"The best they could muster in the way of impeachment was the following: “However unwilling Mr. Morris may be to acknowledge the term engrossing or monopolizing, yet as he did not import the cargo, and did, in partnership with Mr. Sollekoff, get the whole into his possession, we are at a loss to find any other name, though the expedition with which he entered on the sale abates the rigorous sense generally applied to these words.”"
"I had washed and made myself presentable in a plain black dress of silk gabardine with a long, very full skirt, buttons down the front, in its way a classic-which is to say that with a hoop under it, this dress would have passed muster in the previous century."
"Parts of it were evidently written when the theme stirred and moved the writer: others, again, when he was merely bent on reproducing scenes that lived in his singularly retentive memory, with needless minuteness of detail, and in any kind of couplet that might pass muster in respect of scansion and rhyme."