Matthew Gregory Lewis 1775-1818
The Southern Literary Messenger , 1849.
“In person, Mat Lewis (as his intimate friends at first termed him) was quite ordinary; his stature was rather diminutive; his face was almost an ellipse, looking upon it from the side, and his features though pleasant were not to be regarded as handsome. His forehead, however, was high and his eyes very lustrous.”
Jeaffreson’s Novels and Novelists .
“Lewis’s personal appearance was not prepossessing. He describes himself as
‘Of passions strong, of hasty nature,
Of graceless form and dwarfish stature.’
He had, moreover, large gray eyes, thick features, and an inexpressive countenance. When he talked he had an insufferable habit of drawing the fore-finger of his right hand across his eyelid, and in conversation he was guilty of the absurd affectation of a drawling tone such as was popular with dandies.”
New Monthly Magazine , 1848.
“Matthew Gregory Lewis. Of this gentleman I knew but little, not having encountered him half a dozen times after my introduction to him at the house of Nat Middleton, the banker. With a short thick-set figure, unintellectual features, and a disagreeable habit of peering, being very short-sighted, his aspect was by no means prepossessing; but as he had ‘that within which passeth show,’ he recovered the ground lost at starting as rapidly as Wilkes could have done.”