Let me go away untrammelled; consider yourself as unfettered, as before our engagement, and when the year expires, if you deem me absolutely necessary to your happiness, you can readily ask a renewal of your bonds, and I can be sure by that time whether my happiness depends upon becoming your wife.
— from At the Mercy of Tiberius by Augusta J. (Augusta Jane) Evans

If haply you are invited out nowhere to supper, you praise your quiet dish of vegetables; and as if you ever go abroad upon compulsion, you think yourself so happy, and do so hug yourself, that you are obliged to drink out nowhere.
— from The Works of Horace by Horace

In his reply Mason mockingly declared: The epithets of parent and child have been so long applied to Great Britain and her colonies, that ... we rarely see anything from your side of the water free from the authoritative style of a master to a schoolboy: "We have with infinite difficulty and fatigue got you excused this one time; pray be a good boy for the future, do what your papa and mama bid you, and hasten to return them your most grateful acknowledgements for condescending to let you keep what is your own ... and if you should at any time hereafter happen to transgress, your friends will all beg for you and be security for your good behaviour; but if your are a naughty boy,... then everybody will hate you, and say you are a graceless and undutiful child; your parents and masters will be obliged to whip you severely...." 23 One other Virginian did not rest until he had challenged the notion, much discussed in parliament by commons member Soame Jenyns, that the colonists, like all British citizens, were "virtually" represented in parliament.
— from The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 by Virginia. History, Government, and Geography Service