1811-1863
[Sidenote: Theodore Taylor’s _Thackeray_.]
“As for the man himself who has lectured us, he is a stout, healthful,
broad-shouldered specimen of a man, with cropped grayish hair, and
keenish gray eyes, peering very sharply through a pair of spectacles
that have a very satiric focus. He seems to stand strongly on his own
feet, as if he would not be easily blown about or upset, either by
praise or pugilists; a man of good digestion, who takes the world easy,
and scents all shams and humours (straightening them between his thumb
and forefinger) as he would a pinch of snuff.”--1852.
[Sidenote: Stoddard’s _Anecdote Biography of Thackeray_.]
“Good portraits of Thackeray are so common, and so many of your
readers saw him in the lecture-room, that I need not describe his
person. The misshaped nose, so broad at the bridge and so stubby at
the end, was the effect of an early accident. His near-sightedness,
unless hereditary, must have had, I think, a similar origin, for no
man had less the appearance of a student who had weakened his sight by
application to books. In his gestures--especially in the act of bowing
to a lady--there was a certain awkwardness, made more conspicuous by
his tall, well-proportioned, and really commanding figure. His hair,
at forty, was already gray, but abundant and massy; the cheeks had a
ruddy tinge, and there was no sallowness in the complexion; the eyes,
keen and kindly even when they bore a sarcastic expression, twinkled
through and sometimes over the spectacles. What I should call the
predominant expression of the countenance was courage--a readiness to
face the world on its own terms, without either bawling or whining,
asking no favour, yielding, if at all, from magnanimity. I have seen
but two faces on which this expression, coupled with that of high and
intellectual power, was equally striking--those of Daniel Webster
and Thomas Carlyle. But the former had a saturnine gloom even in its
animation, and the latter a variety and intensity of expression which
was absent from Thackeray’s.”
[Sidenote: Watts’s _Great Novelists_.]
“In stature he was tall and commanding, and he walked erect. With
gray eyes--not over luminous--and a noble brow, his appearance was
confident, but never conceited or aggressive. He wore long hair, and,
but for a small whisker, shaved clean. His features, if anything,
were immobile; the nose, which had been fractured in youth at the
Charterhouse, was, like Milton’s, ‘a thoughtful one,’ and the nostrils
were full and wide, as are those of all men of genius, according to
Balzac.”