Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/wordportraitsoff00wottrich Transcriber’s note: Text in italics is surrounded by underscores: _italics_. Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=. WORD PORTRAITS OF FAMOUS WRITERS Edited by MABEL E. WOTTON ‘What manner of man is he?’ _Twelfth Night_ London Richard Bentley & Son Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen 1887 Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh. [Illustration] INTRODUCTION “The world has always been fond of personal details respecting men who have been celebrated.” These were the words of Lord Beaconsfield, and with them he prefixed his description of the personal appearance of Isaac D’Israeli; but we hardly need the dictum of our greatest statesman to convince ourselves that at all events every honest literature-lover takes a very real interest in the individuality of those men whose names are perpetually on his lips. It is not enough for such a one merely to make himself familiar with their writings. It does not suffice for him that the _Essays of Elia_, for instance, can be got by heart, but he feels that he must also be able to linger in the playground at Christ’s with the “lame-footed boy,” and in after years pace the Temple gardens with the gentle-faced scholar, before he can properly be said to have made Lamb’s thoughts his own. At the best it is but a very incomplete notion that most of us possess as to the actual personality of even the most prominent of our British writers. The almost womanly beauty of Sidney, and the keen eyes and razor face of Pope, would, perhaps, be recognised as easily as the well-known form of Dr. Johnson; but taking them _en masse_ even a widely-read man might be forgiven if, from amongst the scraps of hearsay and curtly-recorded impressions on which at rare intervals he may alight, he cannot very readily conjure up the ghosts of the very men whose books he has studied, and to whose haunts he has been an eager pilgrim.