But really, I don't see how, from the
description you have, you will be able to recognise your man, even if he is on board the Mongolia."
But I think you will be as much surprised as I was when I tell you that the
description given by the people at Aldborough of Miss Bygrave's appearance is most startlingly and unaccountably like the
description of Magdalen's appearance.
Individual Persons and Human Life: Is the author skilful in
descriptions of personal appearance and dress?
These qualities, it is true, are those pre-eminently of the "Works and Days": the literary values of the "Theogony" are of a more technical character, skill in ordering and disposing long lists of names, sure judgment in seasoning a monotonous subject with marvellous incidents or episodes, and no mean imagination in depicting the awful, as is shown in the
description of Tartarus (ll.
"That part of the
description is useless," the doctor remarked; "he would change his clothes."
But suppose a literary artist ventured to go into a painstaking and elaborate
description of one of these grisly things--the critics would skin him alive.
Inchbare's
description," returned Sir Patrick, "you will be a great deal cleverer than I am.
But our former
description of a citizen will admit of correction; for in some governments the office of a juryman and a member of the general assembly is not an indeterminate one; but there are particular persons appointed for these purposes, some or all of the citizens being appointed jurymen or members of the general assembly, and this either for all causes and all public business whatsoever, or else for some particular one: and this may be sufficient to show what a citizen is; for he who has a right to a share in the judicial and executive part of government in any city, him we call a citizen of that place; and a city, in one word, is a collective body of such persons sufficient in themselves to all the purposes of life.
The celebrity of the bread-fruit tree, and the conspicuous place it occupies in a Typee bill of fare, induces me to give at some length a general
description of the tree, and the various modes in which the fruit is prepared.
He called him "The Well of English undefiled,"* and after many hundred years we still feel the truth of the
description. He uses many of Chaucer's words, which even then had grown old-fashioned and were little used.
A short hint of what we can do in the sublime, and a
description of Miss Sophia Western.
It is easy to observe from this
description that he hath no resemblance of a horse, and indeed nothing could give occasion to the name but some likeness in his ears, and his neighing and snorting like a horse when he is provoked or raises his head out of water.