Venerable to me is the hard hand, crooked, coarse, wherein, notwithstanding, lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the scepter of this planet.

I descended a little on the side of that delicious vale, surveying it with a secret kind of pleasure (though mixed with other afflicting thoughts,) to think that this was all my own; that I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly, and had a right of possession; and, if I could convey it, I might have it in inheritance as completely as any lord of a manor in England.

What Niccola added of indefeasibly his own to the style of these continuators of a dead tradition, was feeling for the beauty of classical work in a good age, and through that feeling a more perfect sympathy with nature.

Pragmatical (didactic) reflections, though in their nature decidedly abstract, are truly and indefeasibly of the present, and quicken the annals of the dead past with the life of today.