“Pepys spent part of a certain winter Sunday, when he had taken physic, composing ‘a song in praise of a liberal genius (such as I take my own to be) to all studies and pleasures.’ The song was successful, but the diary is, in a sense, the very song that he was seeking; and his portrait by Hales, so admirably reproduced in Mynors Bright’s edition, is a confirmation of the diary. Hales, it would appear, had known his business, and though he put his sitter to a deal of trouble, almost breaking his neck ‘to have the portrait full of shadows,’ and draping him in an Indian gown hired expressly for the purpose, he was preoccupied about no merely picturesque effects, but to portray the essence of the man. Whether we read the picture by the diary, or the diary by the picture, we shall at least agree, that Hales was among the numbers of those who can ‘surprise the manners in a face.’ Here we have a mouth pouting, moist with desires; eyes greedy, protuberant, and yet apt for weeping too; a nose great alike in character and dimensions, and altogether a most fleshly, melting countenance. The face is attractive by its promise of reciprocity. I have used the word _greedy_, but the reader must not suppose that he can change it for that closely kindred one of _hungry_, for there is here no aspiration, no waiting for better things, but an animal joy in all that comes. It could never be the face of an artist; it is the face of a _viveur_--kindly, pleased, and pleasing, protected from excess and upheld in contentment by the shifting versatility of his desires. For a single desire is more rightly to be called a lust; but there is health in a variety, where one may balance and control another.” ALEXANDER POPE 1688-1744 [Sidenote: _The Guardian_, 1713.] “Dick Distich ... we have elected president, not only as he is the shortest of us all, but because he has entertained so just a sense of his stature as to go generally in black, that he may appear yet less. Nay, to that perfection is he arrived, that he stoops as he walks. The figure of the man is odd enough; he is a lively little creature, with long arms and legs: a spider is no ill emblem of him. He has been taken at a distance for a small windmill.”--1713. [Sidenote: Johnson’s _Life of Pope_.]