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Joseph Addison[1]
Harrison Ainsworth[4]
Jane Austen[7]
Francis, Lord Bacon[10]
Joanna Baillie[12]
Benjamin, Lord Beaconsfield[15]
Jeremy Bentham[17]
Richard Bentley[20]
James Boswell[21]
Charlotte Brontë[24]
Henry, Lord Brougham[27]
Elizabeth Barrett Browning[34]
John Bunyan[36]
Edmund Burke[39]
Robert Burns[42]
Samuel Butler[47]
George, Lord Byron[47]
Thomas Campbell[51]
Thomas Carlyle[55]
Thomas Chatterton[58]
Geoffrey Chaucer[61]
Philip, Lord Chesterfield[63]
William Cobbett[66]
Hartley Coleridge[70]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge[74]
William Collins[77]
William Cowper[79]
George Crabbe[81]
Daniel De Foe[83]
Charles Dickens[86]
Isaac D’Israeli[91]
John Dryden[94]
Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot)[98]
Henry Fielding[102]
John Gay[105]
Edward Gibbon[107]
William Godwin[110]
Oliver Goldsmith[112]
David Gray[114]
Thomas Gray[116]
Henry Hallam[118]
William Hazlitt[120]
Felicia Hemans[125]
James Hogg[128]
Thomas Hood[130]
Theodore Hook[134]
David Hume[136]
Leigh Hunt[139]
Elizabeth Inchbald[143]
Francis, Lord Jeffrey[144]
Douglas Jerrold[147]
Samuel Johnson[150]
Ben Jonson[152]
John Keats[155]
John Keble[158]
Charles Kingsley[164]
Charles Lamb[168]
Letitia Elizabeth Landon[172]
Walter Savage Landor[174]
Charles Lever[177]
Matthew Gregory Lewis[179]
John Gibson Lockhart[180]
Sir Richard Lovelace[181]
Edward, Lord Lytton[183]
Thomas Babington Macaulay[187]
William Maginn[190]
Francis Mahony (Father Prout)[195]
Frederick Marryat[199]
Harriet Martineau[202]
Frederick Denison Maurice[205]
John Milton[207]
Mary Russell Mitford[211]
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu[215]
Thomas Moore[217]
Hannah More[220]
Sir Thomas More[224]
Caroline Norton[227]
Thomas Otway[231]
Samuel Pepys[232]
Alexander Pope[234]
Bryan Waller Procter[236]
Thomas de Quincey[238]
Ann Radcliffe[243]
Sir Walter Raleigh[244]
Charles Reade[248]
Samuel Richardson[251]
Samuel Rogers[254]
Dante Gabriel Rossetti[256]
Richard Savage[262]
Sir Walter Scott[264]
William Shakespeare[267]
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley[275]
Percy Bysshe Shelley[277]
Richard Brinsley Sheridan[282]
Sir Philip Sidney[284]
Horace Smith[286]
Sydney Smith[287]
Tobias Smollett[289]
Robert Southey[290]
Edmund Spenser[293]
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley[296]
Sir Richard Steele[299]
Laurence Sterne[302]
Sir John Suckling[304]
Jonathan Swift[305]
William Makepeace Thackeray[308]
James Thomson[311]
Anthony Trollope[313]
Edmund Waller[317]
Horace Walpole[319]
Izaac Walton[323]
John Wilson[324]
Ellen Wood (Mrs. Henry Wood)[330]
William Wordsworth[332]
Sir Henry Wotton[335]

JOSEPH ADDISON
1672-1719

Temple Bar,
1874.
*

“Of his personal appearance we have at least two portraits by good hands. Before us are three carefully-engraved portraits of him, but there is a great dissimilarity between the three except in the wig. Sir Godfrey Kneller painted one of these portraits, which is entirely unlike the two others; let us, however, give Sir Godfrey the credit of the best picture, and judge Addison’s appearance from that. The wig almost prevents our judging the shape of the head, yet it seems very high behind. The forehead is very lofty, the sort of forehead which is called ‘commanding’ by those people who do not know that some of the least decided men in the world have had high foreheads. The eyebrows are delicately ‘pencilled,’ yet show a vast deal of vigour and expression; they are what his old Latin friends, who knew so well the power of expression in the eyebrow, would have called ‘supercilious,’ and yet the nasal end of the supercilium is only slightly raised, and it droops pleasantly at the temporal end, so that there is nothing Satanic or ill-natured about it. The eyebrow of Addison, according to Kneller, seems to say, ‘You are a greater fool than you think yourself to be, but I would die sooner than tell you so.’ The eye, which is generally supposed to convey so much expression, but which very often does not, is very much like the eyes of other amiable and talented people. The nose is long, as becomes an orthodox Whig; quite as long, we should say, as the nose of any member of Peel’s famous long-nosed ministry, and quite as delicately chiselled. The mouth is very tender and beautiful, firm, yet with a delicate curve upwards at each end of the upper lip, suggestive of a good joke, and of a calm waiting to hear if any man is going to beat it. Below the mouth there follows of course the nearly inevitable double chin of the eighteenth century, with a deep incision in the centre of the jaw-bone, which shows through the flesh like a dimple. On the whole a singularly handsome and pleasant face, wanting the wonderful form which one sees in the faces of Shakespeare, Prior, Congreve, Castlereagh, Byron, or Napoleon, but still extremely fine of its own.”

Johnson’s
Lives of the
Poets.

“Of his habits, or external manners, nothing is so often mentioned as that timorous or sullen taciturnity, which his friends called modesty by too mild a name. Steele mentions, with great tenderness, ‘that remarkable bashfulness, which is a cloak that hides and muffles merit;’ and tells us ‘that his abilities were covered only by modesty, which doubles the beauties which are seen, and gives credit and esteem to all that are concealed.’ Chesterfield affirms that ‘Addison was the most timorous and awkward man that he ever saw.’ And Addison, speaking of his own deficiency in conversation, used to say of himself that, with respect to intellectual wealth, ‘he could draw bills for a thousand pounds though he had not a guinea in his pocket.’... ‘Addison’s conversation,’ says Pope, ‘had something in it more charming than I have found in any other man. But this was only when familiar; before strangers, or, perhaps, a single stranger, he preserved his dignity by a stiff silence.’”