Odious Obadiah

I may have mentioned that I am discovering the “classic” novels, thanks to being able to download these public domain works for free and read them on my black Kobo.

My find of the year may be the works of Anthony Trollope. I have finished his The Warden, and have just started Barchester Towers.

I love his description of the Reverend Obadiah Slope:

Mr. Slope is tall, and not ill-made. His feet and hands are large, as has ever been the case with all his family, but he has a broad chest and wide shoulders to carry off these excrescences, and on the whole his figure is good. His countenance, however, is not specially prepossessing. His hair is lank and of a dull pale reddish hue. It is always formed into three straight, lumpy masses, each brushed with admirable precision and cemented with much  grease; two of them adhere closely to the sides of his face, and the other lies at right angles above them. He  wears no whiskers, and is always punctiliously shaven. His face is nearly of the same colour as his hair, though perhaps a little redder: it is not unlike beef–beef, however, one would say, of a bad quality. His forehead is  capacious and high, but square and heavy and unpleasantly shining. His mouth is large, though his lips are thin  and bloodless; and his big, prominent, pale-brown eyes inspire anything but confidence. His nose, however, is  his redeeming feature: it is pronounced, straight and well-formed; though I myself should have liked it better  did it not possess a somewhat spongy, porous appearance, as though it had been cleverly formed out of a red-coloured cork.

Funny how I lacked any interest in Project Gutenberg, until I could download their titles onto a portable device.