formed to let him pass freely through the assemblage, and he proceeded along bowing to those who were on each side. He was, according to Sir Joshua’s account, about four feet six high; very humpbacked and deformed; he wore a black coat; and according to the fashion of that time, had on a little sword. Sir Joshua adds that he had a large and very fine eye, and a long handsome nose; his mouth had those peculiar marks which always are found in the mouths of crooked persons; and the muscles which run across the cheek were so strongly marked as to appear like small cords. Roubilliac, the statuary, who made a bust of him from life, observed that his countenance was that of a person who had been much afflicted with headache, and he should have known the fact from the contracted appearance of the skin between his eyebrows, though he had not been otherwise apprised of it. This bust of Roubilliac is now (1791) in possession of Mr. Bindley, Commissioner of Stamps.
Speaking of Sir Godfrey Kneller, on whom the conversation turned last night when we had done with Pope, Sir Joshua observed that he painted so very carelessly during the latter part of his life that his pictures done at that time were wretched in the extreme. On the contrary, several of his early pictures were equal to the best of Vandyck.—Nov. 1, 1791.
It is remarkable that of twelve passages objected to in Spencer’s Essay on the English Odyssey, two
