William Edward Hartpole Lecky, 'the eighteenth century'

Spy (Leslie Ward) renders the Irish historian W. E. H. Lecky — then celebrated for his History of England in the Eighteenth Century — as a figure almost comically marooned in his own subject. The profile is elongated and nose-heavy in Ward's characteristic manner, the reddish hair swept back beneath a glossy top hat. Lecky carries a furled umbrella tucked under one arm and grey gloves in his free hand, the picture of a distracted Victorian gentleman of letters rather than a man of action. The caption 'the eighteenth century' works as both biography and gentle mockery: the scholar so immersed in a vanished age that he seems to inhabit it.