Paul's, looking
at one moment like Don Quixote, at another like a figure from the pages
of Dostoevsky, and flitting almost noiselessly about rooms which would
surely have been filled for the mind of Dickens with ghosts of both
sexes and of every order and degree; here the great Dean faces the
problems of the universe, dwells much with his own soul, and fights the
Seven Devils of Foolishness in a style which the Church of England has
not known since the days of Swift.
In appearance he is very tall, rigid, long-necked, and extremely thin,
with fine dark hair and a lean grey clean-shaven face, the heavy-lidded
eyes of an almost Asian deadness, the upper lip projecting beyond the
lower, a drift of careless hair sticking boyishly forward from the
forehead, the nose thin, the mouth mobile but decisive, the whole set
and colour of the face stonelike and impassive.
In repose he looks as if he had set himself to stare the Sphinx out of
countenance and not yet had lost heart in the matter. When he smiles, it
is as if a mischievous boy looked out of an undertaker's window; but the
smile, so full of wit, mischief, and even gaiety, is gone in an instant,
quicker than I have ever seen a smile flash out of sight, and
immediately the fine scholarly face sinks back into somnolent austerity
which for all its aloofness and immemorial calm suggests, in some
fashion for which I cannot account, a frozen whimsicality.
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