230 FRESH FIELDS 



scribes him to his wife as "a slender, rather tall, 

 and elegant youth, with small, clear, Roman- nosed 

 face, two small, earnestly smiling eyes; modest, 

 remarkably gifted with precision of utterance; en- 

 thusiastic, yet lucid, calm; not a great, yet dis- 

 tinctly a gifted and amiable youth." 



A London editor, whom he met about the same 

 time, he describes as "a tall, loose, lank-haired, 

 wrinkly, wintry, vehement-looking flail of a man." 

 He goes into the House of Commons on one of his 

 early visits to London: "Althorp spoke, a thick, 

 large, broad- whiskered, farmer-looking man; Hume 

 also, a powdered, clean, burly fellow; and Weth- 

 erell, a beetle-browed, sagacious, quizzical old gen- 

 tleman; then Davies, a Roman-nosed dandy," etc. 

 He must touch off the portrait of every man he 

 sees. De Quincey "is one of the smallest men you 

 ever in your life beheld; but with a most gentle 

 and sensible face, only that the teeth are destroyed 

 by opium, and the little bit of an under lip projects 

 like a shelf." Leigh Hunt: "Dark complexion (a 

 trace of the African, I believe); copious, clean, 

 strong black hair, beautifully shaped head, fine, 

 beaming, serious hazel eyes; seriousness and intel- 

 lect the main expression of the face (to our surprise 

 at first)." 



Here is his sketch of Tennyson: "A fine, large- 

 featured, dira-ey^d, bronze- colored, shaggy-headed 

 man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free and easy, who 

 swings outwardly and inwardly with great compos- 

 ure in an inarticulate element of tranquil chaos and 



