From Vagabondiana by John Thomas Smith, 1874.

Here's an ornate capital S from Fra Lippo Lippi by Margaret Vere Farrington, 1899.

"One out of suits with fortune," from Paul Jones's Alias By Henry Herman, 1890.

Here's an ornate capital T from The Hades of Ardenne, written and illustrated by T. T. Club, 1883.

As you know, the letter n is used to mean an unspecified variable, but if you wish to write "A to n" (like "A to Z," but to mean "A to anything") then the letter N would be misleading (as it might be taken to indicate the exact range between the letters A and N), so this is how to do it, as revealed in A Little Spasm at the Home of Wolfgang Mozart. Being a Sketch Printed from What Is (Supposedly) the Original Manuscript of the Little Journey to Mozart, 1901.

Here is revealed a long-held secret of typographers: exactly where the head and feet of an H are.  From Mistura Curiosa by James Archibald Sidey, 1886.

Q and U are associated through a mentor/protege contract, as we learn in St. Nicholas magazine, 1877.

Here's an L crossing a waterfall, from Seen in an Old Mirror by Mary Bathurst Deane, 1891.

We'd rather take our chances with the Sword of Damocles than this blade.  From The Earth Children by Henrietta M. Batson, 1897.

Capital M has four legs with extraordinarily well-developed calves, from The Oxford Thackeray.

Did you know that drop caps were once more difficult to work with?  From Zigzag Journeys in the Western States of America by Hezekiah Butterworth, 1884

From Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour, 1892.