Description of Personal Appearance.

MOTIVE 2
— Unity of effect is secured by assigning a fundamental quality to the following picture of a person :
together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock, perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a corn-field.
-WASHINGTON IRVING, The Sketch-Book.
 ANALYSIS OF THE MODEL
1. The paragraph structure is the same as in Description- motive I. 
Prove this by studying the first, the last, and the intervening sentences. What is the fundamental quality ? What expressions enforce this quality ?
2.	The material used to develop the fundamental quality consists of:
Items of personal appearance — figure, posture, gait, dress, features. Ai which sentence of the quotation do you find each of the items of personal appearance mentioned above ?
3.	In the order of arrangement, the larger or more general items are placed first.
Figure, posture, and gait are mentioned before details of the face. Prove this from the model. What details are put in phrases and clauses ?
4. The devices used in the handling of detail are :
a.	The giving of the summarizing sentence in the form of a simile instead of a general statement, as in Descrip¬tion-motive I. What is the simile ?
b.	Find another simile or comparison.
VI.	
These dim eyes have in vain explored for some months past a well-known figure, or part of the figure, of a man, who used to glide his comely upper half over the pavements of London, wheeling along with most ingenious celerity upon a machine of wood. . . . He was of robust make, with a florid, sailor-like complexion, and his head was bare to the storm and sunshine. He was a natural curiosity, a speculation to the scientific, a prodigy to the simple. The infant would stare at the mighty man brought down to his own level. The
common cripple would despise his own pusillanimity, viewing the hale stoutness, and hearty heart, of this half-limbed giant He seemed earth-born, an Antxus, and to suck in fresh vigor from the soil which he neighbored. He was a grand fragment ; as good as an Elgin marble. The nature, which should have recruited his reft legs and thighs, was not lost, but only retired into his upper parts, and he was half a Hercules. . . . . He was as the man-part of a centaur from which the horse-half had been cloven in some dire
Lapithan controversy. -CHARLES LAMB, Essays of Ella.
Category:Character