You have a “free hand” in the terms of this correspondence, and I hope you will see your way to completing the decorations, in the matter of which I know it is difficult to be absolutely exact.
— from The Forsyte Saga, Volume I. The Man Of Property by John Galsworthy

It is very certain that a great many of the clergy who were in circumstances to do it withdrew and fled for the safety of their lives; but 'tis true also that a great many of them stayed, and many of them fell in the calamity and in the discharge of their duty.
— from A Journal of the Plague Year Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London by Daniel Defoe

As we before noticed, [211] the term seems, as ordinarily used, to contain the distinct ideas of (1) the common as opposed to the exceptional, and (2) the original or primitive as contrasted with the result of later [273] conventions and institutions.
— from The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick

What a morality or book of law creates: that deep instinct which renders automatism and perfection possible in life and in work.
— from The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book I and II by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

During a long period of two hundred and twenty years from the establishment of this artful system to the death of Commodus, the dangers inherent to a military government were, in a great measure, suspended.
— 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

This is when words become vitaliz'd, and stand for things, as they unerringly and soon come to do, in the mind that enters on their study with fitting spirit, grasp, and appreciation.
— from Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy by Walt Whitman

The sound of that everlasting scolding was part of the place like the other fixtures; even strangers would very soon come to disregard it completely unless it be perhaps to mutter “Nuisance,” or to get up suddenly and shut the door of the “parlour.”
— from Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

I am surprised that you should have allowed him to come to divisions in this condition."
— from Stand By! Naval Sketches and Stories by H. Taprell (Henry Taprell) Dorling

Out of this reverie she was soon woke to keener anguish, by the arrival of a letter from her husband; it came to Lisbon after her departure: Henry had forwarded it to her, but did not choose to deliver it himself, for a very obvious reason; it might have produced a conversation he wished for some time to avoid; and his precaution took its rise almost equally from benevolence and love.
— from Mary: A Fiction by Mary Wollstonecraft

This Arnolfo, from whose talent architecture gained no less betterment than painting had gained from that of Cimabue, being born in the year 1232, was thirty years of age when his father died, and was held in very great esteem, for the reason that, having not only learnt from his [Pg 21] father all that he knew, but having also given attention under Cimabue to design in order to make use of it in sculpture, he was held by so much the best architect in Tuscany, that not only did the Florentines found the last circle of the walls of their city under his direction, in the year 1284, and make after his design the Loggia and the piers of Or San Michele, where the grain was sold, building them of bricks and with a simple roof above, but by his counsel, in the same year when the Poggio de' Magnuoli collapsed, on the brow of S. Giorgio above S. Lucia in the Via de' Bardi, they determined by means of a public decree that there should be no more building on the said spot, nor should any edifice be ever made, seeing that by the sinking of the stones, which have water trickling under them, there would be always danger in whatsoever edifice might be made there.
— from Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 01 (of 10) Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi by Giorgio Vasari

They suffered spells to be manufactured, since every friar had the power of reversing them; they permitted poison to be distilled, because every convent had the antidote, which was disposed of to all who chose to demand it.
— from Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft by Walter Scott

She wished him dead and crumbling to dust in his coffin.
— from The Devil's Garden by W. B. (William Babington) Maxwell

He, a most accurate observer, used to say of them, that their features and countenances seemed to have conformed to those of the creatures they dealt in; at all events the resemblance was striking.
— from The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth — Volume 6 (of 8) by William Wordsworth

Have the clear title deeds in fee simple to yourselves, without any mortgage on the premises to anybody in the world.
— from The Ghosts, and Other Lectures by Robert Green Ingersoll

[18] These backward persons, the Arunta, have no native strong drink, and cannot get intoxicated, but what they can they do in the way of licence, like more civilised races, and necessarily not for agricultural reasons, as they have no agriculture.
— from Magic and Religion by Andrew Lang