The contemporaries of Sir Isaac Newton, like those of Kean, were all so much impressed by what he knew and by what he did, that they seldom thought of posterity as caring to know how he looked, either in life or in death. From many different sources, however, we learn, in a fragmentary way, that he was “short but well-set, and inclined to be corpulent;” that “he had a very lively and piercing eye;” that “his hair was abundant and white as silver, without any baldness, and when his peruke was off was a venerable sight;” that “he was a man of no very prominent aspect;” that “his face was almost square, and that his chin had unusual width;” that “although he reached the great age of eighty-four, he retained until the last almost all of his teeth;” and that “his countenance was mild, pleasant, and comely.” Bishop Atterbury said, “in the whole air of his face and make there was nothing of that penetrating sagacity which appears in his compositions. He had something rather languid in his look and manner, which did not raise any very great expectation in those who did not know him;” and Dr. Humphrey Newton, who was his assistant and amanuensis, said that during the many years of their intimate association he never knew him to laugh but once!
His death was not without pain, and his mask will not be recognized readily by those who are familiar with his face as pictured and sculptured with his peruke on.
If Sir David Brewster’s account of Newton’s life be the true one, he was as good as he was great, and nothing can be added to that. His portraits by Lely, Kneller, and other famous painters still exist in different parts of Great Britain.
The terra-cotta bust of Newton, from the hand of Roubilliac, is in the British Museum. His bust and full-length statue in marble, by the same artist, belong to Trinity College, Cambridge. They were both, as is well known, based upon this mask of his face, taken after death, the original of which, made by Roubilliac, is now in the rooms of the Royal Society, at Burlington House in London. It was presented to that institution in 1829 by Samuel Hunter Christie, and the officers of the society have no doubt of its authenticity. Mr. Christie found it by accident in the shop of a dealer in statuary, whose father had purchased it at the sale of Roubilliac’s effects more than half a century before. The dealer parted with it for a few shillings, although he was satisfied that it was the mask of Newton, and by Roubilliac. Charles Richard Weld, in his History of the Royal Society, gave a steel engraving of it, and declared that “it presents all the characteristic features of the Society’s former illustrious president.” Only a few copies of it are known to exist, and it is one of the most valuable and important masks in my collection.
SIR ISAAC NEWTON
Roubilliac’s mask of Alexander Pope was one of the cherished possessions of Samuel Rogers, but its present whereabouts I have not been able to discover.
The contrasts between the profoundest of England’s philosophers and the bravest of her bruisers are as marked in an intellectual as in a physical way. Ben Caunt, the pugilist, died in London in 1861, universally respected. He was, during the later years of his life, proprietor of the Coach and Horses, a public-house in St. Martin’s Lane, much frequented by his old pupils, and by all the prominent patrons of the prize-ring. He came to America in the early Forties, giving a series of exhibitions throughout the country, but never engaging in any serious encounter here. He was a leader in his own profession, and at one time, perhaps, the best-known man in all England. His portrait, which once adorned the walls of cottage and palace, is still to be found in Miles’s Pugilistica, taken at the period of his famous fight with “Bendigo” in 1842. His head is certainly a strong one, and, in a phrenological way, he was better than many of the men among his contemporaries who did better things.