TS Eliot the Phrenologist

When Eliot writes about Byron his head goes gooey:

"I [...] suggest considering Byron as a Scottish poet -- I say 'Scottish' and not 'Scots' since he wrote in English. The one poet of his time with whom he could be considered to be in competition, a poet of whom he spoke invariably with the highest respect, was Sir Walter Scott. I have always seen, or imagined that I saw, in busts of the two poets, a certain resemblance in the shape of the head. The comparison does honour to Byron, and when you examine the two faces there is no further resemblance. Were one a person who liked to have busts about, a bust of Scott would be something one could live with. There is an air of nobility about that head, an air of magnanimity, and of that inner and perhaps unconscious serenity that belongs to great writers who are also great men. But Byron -- that pudgy face suggesting a tendency to corpulence, that weakly sensual mouth, that restless triviality of expression, and worst of all that blind look of the self-conscious beauty; the bust of Byron is that of a man who was every inch the touring tragedian."

Come off it. Byron was politically and personally more courageous than all the other Romantics put together. It sounds like Eliot is just sucking up to the English establishment's worst prejudices.