📔 Middlemarch

Fred's voice had taken a tone of grumbling remonstrance, [...]

[T]hey had both been educated [...] on plans at once narrow and promiscuous, first in an English family and afterwards in a Swiss family at Lausanne, their bachelor uncle and guardian trying in this way to remedy the disadvantages of their orphaned condition.

Yes: I think he is a good fellow: rather miscellaneous and bric-à-brac, but likable.

"Don’t speak of my painting before Naumann," said Will. "He will tell you, it is all pfuscherei, which is his most opprobrious word!"

[G]oodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much privacy, elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, [...]

[…] the other medical visitors having a consultative influence, but no power to contravene Lydgate’s ultimate decisions;

There were plenty of dirty-handed men in the world to do dirty business; and Will protested to himself that his share in bringing Mr. Brooke through would be quite innocent.

[...] Celia was no longer the eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence in the 'Pilgrim's Progress.'

The country gentry of old time lived in a rarefied social air: dotted apart on their stations up the mountain they looked down with imperfect discrimination on the belts of thicker life below.