So thick bestrown abject and lost lay these, covering the flood. - John Milton.
He sat obediently with that tentative and abject eagerness of a man who has but one pleasure left and whom the world can reach only through one sense, for he was both blind and deaf. - 1931 Faulkner, Sanctuary, ii.
We are the queen's abjects, and must obey. - W. Shakespeare.
So, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again;.