to act his subject, apparently without premeditated art, in the liveliest pantomime.  He had no power of voice-mimicry, and none of the ordinary gifts of the actor.  A tall and slim figure, not yet shortened from its five feet ten or eleven by the habitual stoop, which ten years later brought him down to less than middle height; a stiff, blue frock-coat; prominent, half-starched wristbands, and tall collars of the Gladstonian type; and the bright blue stock which every one knows for his heraldic bearing:  no rings or gewgaws, but a long thin gold chain to his watch:—­plain old-English gentleman, neither fashionable bourgeois nor artistic mountebank.

But he gave himself over to his subject with such unreserved intensity of imaginative power, he felt so vividly and spoke so from the heart, that he became whatever he talked about, never heeding his professorial dignity, and never doubting the sympathy of his audience.  Lecturing on birds, he strutted like the chough, made himself wings like the swallow; he was for the moment a cat, when he explained (not “in scorn”) that engraving was the “art of scratch.”  If it had been an affectation of theatric display, we “emancipated school-boys,” as the Master of University used to call us, would have seen through it at once, and scorned him.  But it was so evidently the expression of his intense eagerness for his subject, so palpably true to his purpose, and he so carried his hearers with him, that one saw in the grotesque of the performance only the guarantee of sincerity.

If one wanted more proof of that, there was his face, still young-looking and beardless; made for expression, and sensitive to every change of emotion.  A long head, with enormous capacity of brain, veiled by thick wavy hair, not affectedly lengthy but as abundant as ever, and darkened into a deep brown, without a trace of grey; and short, light whiskers growing high over his cheeks.  A forehead not on the model of the heroic type, but as if the sculptor had heaped his clay in handfuls over the eyebrows, and then heaped more.  A big nose, aquiline, and broad at the base, with great thoroughbred nostrils and the “septum” between them thin and deeply depressed; and there was a turn down at the corners of the mouth, and a breadth of lower lip, that reminded one of his Verona griffin, half eagle, half lion; Scotch in original type, and suggesting a side to his character not all milk and roses.  And under shaggy eyebrows, ever so far behind, the fieriest blue eyes, that changed with changing expression, from grave to gay, from lively to severe; that riveted you, magnetised you, seemed to look through you and read your soul; and indeed, when they lighted on you, you felt you had a soul of a sort.  What they really saw is a mystery.  Some who had not persuaded them to see as others see, maintained that they only saw what they looked for; others, who had successfully deceived them, that they saw nothing.  No doubt they might be deceived; but I know now that they often took far shrewder measurements of men—­I do not say of women—­than anybody suspected.