Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey: “a child who, at the age of three, had been presented by his father, as a reward for proficiency in his studies, with the twenty-four volumes of Smollett's History of England?”
The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins: “I saw Voltaire in red morocco, Shakespeare in blue, Walter Scott in green, the "History of England" in brown, the "Annual Register" in yellow calf.”