Long years of suffering had impaired neither the soundness of her judgment nor the sweetness, and even gaiety, of her happy, unselfish disposition.
— from The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 by Rustichello of Pisa

Moreover, the established guard at each gate of the city is 1000 armed men; not that you are to imagine this guard is kept up for fear of any attack, but only as a guard of honour for the Sovereign, who resides there, and to prevent thieves from doing mischief in the town.[NOTE 7] NOTE 1.—
— from The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 by Rustichello of Pisa

The Christians, who had now possessed above forty years the civil and ecclesiastical government of the empire, had contracted the insolent vices of prosperity, 135 and the habit of believing that the saints alone were entitled to reign over the earth.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

He thought of Mrs. Bardell; and every glance of the old lady’s eyes threw him into a cold perspiration.
— from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

This passage is very obscurely expressed, but the general meaning is clear: "Until endurance grow sinewed with action, and the full-grown will, circled through all experiences grow or become law, be identified with law, and commeasure perfect freedom".
— from The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson by Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron

There were very common hacks, with father and mother and all the children in them; conspicuous little open carriages with celebrated ladies of questionable reputation in them; there were Dukes and Duchesses abroad, with gorgeous footmen perched behind, and equally gorgeous outriders perched on each of the six horses; there were blue and silver, and green and gold, and pink and black, and all sorts and descriptions of stunning and startling liveries out, and I almost yearned to be a flunkey myself, for the sake of the fine clothes.
— from The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

he said, frowning and making an energetic gesture of inquiry with his small white plump hand.
— from War and Peace by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

She very graciously consoled our gallant for the mishap of which he complained, representing Wilhelmina (that was the daughter's name) as a pert, illiterate, envious baggage, of whose disgust he ought to make no consideration; then she recounted many instances of her own generosity to that young lady, with the returns of malice and ingratitude she had made; and, lastly, enumerated all the imperfections of her person, education, and behaviour; that he might see with what justice the gypsy pretended to vie with those who had been distinguished by the approbation and even gallantry of the best people in Vienna.
— from The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom — Complete by T. (Tobias) Smollett

to men gar ischyrotaton enapotithetai tois plêsion hapasin, ekeinôn d' au palin hekaston eis heter' atta tôn asthenesterôn, eit' authis ekeinôn hekaston eis alla kai tout' epi pleiston gignetai, mechri per an ex hapantôn elaunomenon to perittôma kath' hen ti meinê tôn asthenestatôn; enteuthen gar ouket' eis allo dynatai metarrhein, hôs an mête dechomenou tinos auto tôn ischyroterôn mêt' apôsasthai dynamenou tou peponthotos.
— from Galen: On the Natural Faculties by Galen

[70] has two vibrating tongues of wood, and is beaten with sticks that are smeared with an elastic gum obtained from the milky juice of plants; the yotl-bells of the Aztecs, that are hung in clusters like grapes; and a huge cylindrical drum, covered with the skins of great serpents, like the one that Bernal Diaz saw when he went with Cortes into the Mexican temple, and of whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a description.
— from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

If it be so, then I am either guilty, or in reality free.
— from Deerbrook by Harriet Martineau

'A man who in the middle of an Election goes over to France to fight a duel, can hardly expect to win; he has all the morality of an English borough opposed to him,' she said; and seeing the young lady stiffen: 'Oh!
— from Beauchamp's Career — Volume 4 by George Meredith

Such thoughts passed through his mind as he sat in a straight-backed sort of rack in the Castle of Mauzé, just opposite to the Cardinal de Richelieu, who, having cast off cuirass and scarlet robe, was seated, in an easy gown of deep purple, in that comfortable arm-chair.
— from Lord Montagu's Page: An Historical Romance by G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford) James

It cannot surely admit of a doubt, and has been already affirmed more than once by the committee, that for an extraordinary grant of money the consent of military tenants in chief was required long before the reign of John.
— from View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, Vol. 3 by Henry Hallam

In its lowest fossiliferous beds we detect a Lycopodite which not a little resembles one of the commonest of our club mosses,— Lycopodium clavatum ,—with a minute fern and a large striated plant resembling a calamite, and evidently allied to an existing genus of Acrogens, the equisetaceæ.
— from The Testimony of the Rocks or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed by Hugh Miller

The traitors now proposed that Brasidas and his army should be admitted, but they were overruled by the general voice of the people, and it was agreed that the Athenian Eucles, governor of Amphipolis, should send a message for help to another Athenian officer, who was commissioned to watch the interests of Athens in Thrace.
— from Stories from Thucydides by Thucydides

"Verily," he added, "in this mother country of wonder, fantasy, and everything great, one as easily believes in fair, enriching miracles of fate, as one does in the north in dreadful robbing miracles of spirits."
— from Titan: A Romance. v. 2 (of 2) by Jean Paul

He had been asleep perhaps three minutes, and every garment on him was wet with perspiration.
— from Harper's Round Table, January 21, 1896 by Various

The polytheistic religions of the Old World, created as they were in the infancy of society, no doubt under the guidance of a healthy instinct of dependence on the ruling power of the universe, but in the main inspired by the emotions and formulated by the imagination, without the regulating control of reason, could not hope to hold their ground permanently in the face of that rich growth of individual speculation which, from the sixth century before Christ, spread with such ample ramification from Asiatic and European Greece over the greater part of the civilised world.
— from What Does History Teach? Two Edinburgh Lectures by John Stuart Blackie

All around us the rank, woody growth was full of murmurs and movements of life, and perfumes from unseen blossoms disturbed one's thoughts with sweet insistence at every gust of wind, and always one heard the lapping of the sea-water through all its countless ways, for well it loves this country of Virginia and steals upon it, like a lover who will not be gainsaid, through meadows and thick woods and coarse swamps, until it is hard sometimes to say, when the tide be in, whether it be land or sea, and we who dwell therein might well account ourselves in a Venice of the New World.
— from The Heart's Highway: A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman