While the city and citadel of Messina were being besieged by the Austrians, English, and Sardinians, a dispute arose as to the possession of the Spanish men-of-war within the mole.
— from The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 by A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

Though needing to effect a mortgage, I desire to put no one to the risk of having to pay the two roubles on each living soul; wherefore I have conceived the idea of relieving landowners of that distasteful obligation by acquiring dead and absconded souls who have failed to disappear from the revision list.
— from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol

“How, sir?” replies young Nightingale, “is there this difference between having already done an act, and being in honour engaged to do it?”
— from History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding

triumphantly into a dawn arrival at Hardwar
— from Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda

that the precincts of those four walls would thenceforth be his world—his world, his home, his tomb, at once a dwelling-and a burial-place—till he were borne to a darker and a narrower one.
— from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne

His very popularity seemed a disgrace and a treason to Brissenden.
— from Martin Eden by Jack London

The publicans and their retainers rule the ward meetings (for everybody else hates the worry of politics and stays at home); the delegates from the ward meetings organize as a nominating convention and make up a list of candidates—one convention offering a democratic and another a republican list of incorruptibles; and then the great meek public come forward at the proper time and make unhampered choice and bless Heaven that they live in a free land where no form of despotism can ever intrude.
— from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Charles Dudley Warner

He tells me he is commanded by the King to go down to the Northward to satisfy the Deputy Lieutenants of Yorkshire, who have desired to lay down their commissions upon pretence of having no profit by their places but charge, but indeed is upon the Duke of Buckingham’s being under a cloud (of whom there is yet nothing heard), so that the King is apprehensive of their discontent, and sends him to pacify them, and I think he is as good a dissembler as any man else, and a fine person he is for person, and proper to lead the Pensioners, but a man of no honour nor faith I doubt.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

To the westward, the northward, and the southward, as far as I could see, lay a boundless sheet of apparently unruffled ocean, which every moment gained a deeper and a deeper tint of blue and began already to assume a slight appearance of convexity.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition Table Of Contents And Index Of The Five Volumes by Edgar Allan Poe

Two men had come to the Congress with a definite aim: Alexander had resolved to gain the Duchy of Warsaw, and to form it, with or without some part of Russian Poland, into a Polish kingdom, attached to his own crown: Talleyrand had determined, either on the question of Poland, or on the question of Saxony, which arose out of it, to break allied Europe into halves, and to range France by the side of two of the great Powers against the two others.
— from A History of Modern Europe, 1792-1878 by Charles Alan Fyffe

Since this kind of bellows does not give a vigorous blast, because they are drawn apart and compressed slowly, the smelter is not able during a whole day to smelt much more than half a centumpondium of tin.
— from De Re Metallica, Translated from the First Latin Edition of 1556 by Georg Agricola

I do not suppose that any of the more serious critics of the expedient would be prepared to propose and defend an alternative.
— from The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction by John Buchan

All his own thoughts and feelings and duties and affections are now concentrated in your Majesty, and he desires nothing more for his remaining years than to serve your Majesty, or, if that service ceases, to live still on its memory as a period of his existence most interesting and fascinating."
— from Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey

It was about five o’clock on as dreary an afternoon as I ever remember, when the slow train, which crawls always at a most miserable pace from Peterborough across the eastern counties, deposited me at Little Drayton.
— from Mr. Marx's Secret by E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim

6.—In opposition to the classification and doctrine adopted above, many of our grammarians teach, that my, thy, this, her, our, your, their , are adjectives or "adjective pronouns;" and that mine, thine, hers, its, ours, yours, theirs , are personal pronouns in the possessive case.
— from The Grammar of English Grammars by Goold Brown

Our hiding place quickly became too hot, and as we broke cover and dashed across another small clearing we were spied again by those on the ridge, who shouted to the soldiers and directed the chase by waving their caps.
— from The Laird's Luck and Other Fireside Tales by Arthur Quiller-Couch

Anyhow the fact that Gray's Inn [1] was alone designated as a home for infamy—whilst the Inner Temple was pointed to as the hospice most popular with rich men, the Middle Temple as the society frequented by Templars of narrow means, and Lincoln's Inn as the abode of gentlemen—is, of itself, a proof that the pervading manners of the last three institutions were outwardly decorous.
— from A Book About Lawyers by John Cordy Jeaffreson

But there are some who can get a great deal more out of it than that ... and if they don't the rest of it is a drag and a weariness."
— from The Lovely Lady by Mary Hunter Austin