Dr. Wilde compared this cast of Swift’s face, taken immediately after death, with the cast and drawings of his skull made in 1835, ninety years later, when the bodies of Swift and Stella were exhumed, and their craniums examined by the phrenologists belonging to the British Association; and by careful analysis of both, he was able to satisfy himself that Swift was not “a driveller and a show” when he died, nor a madman while he lived. He gave, upon the sixty-second page of his book, a drawing of this mask in profile, and the face is certainly identical with the face in my collection. It resembles very strongly the accepted portraits of Swift, particularly the two in which he was drawn without his wig. The more familiar of these is a profile in crayon, by Barber, taken when the Dean was about sixty years of age—and eighteen years before his death—which has been frequently engraved for the several editions of Lord Orrery’s Remarks on the Life and Writings of Jonathan Swift, first published in 1751. The original cast was made in two parts, according to Dr. Wilde, and the difference in surface between the rough hinder part—not existing in my copy—and the smooth polished anterior portion, as here seen, shows at once that the back of the head was added at a later date. Two lines of writing, greatly defaced, found upon the cast attest this to be “Dean Swift taken off his ... the night of his burial, and the ... one side larger than the other in nature.” In a foot-note to the second edition of his work, Dr. Wilde said: “The original mask remained in the museum T.C.D. [Trinity College, Dublin] till within a few years ago [1849], when it was accidentally destroyed.” The history of this replica—for replica it certainly is—before it came into my hands I have never been able to trace. It found its way into the shop of a dealer in curiosities, who knew nothing of its pedigree, not even whose face it was; and from him I bought it for a few shillings. It is one of the most interesting of the collection, and perhaps the most valuable, because the most rare. It is hardly the Swift of our imagination, the man whom Stella worshipped and Vanessa adored; and, Dr. Wilde to the contrary, notwithstanding, one cannot help feeling while looking at it that Swift’s own sad prophecy to Dr. Young was fulfilled—“I shall be like that lofty elm whose head has been blasted; I shall die first at the top.”
At least one of the biographers of the Irish dean died as Byron often feared to die, “like Swift, at the top first.” Sir Walter Scott’s decay was a mental decay in the beginning of his last illness; but happily for him, and for his family, the axe was laid at the root of the grand old monarch of the forest of Scottish letters before the upper branches were permitted to go to utter ruin.
There exist at Abbotsford two masks of its first laird—a life-mask and a death-mask. Of the former very little is known except that it is said to have been made in Paris. The latter was exhibited at the Scott Centenary Celebration in Edinburgh, in 1871, when it attracted a great deal of attention. They both show, as no portrait of the living man shows, except the familiar sketch by Maclise in the Fraser Gallery, the peculiar formation of his head, and the unusual length above the eyes. Lockhart, in his account of Scott’s last hours, said: “It was a beautiful day; so warm that every window was wide open, and so perfectly still that the sound of all others most delicious to his ears—the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles—was distinctly audible as we knelt around the bed, and his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes. No sculptor ever marbled a more majestic image of repose.”
He does not mention the taking of the death-mask, however, and nowhere alludes to it. It was made by George Bullock—it is said, at the request of Dr. Spurzheim—and Bullock and Chantrey both used it in modelling posthumous busts of the bard. It was loaned to Sir (then Mr.) Edwin Landseer while he was painting his full-length portrait of Sir Walter, with the background of the scenery of the Rhymer’s Glen.
Bullock supposed that the original mould was destroyed not long after Scott’s death, but Mr. Gourlay Steel writes that his brother, Sir John Steel, while engaged upon the monument to Lockhart at Dryburgh Abbey, some years later, came upon it accidentally at Abbotsford, and used it in remodelling his bust of Sir Walter for Mr. Hope-Scott.
Chantrey, in comparing the measurements of Scott’s head from this mask with the measurements he had made of the head of Shakspere on the Stratford monument—which latter he had always considered unnatural, if not impossible—found, to his great surprise, that they were almost identical in height from the eyes up; and in each case he noticed the very unusual length of the upper-lip. It was this dome-like feature of Scott’s head which inspired one of his jocular friends in Edinburgh to hail him once, when he dragged himself up the stairs of the Session House with his hat in his hand, as “Peveril of the Peak.”
SIR WALTER SCOTT