1775-1818
[Sidenote: _The Southern Literary Messenger_, 1849.]
“In person, Mat Lewis (as his intimate friends at first termed him) was
quite ordinary; his stature was rather diminutive; his face was almost
an ellipse, looking upon it from the side, and his features though
pleasant were not to be regarded as handsome. His forehead, however,
was high and his eyes very lustrous.”
[Sidenote: Jeaffreson’s _Novels and Novelists_.]
“Lewis’s personal appearance was not prepossessing. He describes
himself as
‘Of passions strong, of hasty nature,
Of graceless form and dwarfish stature.’
He had, moreover, large gray eyes, thick features, and an inexpressive
countenance. When he talked he had an insufferable habit of drawing the
fore-finger of his right hand across his eyelid, and in conversation
he was guilty of the absurd affectation of a drawling tone such as was
popular with dandies.”
[Sidenote: _New Monthly Magazine_, 1848.]
“Matthew Gregory Lewis. Of this gentleman I knew but little, not having
encountered him half a dozen times after my introduction to him at the
house of Nat Middleton, the banker. With a short thick-set figure,
unintellectual features, and a disagreeable habit of peering, being
very short-sighted, his aspect was by no means prepossessing; but as he
had ‘that within which passeth show,’ he recovered the ground lost at
starting as rapidly as Wilkes could have done.”