Shelley’s figure was a little above the middle height, slender, and of delicate construction, which appeared the rather from a lounging or waving manner in his gait, as though his frame was compounded merely of muscle and tendon, and that the power of walking was an achievement with him, and not a natural habit.  Yet I should suppose that he was not a valetudinarian, although that has been said of him, on account of his spare and vegetable diet:  for I have the remembrance of his scampering and bounding over the gorse-bushes on Hampstead Heath, late one night,—­now close upon us, and now shouting from the height, like a wild school-boy.  He was both an active and an enduring walker,—­feats which do not accompany an ailing and feeble constitution.  His face was round, flat, pale, with small features; mouth beautifully shaped; hair, bright-brown and wavy; and such a pair of eyes as are rarely seen in the human or any other head,—­intensely blue, with a gentle and lambent expression, yet wonderfully alert and engrossing:  nothing appeared to escape his knowledge.

Whatever peculiarity there might have been in Shelley’s religious faith, I have the best authority for believing that it was confined to the early period of his life.  The practical result of its course of action, I am sure, had its source from the “Sermon on the Mount.”  There is not one clause in that divine code which his conduct towards his fellow-mortals did not confirm, and substantiate him to be a follower of Christ.  Yet, when the news arrived in London of the death of Shelley and Captain Williams by drowning, the “Courier” newspaper—­an evening journal of that day—­capped the intelligence with the following remark:—­“He will now know whether there is a hell or not!”—­I believe that there are still one or two public fanatics who would think that surmise, but not one would dare to utter it in his journal.  So much for the progress of liberality, and the power of opinion.

At page 100 of the “Life of Keats,” Vol.  I., Mr. Monckton Milnes has quoted a literary portrait of him, which he received from a lady who used to see him at Hazlitt’s lectures at the Surrey Institution.  The building was on the south or right-hand side, and close to Blackfriars’ Bridge.  I believe that the whole of Hazlitt’s lectures, on the British Poets, the Writers of the Time of Elizabeth, and the Comic Writers, were delivered in that Institution, during the years 1817 and 1818; shortly after which time the establishment appears to have been broken up.  The lady’s remark upon the character and expression of Keats’s features is both happy and true.  She says,—­“His countenance lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness; it had an expression as if he had been looking on some glorious sight.”  That’s excellent.—­“His mouth was full, and less intellectual than his other features.”  True again.  But when our artist pronounces that “his eyes were large and blue” and