[ The Geographer of Ravenna, i. 11, by mentioning Mauringania, on the confines of Denmark, as the ancient seat of the Franks, gave birth to an ingenious system of Leibritz.
— 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

The horses started off almost at a bound; the villagers again hurried to right and left; the wheels threw up a cloud of dust, and the aspirin family was rapt out of sight in a whirlwind.
— from The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon by Washington Irving

Since things were going on so pleasantly, Mr. Casaubon's statement that his labors in the Library would be suspended for a couple of days, and that after a brief renewal he should have no further reason for staying in Rome, encouraged Will to urge that Mrs. Casaubon should not go away without seeing a studio or two.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

Mendoza goes to his presidential block and seats himself calmly with his rank and file grouped behind him, and his Staff, consisting of Duval and the Anarchist on his right and the two Social-Democrats on his left, supporting him in flank].
— from Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy by Bernard Shaw

From the inhabitants we learned that some of Kilpatrick's cavalry had preceded us by a couple of days, and that all of the right wing was at and near Gordon, twelve miles off, viz., the place where the branch railroad came to Milledgeville from the Mason & Savannah road.
— from Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete by William T. (William Tecumseh) Sherman

So she went upstairs to her room to her chest of drawers, and took a white handkerchief out of the top drawer, and set the head on the neck again, and folded the handkerchief so that nothing could be seen, and she set him on a chair in front of the door, and put the apple in his hand.
— from Household Tales by Brothers Grimm by Wilhelm Grimm

When I trotted, I rattled like a crate of dishes, and that annoyed me; and moreover I couldn’t seem to stand that shield slatting and banging, now about my breast, now around my back; and if I dropped into a walk my joints creaked and screeched in that wearisome way that a wheelbarrow does, and as we didn’t create any breeze at that gait, I was like to get fried in that stove; and besides, the quieter you went the heavier the iron settled down on you and the more and more tons you seemed to weigh every minute.
— from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Thus the measure of what is everywhere called and esteemed virtue and vice is this approbation or dislike, praise or blame, which, by a secret and tacit consent, establishes itself in the several societies, tribes, and clubs of men in the world: whereby several actions come to find credit or disgrace amongst them, according to the judgment, maxims, or fashion of that place.
— from An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1 MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books 1 and 2 by John Locke

(The original idea of morality, or the leading conception of the supreme moral law, occurs by a necessity which seems [Pg 2] peculiar to the subject, but which is by no means a logical one, both in that science, whose object it is to set forth the knowledge of what is moral, and also in real life, where it shows itself partly in the judgment passed by conscience on our own actions, partly in our moral estimation of the actions of others; moreover, most of the chief conceptions in Ethics, springing as they do out of that idea, and inseparable from it (as, for instance, the conception of duty, and the ascription of praise or blame) assert themselves with the same necessity, and under the same conditions.
— from The Basis of Morality by Arthur Schopenhauer

Various ingenious arrangements he had made, for the disguise of his chest of drawers, and the accommodation of his boots, his shaving-glass, and so forth, particularly impressed themselves upon me, as evidences of the same Traddles who used to make models of elephants’ dens in writing-paper to put flies in; and to comfort himself under ill usage, with the memorable works of art I have so often mentioned.
— from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

A little miscellaneous furniture, including a bed, a washstand and chest of drawers, a table and one or two chairs, lurked in the obscure corners of the den or ventured furtively out into the open.
— from Mortal Coils by Aldous Huxley

Moreover, the character of the persons who signed the certificate of death, and the affidavits of those who took care of the said Bourignard in his last illness, among others that of the worthy vicar of the church of the Bonne-Nouvelle (to whom he made his last confession, for he died a Christian), do not permit us to entertain any sort of doubt.
— from Ferragus, Chief of the Dévorants by Honoré de Balzac

THE TREATMENT OF APES IN CAPTIVITY In conclusion, I deem it in order to offer a few remarks with regard to the causes of death among these apes, and to the proper treatment of the animals in captivity.
— from Gorillas & Chimpanzees by R. L. (Richard Lynch) Garner

The very same thinge is to be sayde / where a kinge or suche which do retayne the supreame auctoritie / do commaunde or determyne anye thynge againste right.
— from A treatise of the cohabitacyon of the faithfull with the vnfaithfull. Whereunto is added. A sermon made of the confessing of Christe and his gospell, and of the denyinge of the same. by Heinrich Bullinger

But he had a strong and enduring faith in the assured permanency of an Empire of “free and loyal” daughter Dominions knit together by ties of common interest, common endeavour and common devotion to the cause of democracy and the advancement of Christianity and civilization.
— from Sir Wilfrid Laurier by Peter McArthur

In Wad Hamed alone there were, I believe, no less than twenty cases of desertion, and three at least of the scoundrels were recaptured and shot.
— from The Downfall of the Dervishes; or, The Avenging of Gordon by Ernest Nathaniel Bennett

Then there followed a rather laughable scene: my servant was dressed in a whitish frock-coat; white being the colour of distinction among the Arabs, they deemed that Julien was the sheik.
— from The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England, Volume 2 (of 6) Mémoires d'outre-tombe, volume 2 by Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de

Since I have ascertained their fate I have ordered them to be rated as petty officers (in ratings allowed to most of the "fourth rates"), as I have thought that all the crew of that boat should have stood on equal footing as regards the amount they might be entitled to in case of disaster, as they all incurred the same risk.
— from The Last Cruise of the Saginaw by George H. (George Henry) Read

After Philip had succeeded in putting some heart into the poor fellow, he insisted on his coming on deck, and they ascended thereto just in time to see the return of the officer sent by Tejada to Don Hypolito.
— from The Harlequin Opal: A Romance. Vol. 2 (of 3) by Fergus Hume