“He looks like a plump white mouse in a wig, with an air at once vivacious and timid, a quick excitable nature, taking refuge in the outside of a smug, portly tradesman. Two coloured engravings in Mrs. Barbauld’s volumes give us Richardson amidst his surroundings.... One introduces us to Richardson at home. Half a dozen ladies and gentlemen are sitting by the open window in his bare parlour looking out into the garden. There is only one spindle-legged table, and a set of uncompromising wooden chairs, just enough to accommodate the party.... Miss Highmore, whose hoop can scarcely be squeezed into her straight-backed chair, is quietly sketching the memorable scene. We are truly grateful to her, for there sits the little idol of the party in his usual morning dress, a nondescript brown dressing-gown with a cap on his head of the same materials. His plump little frame fills the chair, and he is apparently raising one foot for an emphatic stamp, as he reads a passage of _Sir Charles Grandison_. We can see that as he concludes he will be applauded with deferential gasps of heartfelt admiration.” SAMUEL ROGERS 1763-1855 [Sidenote: S. C Hall’s _Memories of Great Men_.] “His countenance was the theme of continual jokes. It was ‘ugly,’ if not repulsive. The expression was in no way, nor under any circumstances, good; he had a drooping eye and a thick underlip; his forehead was broad, his head large--out of proportion indeed to his form; but it was without the organs of benevolence and veneration, although preponderating in that of ideality. His features were ‘cadaverous.’ Lord Dudley once asked him why, now that he could afford it, he did not set up his hearse; and it is said that Sydney Smith gave him mortal offence by recommending him, ‘when he sat for his portrait, to be drawn saying his prayers, with his face hidden by his hands.’” [Sidenote: Jerdan’s _Men I have known_.] “His personal appearance was extraordinary, or rather his countenance was unique. His skull and facial expression bore so striking a likeness to the skeleton pictures which we sometimes see of Death, that the facetious Sydney Smith (at one of the dressed evening parties ...) entitled him the ‘Death dandy.’ And it was told (probably with truth), that the same satirical wag inscribed upon the capital portrait in his breakfast-room, ‘Painted in his lifetime.’” [Sidenote: Mackay’s _Forty Years’ Recollections_.] “My first look at the poet, then in his seventy-eighth year, was an agreeable surprise, and a protest in my mind against the malignant injustice which had been done him. As a young man he might have been uncomely, if not as ugly as his revilers had painted him, but as an old man there was an intellectual charm in his countenance, and a fascination in his manner which more than atoned for any deficiency of personal beauty.”--1840. DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 1828-1882 [Sidenote: William Sharp’s _Dante Gabriel Rossetti_.]