He seemed to make an ascent under the exhilarating circumstances of his new and increasingly responsible position, and to have the consciousness of a great mission, which nerved him to surmount all that was dubious in his earlier career.
— from Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne and Victoria by William Westgarth

He is sitting opposite me smoking a gigantic cigar and imbibing rum punch, and talking hard; he always talks hard, but is never a bore, and never palls on one in the slightest degree.
— from St. Andrews Ghost Stories Fourth Edition by William Thomas Linskill

It is now, therefore, as easy as it can be expected ever to be to follow the career of this extraordinary man, with all its cold and hot fits, its rage of lyrical amativeness, its Roman passion, and the high and clouded austerity of its final Anglicanism.
— from Gossip in a Library by Edmund Gosse