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"It would be a great honor to any one to be his companion," said Dorothea, energetically. "You like him, eh?" said Mr. Brooke, without showing any surprise, or other emotion. "Well, now, I've known Casaubon ten years, ever since he came to Lowick. But I never got anything out of him—any ideas, you know. However, he is a tiptop man and may be a bishop—that kind of thing, you know, if Peel stays in. And he has a very high opinion of you, my dear."
He [Professor Otto Lidenbrock] was an egotistical scholar, a deep well of scientific knowledge whose pulley screeched when you tried to draw something out of it. In a word, he was a miser.
(Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth")
"There was a time when he [Saruman] was always walking about my woods. He was polite in those days, always asking my leave (at least when he met me); and always eager to listen. I told him many things that he would never have found out by himself; but he never repaid me in like kind."
(JRR Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers")
"It must be admitted that his blood is a frightful mixture!" said Mrs. Cadwallader. "The Casaubon cuttle-fish fluid to begin with,
Casaubon is likened here to the cuttle-fish, which is similar to the squid or octopus.
Disturbing and apt analogy.
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Compare this unvisited tomb with an unwept death in "Silas Marner" that also has unknown consequences:
"There was a pauper's burial that week in Raveloe, and up Kench Yard at Batherley it was known that the dark-haired woman with the fair child, who had lately come to lodge there, was gone away again. That was all the express note taken that Molly had disappeared from the eyes of men. But the unwept death which, to the general lot, seemed as trivial as the summer-shed leaf, was charged with the force of destiny to certain human lives that we know of, shaping their joys and sorrows even to the end."
