W. C. Whitney rivalled Senator Brice in hospitality, and was besides an old acquaintance of the reforming era, but Adams saw him as little as he saw his chief, President Cleveland, or President Harrison or Secretary Bayard or Blaine or Olney.
— from The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

Though he must be prepared to meet the difficulties caused in the contact of races, of civilisations, by the conversion of persons holding one set of mythical ideas to belief in another set of different, more attractive, and often more advanced stage.
— from The Danish History, Books I-IX by Grammaticus Saxo

The commissary of police, holding office since the Restoration, had relations throughout the arrondissement.
— from The Works of Balzac: A linked index to all Project Gutenberg editions by Honoré de Balzac

The picador cannot kill a bull with a weapon like that,—he can only pierce him or stop him for a moment; but in the last case he must have in his arm the strength of a giant.
— from Lillian Morris, and Other Stories by Henryk Sienkiewicz

At the inquest, his wife said that, when she pressed him to eat such scanty food as they could occasionally procure, he often said to her, "Eat it yourself and the children."
— from The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) With Notices of Earlier Irish Famines by O'Rourke, John, Canon

Opposite to the school and to the church gates, stands the Black Bull Inn, one of that low-browed, old-fashioned, roomy and snug class of public houses once so numerous in all the rural districts of England, but now fast disappearing before the sweep of modern improvement, or, if you like it better, modern innovation—and around whose ample hearths “the rude forefathers of the hamlet” were wont to muddle their brains, whilst settling the affairs of the parish, or discussing those of the country;— “Where village statesmen talked with looks profound, And news much older than their ale went round.”
— from The Old Man; or, Ravings and Ramblings round Conistone by Alexander Craig Gibson

Mountjoy's utmost exertion of cunning was not capable of protecting him on such conditions as these.
— from Blind Love by Wilkie Collins

He saw in the intrigue a chance of pushing his own schemes, and at the same time of preventing a Franco-Italian alliance against Germany.
— from The Life of Mazzini by Bolton King