If you'll allow me, I'll mention to Mr Riah when he comes in, who you are, and I'll tell him you're my friend, and I'll say my say for you, instead of your saying it for yourself; I may be able to do it in a more business-like way.
— from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

Dom it, I’d ha’ dean it if all my boans were brokken.’
— from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

The mode of election which has been described is in a mean between monarchy and democracy, and such a mean the state ought always to observe; for servants and masters never can be friends, nor good and bad, merely because they are declared to have equal privileges.
— from Laws by Plato

Fortunately, the student of dress is in a much better position than the naturalist proper.
— from The Heritage of Dress: Being Notes on the History and Evolution of Clothes by Wilfred Mark Webb

That's why I wrote that letter, and I dropped it in a mail box just before I pushed off in a boat and floated down the river.
— from Motor Matt's Promise; or, The Wreck of the Hawk by Stanley R. Matthews

Cicero speaks of it in his time as an important place, and the centre of a very fertile district; it is also mentioned by Pliny and Ptolemy, and Strabo says that it was usually the starting point for those who ascended the mountain.
— from Etna: A History of the Mountain and of its Eruptions by G. F. (George Farrer) Rodwell

Mr. Cox recollects a singular instance of a deranged idea in a maniac being corrected by a very simple stratagem.
— from The Anatomy of Suicide by Forbes Winslow

Every stitch of the border of the Indian shawl being worked by the hand is distinct in itself, and may be pulled out—though it is not very easily detached—without further injury to the fabric; whereas the shawl made on a French or British loom has the border formed in one piece, whence a long thread may at any time be readily drawn.
— from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. VII, December 1850, Vol. II by Various

Surely, never was a simple, upright doctor involved in a more bewildering imbroglio !
— from Master of His Fate by J. Maclaren (James Maclaren) Cobban

Wellesley, again in chief command, marched against the enemy, forced the passage of the Douro, in itself a most brilliant undertaking, and drove the French back into Spain.
— from With Wellington in Spain: A Story of the Peninsula by F. S. (Frederick Sadleir) Brereton

Here I have been trying for half an hour to staunch the blood by closing the wound, while you have done it in a moment, by making the wound greater."
— from The Young Marooners on the Florida Coast by F. R. (Francis Robert) Goulding