Kit Allen was a 19th Century gang leader and blood sports organizer, whose pit fighting hall was referred to as "an eating cancer on the body municipal, and within its crime begrimed walls have been enacted so many villainies, that the world has wondered why the wrath of vengeance did not consume it. But with all its festering and mephitic odors and criminalities, together with its votaries of Jezebel and Nana Sahib, the proprietor prospered and waxed rich. His rat and dog pits were known far and wide, and nowhere could the molochs and thugs find such delectable divertissement as Burns' pits afforded."
Here's Kit Allen, talking about his supposedly reformed rival gangboss Johnny "Wickedest Man in New York" Allen: "I've known Johnny Allen fourteen years and he couldn't be a pious man if he tried ever so hard."
'If he tried ever so hard' is just not a phrase you could imagine being spoken unironically and straight-faced by a man who threw wharf rats at a religious congregation, but it's how people in the 19th Century talked. We don't know how it would have been spoken by someone like that, or how it would have sounded to his listeners. We just know from written records that it was an ordinary phrase for people to say.
