“You scarcely can conceive how much eight years of disappointment, anguish, and study, have worn me down.... Imagine to yourself a pale melancholy visage, with two great wrinkles between the eyebrows, with an eye disgustingly severe, and, a big wig, and you may have a perfect picture of my present appearance.... I can neither laugh nor drink, have contracted a hesitating disagreeable manner of speaking, and a visage that looks ill-nature itself; in short, I have thought myself into a settled melancholy, and an utter disgust of all that life brings with it.”—1759.
Boswell’s Life
of Dr. Johnson.
“He was very much what the French call un étourdi, and from vanity and an eager desire of being conspicuous wherever he was, he frequently talked carelessly without knowledge of the subject, or even without thought. His person was short, his countenance coarse and vulgar, his deportment that of a scholar awkwardly affecting the easy gentleman.”—1763.
R. Walsh’s
British Poets.
*
“Nothing could be more amiable than the general features of his mind; those of his person were not perhaps so engaging. His stature was under the middle size, his body strongly built, and his limbs more sturdy than elegant. His complexion was pale, his forehead low, his face almost round and pitted with the small-pox, but marked with strong lines of thinking. His first appearance was not captivating; but when he grew easy and cheerful in company, he relaxed into such a display of good-humour as soon removed every unfavourable impression.”
DAVID GRAY
1838-1861
Buchanan’s
Life of David
Gray.
“At twenty-one years of age ... David was a tall young man, slightly but firmly built, and with a stoop at the shoulders. His head was small, fringed with black curly hair. Want of candour was not his fault, though he seldom looked one in the face; his eyes, however, were large and dark, full of intelligence and humour, harmonising well with the long thin nose and nervous lips. The great black eyes and woman’s mouth betrayed the creature of impulse; one whose reasoning faculties were small, but whose temperament was like red-hot coal. He sympathised with much that was lofty, noble, and true in poetry, and with much that was absurd and suicidal in the poet. He carried sympathy to the highest pitch of enthusiasm; he shed tears over the memories of Keats and Burns, and he was corybantic in his execution of a Scotch ‘reel.’”—1859.
R. M. Milnes’s
Notice on David
Gray.