well shaped.  Her bones are large, and she is exceedingly embonpoint.  The shape of all her features is fine, as is the form of her head, and particularly her ears; her teeth are a little irregular, but tolerably white; her eyes light blue, with a brown spot in one, which, though a defect, takes nothing away from her beauty or expression.  Her eyebrows and hair (which, by the bye, is never clean) are dark, and her complexion coarse.  Her expression is strongly marked, variable, and interesting; her movements in common life ungraceful; her voice loud, yet not disagreeable.”  Elliot’s briefer mention of her appearance is at once confirmatory and complementary of that of Mrs. St. George:  “Her person is nothing short of monstrous for its enormity, and is growing every day.  Her face is beautiful.”

To these opinions it may be not uninteresting to add the critical estimate of William Beckford, uttered many years later.  Beckford was not an admirable character, far from it; but he had known good society, and he had cultivated tastes.  Nelson accepted his hospitality, and, with the Hamiltons, spent several days under his roof, about Christmas time, 1800.  In reply to the question, “Was the second Lady Hamilton a fascinating woman?” he said, “I never thought her so.  She was somewhat masculine, but symmetrical in figure, so that Sir William called her his Grecian.  She was full in person, not fat, but embonpoint.  Her carriage often majestic, rather than feminine.  Not at all delicate, ill-bred, often very affected, a devil in temper when set on edge.  She had beautiful hair and displayed it.  Her countenance was agreeable,—­fine, hardly beautiful, but the outline excellent.  She affected sensibility, but felt none—­was artful; and no wonder, she had been trained in the Court of Naples—­a fine school for an English woman of any stamp.  Nelson was infatuated.  She could make him believe anything, that the profligate queen was a Madonna.  He was her dupe.  She never had a child in her life."[72] As to this last assertion, Beckford was not in a position to have personal knowledge.

But along with this native coarseness, which, if not ineradicable, was never eradicated, she possessed an intuitive and perfect sense, amounting to genius, for what propriety and good taste demanded in the presentation of an ideal part,—­the gift of the born actress.  Of her powers in this way the celebrated “Attitudes” were the chief example, and there is no disagreement among the witnesses, either as to their charm or as to the entire disappearance of the every-day woman in the assumed character.  “We had the attitudes a night or two ago by candle light,” wrote Sir Gilbert Elliot in 1796.  “They come up to my expectations fully, which is saying everything.  They set Lady Hamilton in a very different light from any I had seen her in before; nothing about her, neither her conversation, her manners, nor figure, announce the very refined taste which she discovers in this performance, besides