A hideous account of a hanging, drawing, and quartering had first attracted him to it; but later he discovered the book (Curiosities of Literature was its name) full of the finest confused feeding—such as forgeries and hoaxes, Italian literary societies, religious and scholastic controversies of old when men (even that most dreary John Milton, of Lycidas) slanged each other, not without dust and heat, in scandalous pamphlets; personal peculiarities of the great; and a hundred other fascinating inutilities.

While ostensibly a romantic novel, Moby Dick can also be viewed as an encyclopedic fiction.

My little cousin is such a dear, always drawing me pictures.

A knight her met in mighty arms embossed.