e
excessive beauty of his lips escaped every painter and sculptor. In their
ceaseless play they represented every emotion, whether pale with anger,
curled in disdain, smiling in triumph, or dimpled with archness and love."
It would be injustice to the reader not to borrow from the same pencil a
few more touches of portraiture. "This extreme facility of expression was
sometimes painful, for I have seen him look absolutely ugly--I have seen
him look so hard and cold, that you must hate him, and then, in a moment,
brighter than the sun, with such playful softness in his look, such
affectionate eagerness kindling in his eyes, and dimpling his lips into
something more sweet than a smile, that you forget the man, the Lord Byron,
in the picture of beauty presented to you, and gazed with intense
curiosity--I had almost said--as if to satisfy yourself, that thus looked
the god of poetry, the god of the Vatican, when he conversed with the sons
and daughters of man."

His head was remarkably small--so much so as to be rather out of
proportion with his face. The forehead, though a little too narrow, was
high, and appeared more so from his having his hair (to preserve it, as he
said) shaved over the temples; while the glossy, dark-brown curls,
clustering over his head, gave the finish to its beauty. When to this is
added, that his nose, though handsomely, was rather thickly shaped, that
his teeth were white and regular, and his complexion colourless, as good
an idea perhaps as it is in the power of mere words to convey may be
conceived of his features.

In height he was, as he himself has informed us, five feet eight inches
and a half, and to the length of his limbs he attributed his being such a
good swimmer. His hands were very white, and--according to his own notion
of the size of hands as indicating birth--aristocratically small. The
lameness of his right foot, though an obstacle to grace, but little
impeded the activity of his movements; and from this circumstance, as well
as from the skill with which the foot was disguised by means of long
trousers, it would be difficult to conceive a defect of this kind less
obtruding itself as a deformity; while the diffidence which a constant
consciousness of the infirmity gave to his first approach and address made,
in him, even lameness a source of interest.

* * * * *

_Printed and Published by J. LIMBIRD, 143, Strand, (near Somerset House,)
London_.