Hall, Eliza Calvert (1910). "Introduction". Sally Ann's Experience. Illustrated by G. Patrick Nelson, Theodore Brown Hapgood. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. pp. v - xii. http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ugAZAAAAYAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA50&dq=aunt+jane+of+kentucky&ots=Oaz4lMOoks&sig=_ET0k7b6BWOlRwCqW5Qja3baNvg#v=onepage&q=Introduction&f=false.
Lida Obenchain's description of her then famous story Sally Ann's Experience.
“Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.”
“They say the promise of a witch is like a plain woman, seldom remembered.”
Source: Volkhavaar (1977), Chapter 11 (p. 100)
Algernon, Act I
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
31 May 1830.
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Context: The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Book XII, ch. 7. Compare: "A flat case as plain as a pack-staff", Thomas Middleton, The Family of Love (1602-07), Act v, Scene 3.
Gil Blas (1715-1735)
“The point is plain as a pike-staff.”
Epistle to a Friend as quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.”
"As Eighty," from Bee Time Vine (1953, Yale University Press); written in 1923
“Plain as the nose on a man's face.”
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book III, Ch. 4.
“A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine.”
Canto 1, stanza 1
The Faerie Queene (1589–1596), Book I
