The Church History is not a scholarly work, notwithstanding its author's undoubted learning, but is a lively and gossipy account which has at least one virtue, that it entertains the reader.
— from English Literature Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World by William J. (William Joseph) Long

If Shakespeare had been born and bred on a barren and unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect would have had no outside material to work with, and could have invented none; and no outside influences , teachings, moldings, persuasions, inspirations, of a valuable sort, and could have invented none; and so Shakespeare would have produced nothing.
— from What Is Man? and Other Essays by Mark Twain

Hither, in St. Augustin ’s Bay, the Ships sometimes touch for Water, when they take the inner Passage for India , and do not design to stop at Johanna ; and we may observe from the sixth general Voyage set forth by the East-India Company, in Confirmation of what is hereafter said in Relation to Currents in general; that this inner Passage or Channel, has its Northern and Southern Currents strongest where the Channel is narrowest, and is less, and varies on different Points of the Compass, as the Sea comes to spread again, in the Passage cross the Line.
— from A General History of the Pyrates: from their first rise and settlement in the island of Providence, to the present time by Daniel Defoe

The news conveyed by Mr. Buscarlet shocks Molly greatly, and causes her, if not actual sorrow, at least a keen regret.
— from Molly Bawn by Duchess

[145] When a death is about to take place in the Baronet's family at Clifton Hall, in Nottinghamshire, a sturgeon is said to force its way up the river Trent, which runs at the foot of the beautifully wooded slope on which the Hall stands, and whenever white owls are seen perched on the family mansion of the Arundels of Wardour it is held to be an indication that a member of the family is near to death.
— from Human Animals by Frank Hamel

Thou hast not seen the Atheling Wulf who has just come; he is nearly as splendid as Cædwalla himself, and that is as much as saying he is like a god.
— from Cædwalla; or, The Saxons in the Isle of Wight: A Tale by Frank Cadogan Cowper

I am no timorous man, Master Fowd, but, judging that I should proceed with caution in such a matter—for I had reason to believe that there was devilry in it—I accosted him in Latin, (whilk it is maist becoming to speak to aught whilk taketh upon it as a goblin,) and conjured him in nomine , and so forth, with such words as my poor learning could furnish of a suddenty, whilk, to say truth, were not so many, nor altogether so purely latineezed as might have been, had I not been few years at college, and many at the pleugh.
— from The Pirate Andrew Lang Edition by Walter Scott

Certainly he is not as sharp and intelligent as are many of the town workmen, but he is a better mate than most of them, and when it comes to work he will stand by you to the last; he is not one to back out at the slightest difficulty.
— from Life in a Railway Factory by Alfred Williams

They chatted a few moments longer, then Ilse promised to call her if necessary, and said good-night.
— from The Crimson Tide: A Novel by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

The theorist of the ‘milieu,’ on the contrary, systematically attributes the chief importance, not to the phenomenon, but to its causal connection; he is not a sense which perceives, but a philosopher who endeavours to interpret and explain according to a system.
— from Degeneration by Max Simon Nordau

Thus, the Peninsular War found a contemporary historian in Napier, and similarly Alexander William Kinglake wrote the story of the next great European contest in which England was engaged after the fall of Napoleon.
— from The Age of Tennyson by Hugh Walker

He looked around, to see darkness closing him in, not a star visible; but the fen all alive with the sounds, which seemed to increase, for a bittern was answering the one overhead, and another at a greater distance forming himself into a second echo.
— from Dick o' the Fens: A Tale of the Great East Swamp by George Manville Fenn