Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/408

394 teach, it pants after things unseen." There may be truth in the above extract, there must be error.

In person he was above the middle height, with dark brown eyes, abundant hair, large arched eyebrows, and prominent mouth. His exterior was prepossessing. "To have his head and shoulders," said Lord Byron, with amusing flippancy, "I would almost have written his 'Sapphics. His manners were gentle, and free from all eccentricity. He was open and unconstrained in conversation among friends, though generally silent in mixed society. He disliked arguing, was tender of the feelings of others, and directed his attention to the subjects of conversation rather than the persons with whom he was conversing.

His house was his workshop. He ate, slept, lived amid his tools. Six or seven hundred volumes crowded his bed-room; upwards of two thousand adorned his sitting-room. This room was his favourite, the scene of his greatest labours. Here we see him day after day at his desk, "working hard and getting little—a bare maintenance, and hardly that; writing poems and history for posterity with his whole heart and soul; one daily progressing in learning, not so learned as he is poor, not so poor as proud, not so proud as happy." He was always collecting. Passages and attics were gradually filled with his accumulating volumes, which swelled at last to the number of fourteen thousand. One apartment was appropriated to old and disfigured books. These were carefully covered with cotton by the ladies of the house, who indulged their taste, their criticism, or their humour in the selection of the colours and patterns; enveloping a Quaker's book in drab, and so on. This room was jocosely called the Cottonian Library.

His method was peculiar. On the arrival of a parcel of books he would rapidly run through each volume, and