Old Grizzle, pleased with such a feast, Flung up his heels, and caper'd round, Then roll'd and rubb'd upon the ground, And frisk'd and browsed and bray'd, And many a clean spot made. Arm'd men came on them as he fed: 'Let's fly,' in haste the old man said.
— from Fables of La Fontaine — a New Edition, with Notes by Jean de La Fontaine

She lived at his Castle several months as his avowed Concubine: All Bavaria was scandalized by her impudent and abandoned conduct.
— from The Monk: A Romance by M. G. (Matthew Gregory) Lewis

Thus then I conclude the matter to be, those Medicines are called temperate (not because they have excess of temperature at all in them) which can neither be said, to heat nor cool so much as will amount to the first degree of excess, for daily experience witnesses that they being added to medicines, change not their qualities, they make them neither hotter nor colder.
— from The Complete Herbal To which is now added, upwards of one hundred additional herbs, with a display of their medicinal and occult qualities physically applied to the cure of all disorders incident to mankind: to which are now first annexed, the English physician enlarged, and key to Physic. by Nicholas Culpeper

You know what sort of thing my jewelled watch was—how inferior all the so-called precious stones were, how clumsy and awkward its shape; but I would not have cared so much about that, had I not been obliged to spend so much money in repairing and regulating it, and after all the watch would one day gain a couple of hours, and next day lose in the same proportion.
— from The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Volume 01 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

By an indirect question he seeks to learn how much Virgil really knows of the economy of the lower world; but he cannot so much as listen to all of his Master’s reassuring answer, terrified as he is by the sudden appearance of the Furies upon the tower, which rises out of the city of unbelief.
— from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: The Inferno by Dante Alighieri

He paid not the slightest attention to me, but as he came abreast I recognized him, and turning I placed my hand upon his shoulder, calling out: "Kaor, Kantos Kan!" Like lightning he wheeled and before I could so much as lower my hand the point of his long-sword was at my breast.
— from A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Let us leave it to our own thought to cut out and make up at pleasure; it cannot so much as covet what is proper for it, and satisfy itself:— Quid enim ratione timemus, Aut cupimus?
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

He asked after you; he told me you had been playing with his daughter—" my mother went on, amazing me with the portentous revelation of my own existence in Swann's mind; far more than that, of my existence in so complete, so material a form that when I stood before him, trembling with love, in the Champs-Elysées, he had known my name, and who my mother was, and had been able to blend with my quality as his daughter's playmate certain facts with regard to my grandparents and their connections, the place in which we lived, certain details of our past life, all of which I myself perhaps did not know.
— from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

Dr. R.V. PIERCE, the greatest American specialist, and proprietor of the World's Dispensary, Buffalo, N.Y., has sent us his new book entitled "The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser," which is a handsome, large volume, elegantly got up, with hundreds of wood-cuts
— from The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English or, Medicine Simplified, 54th ed., One Million, Six Hundred and Fifty Thousand by Ray Vaughn Pierce

It isn't what you know that counts So much as what it is to you.
— from Happy Jack by Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo) Burgess

During the night, from the 14th to the 15th of December, the two irreconcilable friends were busy observing the lunar disc, J. T. Maston abusing the learned Belfast as usual, who was by his side; the secretary of the Gun Club maintaining for the thousandth time that he had just seen the projectile, and adding that he could see Michel Ardan's face looking through one of the scuttles, at the same time enforcing his argument by a series of gestures which his formidable hook rendered very unpleasant.
— from From the Earth to the Moon; and, Round the Moon by Jules Verne

The ladies of the committee sent me a lovely bouquet which they had intended to present, ornamented with a little stuffed bird bearing a tiny model of the 'Sunbeam' on its back.
— from The Last Voyage: To India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' by Annie Brassey

Colonel Smith made a signal to the electrical ship which we had just quitted to draw near.
— from Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett Putman Serviss

Those melancholy ruins, those grand temples of religion, the immortal forms and hues that glorify palace and chapel, square, mausoleum, and Vatican, the dreamy murmur of fountains, the aroma of violets and pine-trees, the pensive relics of imperial
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 08, June 1858 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various

As will be seen in the illustration to No. 26, while the Haberdasher was propounding his problem of the triangle, this young Squire was standing in the background making a drawing of some kind; for "He could songs make and well indite, Joust and eke dance, and well portray and write."
— from The Canterbury Puzzles, and Other Curious Problems by Henry Ernest Dudeney