When Alsace Lorraine was restored to France, it published an article showing how deeply the inhabitants of this province resented being transferred from the German Empire to the French Republic 792 ; when a general strike threatened this country, it seized the opportunity to come out with an appeal in enormous capitals to revise the Versailles Treaty; in the matter of reparations its efforts to let Germany off altogether have been, as it itself observed, "unceasing."
— from Secret Societies And Subversive Movements by Nesta Helen Webster

In every case the root idea involves an inversion of roles, and a situation which recoils on the head of its author.
— from Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic by Henri Bergson

He attacked superstition in her most vital part, by prohibiting the use of sacrifices, which he declared to be criminal as well as infamous; and if the terms of his edicts more strictly condemned the impious curiosity which examined the entrails of the victim, every subsequent explanation tended to involve in the same guilt the general practice of immolation , which essentially constituted the religion of the Pagans.
— 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

A noble place; inside as well as out, a noble place—a house in which you incontinently lost yourself if ever you were so rash as to attempt to penetrate its mysteries alone; a house in which no one room had any sympathy with another, every chamber running off at a tangent into an inner chamber, and through that down some narrow staircase leading to a door which, in its turn, led back into that very part of the house from which you thought yourself the furthest; a house that could never have been planned by any mortal architect, but must have been the handiwork of that good old builder, Time, who, adding a room one year, and knocking down a room another year, toppling down a chimney coeval with the Plantagenets, and setting up one in the style of the Tudors; shaking down a bit of Saxon wall, allowing a Norman arch to stand here; throwing in a row of high narrow windows in the reign of Queen Anne, and joining on a dining-room after the fashion of the time of Hanoverian George I, to a refectory that had been standing since the Conquest, had contrived, in some eleven centuries, to run up such a mansion as was not elsewhere to be met with throughout the county of Essex.
— from Lady Audley's Secret by M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon

138 Before he repassed the Alps, the emperor chastised the revolt of the people and the ingratitude of John XII.
— 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

The French pharmacist Meaujean demonstrated in 1820 that elemi contains two resins, one soluble in the cold, and the other in hot spirits of wine.
— from The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines by T. H. (Trinidad Hermenegildo) Pardo de Tavera

Now when Herod saw them in such a disorder, and that they would not easily change their resolution unless they received satisfaction in this point, he called to him the most eminent men among them, and brought them upon the theater, and showed them the trophies, and asked them what sort of things they took these trophies to be; and when they cried out that they were the images of men, he gave order that they should be stripped of these outward ornaments which were about them, and showed them the naked pieces of wood; which pieces of wood, now without any ornament, became matter of great sport and laughter to them, because they had before always had the ornaments of images themselves in derision.
— from Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus

Every inhabitant of York, able to indulge in the luxury of a carriage, or a saddle horse, or given to extensive pedestrian excursions, continued to regret the inaccessibleness of the peninsula.
— from Toronto of Old Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of Ontario by Henry Scadding

Seeing, no doubt, that Hardy was now at the point to which he wished to bring him, and the night being almost entirely come, the reverend father coughed two or three times in a significant manner, and looked towards the door.
— from The Wandering Jew — Volume 10 by Eugène Sue

Second and very much enlarged edition, contains the Rosicrucian Fire Philosophy according to Jennings.
— from The Way of Initiation; or, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds by Rudolf Steiner

I have twice thus fitted and furnished a large apartment in Berlin, and in each case this represented an expenditure of more than the salary for the first year.
— from Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White — Volume 2 by Andrew Dickson White

Then I was filled with a lively fear that it was the Muse that had taken advantage of my solitude and possessed me—the witch had evidently come to ruin a poor devil like myself making a living by collecting cotton duties.
— from The Hungry Stones, and Other Stories by Rabindranath Tagore

“Wouldn't the editor consider that rather presumptuous?”
— from The Mystery of Murray Davenport: A Story of New York at the Present Day by Robert Neilson Stephens

In 450, the Emperor of the West, Valentinian, and his mother and wife, Placidia and Eudoxia, came to Rome, where the Pope entrusted them with the task of admonishing by letter the weak-minded Theodosius and his heretical followers.
— from The Catholic World, Vol. 15, Nos. 85-90, April 1872-September 1872 A Monthly Magazine by Various

Until the close of the eighteenth century the resistance to the progress of a ship was regarded as a single, uncompounded element, plainly enough varying with the vessel’s speed and size.
— from Inventors at Work, with Chapters on Discovery by George Iles

'A pretty Elijah!' cried the Rabbi.
— from Ghetto Comedies by Israel Zangwill

When they broke ranks, and the human automaton faced to the west and moved slowly towards the [112] stairs with three or four "Yanks" clustering at his side in earnest conversation, the requisite number of spry young prisoners would "shin up" the ladder, emerge, "deploy," and be counted over again in the upper room!
— from Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons A Personal Experience, 1864-5 by Homer B. (Homer Baxter) Sprague