But surely it is a far less serious thing for you to take and pay it back to-day than it would have been to pay the tithe of it, before we came to you; since the limit between less and more is no fixed number, but depends on the relative capacity of payer and recipient, and your yearly income now is larger than the whole property which you possessed in earlier days.
— from Anabasis by Xenophon

“Indeed?” cried Mrs. Montagu, surprised; “that I did not expect, for I have been informed it is the work of a young lady and therefore, though I expected a very pretty book, I supposed it to be a work of mere imagination, and the name I thought attractive; but life and manners I never dreamt of finding.”
— from The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay — Volume 1 by Fanny Burney

But lightly a man is nere the better for their praiers, for they commit al deadly sinne for the most part of them in mingling their drinke, the vintners in the highest degree.
— from The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse by Thomas Nash

No doubt these pictures are a little ideal, a little poetical; the unfavorable side of barbarian life and manners is not displayed in all its crudity.
— from Protestantism and Catholicity compared in their effects on the civilization of Europe by Jaime Luciano Balmes

Isaac Lankershim—father of J. B. Lankershim and Mrs. I. N. Van Nuys—who first visited California in 1854, came from San Francisco in 1869 and bought, for one hundred and fifteen thousand dollars, part of Andrés Pico's San Fernando rancho , which he stocked with sheep.
— from Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913 Containing the Reminiscences of Harris Newmark by Harris Newmark

Democracy: fundamental ideas in it, 32-9, 123; development of extreme form and of certain abuses of it in America, 47-50; its institutions and practices still in an early stage of development, 50; a foolish perversion of it in the Northern States, 59, 218; Lincoln sees a decay of worthy and honest democratic feeling, 117; the Civil War regarded by Lincoln and many in North as a test whether democratic government could maintain itself, 183-4, 362-3, 425; the sense in which Lincoln was a great democrat, 455-6.
— from Abraham Lincoln by Charnwood, Godfrey Rathbone Benson, Baron

[68] And in order to carry the system recommended by them into effect, they proposed to divide the railroad between Liverpool and Manchester into nineteen stages of about a mile and a half each, with twenty-one engines fixed at the different points to work the trains forward.
— from The Life of George Stephenson and of his Son Robert Stephenson Comprising Also a History of the Invention and Introduction of the Railway Locomotive by Samuel Smiles

He owns broad lands and manors in nearly every county north of the Tyne; and, when he came of age four years ago, the border-side blazed with as many bale-fires, as ever were lighted in old days to give warning that the lances of Liddesdale were out on the foray.
— from Barren Honour: A Novel by George A. (George Alfred) Lawrence

So, for instance, the region in which we now are, being low and marshy, is naturally infested with reptiles, which are so much the more dangerous and to be dreaded, because they are half-calcined and rendered furious by the rays of a torrid sun.
— from The Bee Hunters: A Tale of Adventure by Gustave Aimard