But it was in the mouth and chin that the great beauty as well as expression of his fine countenance lay.  “Many pictures have been painted of him,” says a fair critic of his features, “with various success; but the excessive beauty of his lips escaped every painter and sculptor.  In their ceaseless play they represented every emotion, whether pale with anger, curled in disdain, smiling in triumph, or dimpled with archness and love.”  It would be injustice to the reader not to borrow from the same pencil a few more touches of portraiture.  “This extreme facility of expression was sometimes painful, for I have seen him look absolutely ugly—­I have seen him look so hard and cold, that you must hate him, and then, in a moment, brighter than the sun, with such playful softness in his look, such affectionate eagerness kindling in his eyes, and dimpling his lips into something more sweet than a smile, that you forgot the man, the Lord Byron, in the picture of beauty presented to you, and gazed with intense curiosity—­I had almost said—­as if to satisfy yourself, that thus looked the god of poetry, the god of the Vatican, when he conversed with the sons and daughters of man.”

His head was remarkably small[1],—­so much so as to be rather out of proportion with his face.  The forehead, though a little too narrow, was high, and appeared more so from his having his hair (to preserve it, as he said,) shaved over the temples; while the glossy, dark-brown curls, clustering over his head, gave the finish to its beauty.  When to this is added, that his nose, though handsomely, was rather thickly shaped, that his teeth were white and regular, and his complexion colourless, as good an idea perhaps as it is in the power of mere words to convey may be conceived of his features.

[Footnote 1:  “Several of us, one day,” says Colonel Napier, “tried on his hat, and in a party of twelve or fourteen, who were at dinner, not one could put it on, so exceedingly small was his head.  My servant, Thomas Wells, who had the smallest head in the 90th regiment (so small that he could hardly get a cap to fit him), was the only person who could put on Lord Byron’s hat, and him it fitted exactly.”]

In height he was, as he himself has informed us, five feet eight inches and a half, and to the length of his limbs he attributed his being such a good swimmer.  His hands were very white, and—­according to his own notion of the size of hands as indicating birth—­aristocratically small.  The lameness of his right foot[1], though an obstacle to grace, but little impeded the activity of his movements; and from this circumstance, as well as from the skill with which the foot was disguised by means of long trowsers, it would be difficult to conceive a defect of this kind less obtruding itself as a deformity; while the diffidence which a constant consciousness of the infirmity gave to his first approach and address made, in him, even lameness a source of interest.