Middlemarch vocabulary

the asseverations of his love, which seemed to him so vulgar that he was ashamed to utter them, she drank in eagerly, and gradually became calmer.

Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina (Translated by Constance Garnett)

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But that he was not to be, without ignorance or prejudice, mistaken for a gentleman, my father most strongly asseverates;

Charles Dickens. Great Expectations (1861)

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So, stupefied with the gaiety of the 'faithful,' drunken with comradeship, scandal and asseveration, Mme. Verdurin, perched on her high seat like a cage-bird whose biscuit has been steeped in mulled wine, would sit aloft and sob with fellow-feeling.

Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time [volume 1]