If my mother had not first begun on the subject, I certainly would have gone with my friends; but when I saw that she did not like it, I began to dislike it also.
— from The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Volume 01 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw [248] its flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast.
— from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

But as for the multitude of the Jews, they addressed themselves to the king, and to the high priests, and desired they might have leave to send ambassadors to Nero against Florus, and not by their silence afford a suspicion that they had been the occasions of such great slaughters as had been made, and were disposed to revolt, alleging that they should seem to have been the first beginners of the war, if they did not prevent the report by showing who it was that began it; and it appeared openly that they would not be quiet, if any body should hinder them from sending such an embassage.
— from The Wars of the Jews; Or, The History of the Destruction of Jerusalem by Flavius Josephus

57 Note 55 ( return ) [ The gradual losses of the Latins may be traced in the third fourth, and fifth books of the compilation of Ducange: but of the Greek conquests he has dropped many circumstances, which may be recovered from the larger history of George Acropolita, and the three first books of Nicephorus, Gregoras, two writers of the Byzantine series, who have had the good fortune to meet with learned editors Leo Allatius at Rome, and John Boivin in the Academy of Inscriptions of Paris.
— 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

They admitted, indeed, that in point of time Christ was the junior deity, but they triumphantly demonstrated his real seniority by falling back on the subtlety of Satan, who on so important an occasion had surpassed himself by inverting the usual order of nature.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

Let us imagine, also, as great darkness as was formerly occasioned by the irruption of the fires of Mount Ætna, which are said to have obscured 291 the adjacent countries for two days to such a degree that no man could recognize his fellow; but on the third, when the sun appeared, they seemed to be risen from the dead.
— from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth by Marcus Tullius Cicero

One pair is upon the Characters of Men and on the Characters of Women, which would have formed the opening of the subject of the Fourth Book of the Essay: the other pair shows character expressed through a right or a wrong use of Riches: in fact, Money and Morals.
— from An Essay on Man; Moral Essays and Satires by Alexander Pope

I do, and have full many a play-day On fairest bosom of the fair, And sport myself upon her hair.
— from Fables of La Fontaine — a New Edition, with Notes by Jean de La Fontaine

It is the ignorance in which white men compel him to live; it is the torturing whip that lashes manhood out of him; it is the fierce bloodhounds of the South, and the scarcely less cruel human bloodhounds of the north, who enforce the Fugitive Slave Law.
— from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself by Harriet A. (Harriet Ann) Jacobs

This whole article is drawn from the fourth book of the Edifices, except Anchialus, (l. iii. c. 7.)]
— 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

In the times of its splendor, when the abbot was first baron of the kingdom of Naples, and commanded over four hundred towns and villages, it numbered several hundred monks but in 1843 only twenty.
— from The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 4, April, 1864 by Various

One would expect a law, framed by omnipotence, to be invariable, not hampered by all kinds of difficulties that omnipotence, one might have thought, could have provided against.
— from The Thread of Gold by Arthur Christopher Benson

It was a Wednesday, when the dining-room of the inn is generally full because of the weekly market.
— from Legends: Autobiographical Sketches by August Strindberg

For a long [pg 45] time now he had kept under closest observation the working out in each of them of the law of like attaching itself to like; for already this had borne fruit for both on the vine of his own profession.
— from The Doctor's Christmas Eve by James Lane Allen

"Guldise," as it is still called in West Cornwall, is an epic occasion, when all the months, from the first breaking of the land to the piling of the reaped sheaves, culminate at the apex of achievement.
— from Secret Bread by F. Tennyson (Fryniwyd Tennyson) Jesse

in springtime a blue [16] or flowered bowl or two with glorious roses; bookcases filled with brown-backed, much-read books .
— from Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War by Thomas Nelson Page

Turning round, Barbara suddenly gave a cry of delight; set in an arch, cut out of the dense wall of holly, was a small iron gate, and through the aperture so made could be seen a rose garden, the ancient rosery of Chancton Priory, now a tangle of exquisite colouring, a spot evidently jealously guarded and hidden away even from those few to whom the familiar beauties of the place were free.
— from Barbara Rebell by Marie Belloc Lowndes

Some mornings she would hum to him coon songs heard in her former home; and if he was in trim he himself would sing some psalm to the tune of Coleshill, French, Bangor, or Torwood.
— from The Daft Days by Neil Munro

Of course, pa just jumped the broom for both of them.
— from Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves South Carolina Narratives, Part 2 by United States. Work Projects Administration

After the receipt of the second of Sir Walter Scott’s letters, already alluded to, I discontinued the few short articles I had written for Blackwood, on the Fifeshire Gipsies; but I have incorporated the most interesting part of them into the work, forming, however, only a small part of the whole.
— from A History of the Gipsies: with Specimens of the Gipsy Language by Walter Simson