By the smaller section of it—poor, unthrifty, loose-handed fools—who belied the province of their birth so far as to be quick to spend and slow to save, and who therefore fell into want and famine and had to borrow of others their children's bread, the old miller was hated with a hate deeper and stronger because foced to be mute, and to submit, to cringe, and to be trod upon, in the miserable servitude of the hopeless debtor.

To Edward […] he was terrible, nerve-inflaming, poisonously asphyxiating. He sat rocking himself in the late Mr. Churchill's swing chair, smoking and twaddling.

The clerk had, I'm afraid, a shrew of a wife—shrill, vehement, and fluent. […] He had learned, by long experience, the best tactique under fire: he became actually taciturn; or, if he spoke, his speech was laconic and enigmatical; sometimes throwing out a proverb, and sometimes a text; and sometimes when provoked past endurance, spouting mildly a little bit of meek and venomous irony.

It is not literature that speaks kingward, priestward, nobleward, systemward, formward; but it is literature which throws off all these things and issues as a winged creature from the shell of the past.