Firstly, Dickens's eyes were not blue, but of a very distinct and
brilliant hazel--the colour traditionally assigned to Shakspeare's
eyes. Secondly, Dickens, although truly of a slight, compact figure,
was _not a very_ small man. I do not think he was below the average
middle height. I speak from my remembrance of him at a later day,
when I had become intimate with him; but curiously enough, I find on
looking back into my memory, that if I had been asked to describe him,
as I first saw him, I too should have said that he was very small.
Carlyle's words refer to Dickens's youth soon after he had published
_Pickwick_; and no doubt at this period he had a look of delicacy,
almost of effeminacy, if one may accept Maclise's well-known portrait
as a truthful record, which might give those who saw him the
impression of his being smaller and more fragile in build than was
the fact. In later life he lost this D'Orsay look completely, and was
bronzed and reddened by wind and weather like a seaman.
In fact, when I saw him subsequently in London, I think I should have
passed him in the street without recognising him. I never saw a man so
changed.
Any attempt to draw a complete pen-and-ink portrait of Dickens has
been rendered for evermore superfluous, if it were not presumptuous,
by the masterly and exhaustive life of him by John Forster. But one
may be allowed to record one's own impressions, and any small incident
or anecdote which memory holds, on the grounds set forth by the great
writer himself, who says in the introduction to the _American Notes_
(first printed in the biography)--"Very many works having just the
same scope and range have been already published.
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