s the hatchment of Melpomene. Even
the hand of Grinling Gibbons at the porch does not prevent one from
recalling Crabbe's memorable lines:

Dark but not awful, dismal but yet mean,
With anxious bustle moves the cumbrous scene;
Presents no objects tender or profound,
But spreads its cold unmeaning gloom around.

Here in the midst of overshadowing warehouses--and until he came hither
at the age of fifty-one few people in London had ever heard his name, a
name which even now is more frequently pronounced as if it rhymed with
_cringe_, instead of with _sting_--here the Dean of St. Paul's, looking
at one moment like Don Quixote, at another like a figure from the pages
of Dostoevsky, and flitting almost noiselessly about rooms which would
surely have been filled for the mind of Dickens with ghosts of both
sexes and of every order and degree; here the great Dean faces the
problems of the universe, dwells much with his own soul, and fights the
Seven Devils of Foolishness in a style which the Church of England has
not known since the days of Swift.

In appearance he is very tall, rigid, long-necked, and extremely thin,
with fine dark hair and a lean grey clean-shaven face, the heavy-lidded
eyes of an almost Asian deadness, the upper lip projecting beyond the
lower, a drift of careless hair sticking boyishly forward from the
forehead, the nose thin, the mouth mobile but decisive, the whole set
and colour of the face stonelike and impassive.

In repose he looks as if he had set himself to stare the Sphinx out of
countenance and not yet had lost heart in the matter. When he smiles, it
is as if a mischievous boy looked out of an undertaker's window; but the
smile, so full of wit, mischief, and even gaiety, is gone in an instant,
quicker than I have ever seen a smile flash out of sight, and
immediately the fine scholarly face sinks back into somnolent austerity
which for all its aloofness and immemorial calm suggests, in some
fashion for which I cannot account, a frozen whimsicality.

Few public men, with perhaps the exception of Samuel Rogers, ever cared
so little about appearance. It is believed that the Dean would be
indistinguishable from a tramp but for the constant admonishment and
active benevolence of Mrs. Inge. As it is, he is something more than
shabby, and only escapes a disreputable appearance by the finest of
hairs, resembling, as I have suggested, one of those poor Russian
noblemen whom Dostoev