Like many other famous men, he passed through a period of
shyness, which yielded to women's tactfulness only. From the first
they appreciated him; "if you were as gentle as your friend
Kinglake," writes Mrs. Norton reproachfully to Hayward in the
sulks. Another coaeval of those days calls him handsome--an
epithet I should hardly apply to him later--slight, not tall, sharp
featured, with dark hair well tended, always modishly dressed after
the fashion of the thirties, the fashion of Bulwer's exquisites, or
of H. K. Browne's "Nicholas Nickleby" illustrations; leaving on all
who saw him an impression of great personal distinction, yet with
an air of youthful ABANDON which never quite left him: "He was
pale, small, and delicate in appearance," says Mrs. Simpson, Nassau
Senior's daughter, who knew him to the end of his life; while Mrs.
Andrew Crosse, his friend in the Crimean decade, cites his finely
chiselled features and intellectual brow, "a complexion bloodless
with the pallor not of ill-health, but of an old Greek bust."
CHAPTER II--"EOTHEN"
"Eothen" appeared in 1844. Twice, Kinglake tells us, he had
essayed the story of his travels, twice abandoned it under a sense
of strong disinclination to write.
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