The English Spy, page 128 by Bernard Blackmantle
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breakfast, I received a visit from Mr. Mark Supple, the scout, of whom mine host of the Mitre had on the preceding night spoken so highly. There was nothing certainly very prepossessing in his exterior appearance; and if he had not previously been eulogised as the most estimable of college servants, I should not have caught the impression from a first glance. He was somewhere about sixty years of age, of diminutive stature and spare habit, a lean brother with a scarlet countenance, impregnated with tints of many a varied hue, in which however the richness of the ruby and the soft purple of the ultramarine evidently predominated. His forehead was nearly flat; upon his eyebrows and over his os frontis and scalp, a few straggling straight hairs were extended as an apology for a wig, but which was much more like a discarded crow's nest turned upside down. Immense black bushy eyebrows overhung a pair of the queerest looking oculars I had ever seen; below which sprung forth what had once been, no doubt, a nose, and perhaps in youth an elegant feature; but, Heaven help the wearer! it was now grown into such a strange form, and presented so many choice exuberances, that one might have supposed it was the original Bardolph's, and charged with the additional sins of every succeeding generation. The loss of his ~146~~ teeth had caused the other lip to retire inwards, and consequently the lower one projected forth, supported by a huge chin, like the basin or receiver round the crater of a volcano.
His costume was of a fashion admirably corresponding with his person. It might once have graced a dean, or, perhaps, a bishop, but it was evident the present wearer was not by when the artiste of the needle took his measure or instructions. Three men of Mark's bulk might very well have been buttoned up in the upper habiliment; and as for the inexpressibles, they hung round his ultimatum like the petticoat trowsers of a Dutch smuggler: then for the colour, it might once have been