'You scarcely
can conceive,' he writes to his brother in 1759, 'how much eight years
of disappointment, anguish, and study, have worn me down.... Imagine to
yourself a pale melancholy visage, with two great wrinkles between the
eye-brows, with an eye disgustingly severe, and a big wig; and you may
have a perfect picture of my present appearance,' i.e. at thirty years
of age. 'I can neither laugh nor drink,' he goes on; 'have contracted an
hesitating, disagreeable manner of speaking, and a visage that looks
ill-nature itself; in short, I have thought myself into a settled
melancholy, and an utter disgust of all that life brings with it.' It is
obvious that this description is largely coloured by passing depression.
'His features,' says one contemporary, 'were plain, but not
repulsive,--certainly not so when lighted up by conversation.' Another
witness--the 'Jessamy Bride'--declares that 'his benevolence was
unquestionable, and his countenance bore every trace of it.' His true
likeness would seem to lie midway between the grotesquely truthful
sketch by Bunbury prefixed in 1776 to the 'Haunch of Venison', and the
portrait idealized by personal regard, which Reynolds painted in 1770.
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