"Richard Burton was self-reliant, self-sustained, seeking no support from heaven or earth, substituting self-will for faith and strenuous effort for Divine assistance; endowed by nature with a frame of iron and muscles of steel, he was an athlete who might have figured in the arena in Greek or Roman times. Audacious in speech and act, and fond of shocking the prejudices of those with whom he talked, he was the expounder of the most outrageous paradoxes possible to conceive. He was eminently a social animal; loved the pleasures of the table, and would talk with a friend all night in preference to going to bed, and in the Chaucerian style. Yet, with women, I never knew him even hint an indelicacy; for the charm of his conversation was to them very great, he had so much to tell. In his earlier days he was a strikingly handsome man, and even since his face had been scarred and furrowed by wounds and trials, there yet lingered on that expressive countenance the 'faded splendour wan' which had survived his youth. Among his personal habits was that of carrying in his hand an iron walking-stick, as heavy as a gun, to keep his muscles properly exercised, and a blow from his fist was like a kick from a horse. Mind and muscle with him were equally strong propellers, and the animal nature as vigorous as the intellectual. He had the faculty of making staunch friends and bitter enemies, and many of each. Burton had a curious characteristic which he shared with Lord Byron--that of loving to paint himself much blacker than he really was, and to affect vices, much as most men affect virtues, and with the same insincerity. In one of his shipwreck stories, after describing how they all suffered from the pangs of hunger, and the wolfish glances they began to cast on each other from time to time as the days wore on and no relief came, dropping his voice to a mysterious whisper, almost under his breath he added, 'The cabin-boy was young and fat, and looked very tender, and on him, more than on any other, such looks were cast, until----' Here he paused, looked around at the strained and startled faces of his auditors, in which horror was depicted, and then abruptly concluded, as though dismissing a disagreeable memory, 'But these are not stories to be told at a cheerful dinner-party, in a Christian country, and I had best say no more. Let us turn to some more cheerful subject.' Of course he was pressed to continue and complete his story, but stubbornly refused; leaving his hearers in a most unsatisfactory state of mind as to the _dénouement_ of the unfinished narrative." DESCRIPTION OF RICHARD IN HIS STUDY AT TRIESTE. Cutting from _Life_.