Misc. on that sort of thing....

[Mark Kohut]

not really relevant to M& D at all, just serendipity fun after Monte's
fine post. It seems Charles Dudley Warner, pals and co-writer with
Mark Twain of The Gilded Age entitled a travel journal with that
phrase...and like that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baddeck,_And_That_Sort_of_Thing

Also, putting the phrase 'sort of thing' into Google's N--Gram analysis
shows its use in books[Google's digitalized books] only after early 1860's.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22sort+of+thing%22&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2C%22%20sort%20of%20thing%20%22%3B%2Cc0
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