The different characters of the two statesmen were legible in their faces.

The brow, the eye, and the mouth of Halifax indicated a powerful intellect and an exquisite sense of the ludicrous; but the expression was that of a sceptic, of a voluptuary, of a man not likely to venture his all on a single hazard, or to be a martyr in any cause.

To those who are acquainted with his countenance it will not seem wonderful that the writer in whom he most delighted was Montaigne.

[418] Danby was a skeleton; and his meagre and wrinkled, though handsome and noble, face strongly expressed both the keenness of his parts and the restlessness of his ambition.

Already he had once risen from obscurity to the height of power.