“Some notion of Dryden’s personal appearance may be gathered from contemporary notices. He was of short stature, stout, and ruddy in the face. Rochester christened him ‘Poet Squab,’ and Tom Brown always calls him ‘Little Bayes.’ Shadwell, in his _Medal of John Bayes_, sneers at him as a cherry-cheeked dunce; another lampooner calls him ‘learned and florid.’ Pope remembered him as plump and of fresh colour, with a down look. Lady de Longueville, who died in 1763 at the age of a hundred, told Oldys that she remembered Dryden dining with her husband, and that the most remarkable part of his appearance was an uncommon distance between his eyes. He had a large mole on his right cheek. The friendly writer of some lines on his portrait by Closterman says: ‘A sleepy eye he shows, and no sweet feature.’ He appears to have become gray comparatively early, and he let his gray hair grow long. We see him with his long gray locks in the portrait by which, through engravings, his face is best known to us, painted by Kneller in 1698. The face, as we know it by that picture and the engravings, is handsome, it indicates intellect, and sensual characteristics are not wanting.” MARY ANNE EVANS (GEORGE ELIOT) 1819-1880 [Sidenote: _Harper’s Magazine_, 1881.] “In more than one striking passage in his novels Mr. Hardy has recognised the fact that the beauty of the future, as the race is more developed in intellect, cannot be the mere physical beauty of the past; and in one of the most remarkable he says that ‘ideal physical beauty is incompatible with mental development, and a full recognition of the evil of things. Mental luminousness must be fed with the oil of life, even though there is already a physical need for it.’ And this was the case with George Eliot. The face was one of a group of four, not all equally like each other, but all of the same spiritual family, and with a curious interdependance of likeness. These four are Dante, Savonarola, Cardinal Newman, and herself.... In the group of which George Eliot was one there is the same straight wall of brow; the droop of the powerful nose; mobile lips, touched with strong passion, kept resolutely under control; a square jaw, which would make the face stern, were it not counteracted by the sweet smile of lip and eye.... The two or three portraits that exist, though valuable, give but a very imperfect presentiment. The mere shape of the head would be the despair of any painter. It was so grand and massive that it would scarcely be possible to represent it without giving the idea of disproportion to the frame of which no one ever thought for a moment when they saw her, although it was a surprise, when she stood up, to see that after all, she was but a little fragile woman who bore this weight of brow and brain.” [Sidenote: _The Century_, 1881.]