Middlemarch vocabulary

It was a picture of the lovely ---, which hung over the mantelpiece, the eyes and mouth of which were so beautiful, and the whole countenance so radiant with benignity and divine tranquillity, that I had a thousand times laid down my pen or my book to gather consolation from it, as a devotee from his patron saint.

Thomas De Quincey. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821)

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Seen now, in broad daylight, she looked tall, fair, and shapely; brown eyes with a benignant light in their irids, and a fine pencilling of long lashes round, relieved the whiteness of her large front;

Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre

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He came towards Leon, and, with that smile of wheedling benignity assumed by ecclesiastics when they question children—

Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary