Physicians were instantly called, I was plentifully blooded in the foot, my lower extremities were bathed in a decoction of salutiferous herbs: in ten hours after I was taken ill I enjoyed a critical sweat, and next day felt the remains of the distemper, but an agreeable lassitude, which did not hinder me from getting up.
— from The Adventures of Roderick Random by T. (Tobias) Smollett

The case, Mr. Shandy, was this: In the reign of Edward the Sixth, Charles duke of Suffolk having issue a son by one venter, and a daughter by another venter, made his last will, wherein he devised goods to his son, and died; after whose death the son died also——but without will, without wife, and without child—his mother and his sister by the father’s side (for she was born of the former venter) then living.
— from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

He cannot even get his music copied: "By dint of dining out," says he, "I run the risk of dying by starvation at home."
— from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle

Mrs. Darling exclaimed, pained to see her dear one showing himself in such an unfavourable light.
— from Peter Pan by J. M. (James Matthew) Barrie

You've had a good deal of schooling, however; I suppose you're pretty well up in accounts, eh?
— from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Your mother says herself that she was left in the direst poverty, and would have died of starvation had it not been for Pavlicheff, who generously allowed her a yearly pension of six hundred roubles.
— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

On the back of a drawing of 'Somerset House' (?) is this (I copy the words just as he wrote them):— Learn.
— from Turner's Golden Visions by C. Lewis (Charles Lewis) Hind

The females hover over meat and other suitable substances, depositing a number of minute wriggling maggots thereon, not infrequently to the great disgust of some hungry individual, who perhaps is making his dinner off a mutton chop which the fly has selected as a home for her offspring.
— from An Elementary Manual of New Zealand Entomology Being an Introduction to the Study of Our Native Insects by G. V. (George Vernon) Hudson

A neighboring double of similar hues is 52, in which the magnitudes are four and nine, distance 6", p. 60°.
— from Pleasures of the telescope An Illustrated Guide for Amateur Astronomers and a Popular Description of the Chief Wonders of the Heavens for General Readers by Garrett Putman Serviss

It was he who had first given importance to the envelope; and being a resolute and almost heroic man, he was determined that no injustice on the part of a Crown prosecutor, no darkness in a judge's mind, no want of intelligence in a jury, should rob him of the delight of showing how important to the world was a proper understanding of post-office details.
— from John Caldigate by Anthony Trollope

s natural and hardly less important concomitant, that of the difference of specific heats in different bodies, or the different quantities of heat they require to raise their temperature equally, are the chief reasons for regarding heat as a material substance in a more decided manner than light, 323 with which in its radiant state it holds so close an analogy.
— from Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy by John F. W. (John Frederick William) Herschel

During our stay here I availed myself of the opportunity of seeing the capital of the State.
— from The Lone Star Defenders: A Chronicle of the Third Texas Cavalry, Ross' Brigade by S. B. (Samuel Benton) Barron

Her former enemies would not have known her had they dreamed of scrutinizing her in the old cruel way.
— from Much Ado About Something by C. E. (Charles Edward) Lawrence

There is a mass of valuable data on social history in the third volume of McMaster, History of the People of the United States .
— from Union and Democracy by Allen Johnson