1688-1744
[Sidenote: _The Guardian_, 1713.]
“Dick Distich ... we have elected president, not only as he is the
shortest of us all, but because he has entertained so just a sense of
his stature as to go generally in black, that he may appear yet less.
Nay, to that perfection is he arrived, that he stoops as he walks. The
figure of the man is odd enough; he is a lively little creature, with
long arms and legs: a spider is no ill emblem of him. He has been taken
at a distance for a small windmill.”--1713.
[Sidenote: Johnson’s _Life of Pope_.]
“The person of Pope is well known not to have been formed on the nicest
model. He has, in his account of the Little Club, compared himself
to a spider, and, by another, is described as protuberant behind and
before. He is said to have been beautiful in his infancy; but he was of
a constitution originally feeble and weak; and, as bodies of a tender
frame are easily distorted, his deformity was, probably, in part the
effect of his application. His stature was so low, that to bring him on
a level with common tables it was necessary to raise his seat. But his
face was not displeasing, and his eyes were animated and vivid.... His
dress of ceremony was black, with a tie-wig and a little sword.... He
sometimes condescended to be jocular with servants or inferiors; but by
no merriment, either of others or of his own, was he ever seen excited
to laughter.”
[Sidenote: Tyer’s _Historical rhapsody on Mr. Pope_.]
“Pope, as Lord Clarendon says of (the ever memorable) Hales of Eaton,
was one of the least men in the kingdom; who adds of Chillingworth,
that he was of a stature little superior to him, and that it was an
age in which there were many great and wonderful men of that size....
He inherited his deformity from his father, who turns out at last,
from the information of Mrs. Racket his relation, to have been a
linen-draper in the Strand.
‘My friend, this shape which you and I will admire,
Came not from Ammon’s son, but from my sire,’
as he expresses himself in his first epistle to Arbuthnot. He was
protuberant behind and before, in the words of his last biographer.
But he carried a mind in his face, as a reverend person once expressed
himself of a singular countenance. He had a brilliant eye, which
pervaded everything at a glance.”