To the common voice from
the brush of Holbein, which permits us to form our own opinions and
shows us a lady who is certainly very far from deserving his lordship's
harsh stricture. Similarly, I like to believe that Lord Henry was
wrong in his pronouncement upon Sir Oliver, and I am encouraged in this
belief by the pen-portrait which he himself appends to it. "He was,"
he says, "a tall, powerful fellow of a good shape, if we except that
his arms were too long and that his feet and hands were of an uncomely
bigness. In face he was swarthy, with black hair and a black forked
beard; his nose was big and very high in the bridge, and his eyes sunk
deep under beetling eyebrows were very pale-coloured and very cruel and
sinister. He had--and this I have ever remarked to be the sign of
great virility in a man--a big, deep, rough voice, better suited to,
and no doubt oftener employed in, quarter-deck oaths and foulnesses
than the worship of his Maker."
Thus my Lord Henry Goade, and you observe how he permits his lingering
disapproval of the man to intrude upon his description of him. The
truth is that--as there is ample testimony in his prolific writings--
is lordship was something of a misanthropist. It was, in fact, his
misanthropy which drove him, as it has driven many another, to
authorship. He takes up the pen, not so much that he may carry out his
professed object of writing a chronicle of his own time, but to the end
that he may vent the bitterness engendered in him by his fall from
favour.
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