffly, unable to bend his knees properly, just like a stork.” A symposium of such oddities, with Johnson in the chair and Scarron for vice, would have been a sight for the gods, who might with great propriety have sent that amusing old cripple Vulcan to wait upon them. Schiller's Life and Works, vol. i. p. 49. A man of great genius especially if of a poetic turn is not expected to have red hair; brown is the favourite colour, but auburn is allowable and so are certain intermediate stages. As we have just seen, one of Schiller's biographers says he had red hair, but his sister Christophine describes him as having light yellow hair "encircling his pure white forehead;" perhaps this was a delicate way of putting it. Black, especially where it is the custom of the country to wear hair of this hue, is in good taste. Furthermore a genius is not to affect any great singularities, such as having one eye of one colour and the other of a different tint. Blindness is of course not counted as a blemish. Hugh Miller says of Wellington, Washington, and Cæsar that "had they all been brethren, the family likeness could not have been more strong. There is the same hard mathematical cast of face, the same thin cheeks and prominent cheek-bones, the same sharply defined nether jaws, the same bold nose-in each case the indented aquiline and the same quietly keen eye. And in the countenance of Cromwell, though more overcharged as perhaps became his larger structure of bone and more muscular frame, we find exactly the same lineaments united to a massiveness of forehead possessed by neither Washington nor Wellington."* The same writer speaking of Bruce and Burns says, "In general size, the head of the indomitable king who so strongly impressed his character on a rude and turbulent age, and the head of the no less indomitable * Essays, p. 50-57. |