“The person of Pope is well known not to have been formed on the nicest model. He has, in his account of the Little Club, compared himself to a spider, and, by another, is described as protuberant behind and before. He is said to have been beautiful in his infancy; but he was of a constitution originally feeble and weak; and, as bodies of a tender frame are easily distorted, his deformity was, probably, in part the effect of his application. His stature was so low, that to bring him on a level with common tables it was necessary to raise his seat. But his face was not displeasing, and his eyes were animated and vivid.... His dress of ceremony was black, with a tie-wig and a little sword.... He sometimes condescended to be jocular with servants or inferiors; but by no merriment, either of others or of his own, was he ever seen excited to laughter.” [Sidenote: Tyer’s _Historical rhapsody on Mr. Pope_.] “Pope, as Lord Clarendon says of (the ever memorable) Hales of Eaton, was one of the least men in the kingdom; who adds of Chillingworth, that he was of a stature little superior to him, and that it was an age in which there were many great and wonderful men of that size.... He inherited his deformity from his father, who turns out at last, from the information of Mrs. Racket his relation, to have been a linen-draper in the Strand. ‘My friend, this shape which you and I will admire, Came not from Ammon’s son, but from my sire,’ as he expresses himself in his first epistle to Arbuthnot. He was protuberant behind and before, in the words of his last biographer. But he carried a mind in his face, as a reverend person once expressed himself of a singular countenance. He had a brilliant eye, which pervaded everything at a glance.” BRYAN WALLER PROCTER 1787-1874 [Sidenote: Froude’s _Life of Carlyle_.] “I have also seen and scraped acquaintance with Procter--Barry Cornwall. He is a slender, rough-faced, palish, gentle, languid-looking man, of three or four and thirty. There is a dreamy mildness in his eye; he is kind and good in his manners and, I understand, in his conduct. He is a poet by the ear and the fancy, but his heart and intellect are not strong.”--1824. [Sidenote: S. C. Hall’s _Retrospect of a long Life_.] “A decidedly rather pretty little fellow, Procter, bodily and spiritually: manners prepossessing, slightly London-elegant, not unpleasant; clear judgment in him, though of narrow field; a sound, honourable morality, and airy friendly ways; of slight, neat figure, vigorous for his size; fine genially rugged little face, fine head; something curiously dreamy in the eyes of him, lids drooping at the _outer_ ends into a cordially meditative and drooping expression; would break out suddenly now and then into opera attitude and a _Là ci darem là mano_ for a moment; had something of real fun, though in London style.” [Sidenote: Fields’s _Yesterdays with Authors_.]