Here's a precursor to the expression, "Hey, four-eyes."  From A String of Chinese Peach-Stones by William Arthur Cornaby, 1895.

Here's a precursor to Gary Barwin's Yiddish for Pirates (Random House Canada, 2016), a novel narrated by a parrot.  The caption reads, "The very parrot was a participator."  From Annals of the Parish and the Ayrshire Legatees by John Galt and illustrated by Charles Edmund Brock, 1895.

From Sketch-Book of the North by George Eyre Todd, 1896.

An illustration from A Social Departure by Sara Jeannette Duncan (1890).  The caption reads: "But the young Baboo sat in the drawing-room and waited a long time for his ice."

The bliss of oblivion and the phantom, burden, and chain of memory—these are two sides of the same thing, two dimensions of the conditio humana.

"I became an artifact in the proverbial nonsense of my mind." —Atlas Captain, "A Fraudulent Tradition"

From Funny Books for Boys and Girls, 1856.

An illustration from The Experiences of a Forty Niner During Thirty Four Years Residence in California and Australia by Charles Ferguson (1888).  The caption reads: "A race with a shower."

An illustration from Cornhill Magazine (1866).

"On the far side of words there is a poem writing us." —Stein Mehren, Fire & Ice: Nine Poets from Scandinavia and the North

We disagree with [The Magnetic Fields'] Stephin Merritt that "do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do ... are nonsense syllables." We also disagree that "There are only two, arguably three, one-letter words" (as we elaborately demonstrate in our dictionary of one-letter words). But live and let live. And his book, illustrated by the illustrious Roz Chast, is called 101 Two-Letter Words.  (Pictured below, Prof. Oddfellow measures magnetic fields in honor of Stephin Merritt.)

Pictured first is an ancient precursor to the Rabbit-Duck Illusion (1892), excavated from the Hopewell Mound City Group in Ohio and depicted in The Antiquarian (1897).

From Midsummer Eve by S. C. Hall, 1870.

From The Baby's Museum by Uncle Charlie, 1882.

Here's a precursor to the 'couch potato' phenomenon of the 1970s, from Bachelor Ballads and Other Lazy Lyrics by Harry Spurr and illustrated by J. Hassall (1899).