Walpole says he had a black beard which, when suffering with gout, he would leave unshaven for days. But a modern writer, while leaving his portrait intact, transfuses it with genius, and says that ‘with his eagle aspect, and eyes that would blaze a cannon, he commanded the little things that listened to his voice as might an Emperor his legionaries.’ ‘I should not mind what he says,’ exclaimed Lord Holland to his wife; ‘but his eyes!’ There is no doubt that either from physical suffering or mental anxiety he was at times the victim of great prostration and nervous irritability. It may be that at these periods the seclusion and quiet of North End House, with the wooded beauty and fine air of the neighbourhood, may have proved to him in effect what fine music was to the mind of Emerson, at once assuasive and refreshing. It is probable, too, that these seasons of retirement, in which he withdrew himself even from his family, shutting himself up in a small room, which, with the oriel window belonging to it, was for many years _properly left unaltered_, enabled him to abstract himself from everything but the political problems of the day, and to map out in his masterful mind the means of coping with difficulties, if not of subjugating them wholly. Mr. Howitt gives the following description of the ‘closet, or room,’ in which Lord Chatham voluntarily imprisoned himself, at which times not even the servant who waited on him was permitted to see him:[170] ‘The opening in the wall from the staircase to the room still remains through which the unhappy man received his meals, or anything else conveyed to him. It is an opening of perhaps 18 inches square, having a door on each side of the wall; the door within had a padlock, which still hangs upon it. When anything was conveyed to him, a knock was made on the outer door, and the articles placed in the recess. When the outer door again closed, the invalid opened the inner door, took what was there, again closed the door, and locked it.’[171] In all this great man’s afflictive trials it must have comforted him to remember that in the hour of the unfortunate Admiral Byng’s extremity, when women of rank were urging a royal Princess, nothing loath, to be, as they expressed it, ‘for his execution,’ he (Lord Chatham) had been on the side of justice, and had used his utmost influence with the King to procure the Admiral’s pardon, a plea for mercy that must have softened by reflection his own death-bed.[172]