He gives great Satisfaction to the Quality; and if they will make a Subscription for him, I will send for a Brother of his out of Holland , that is a very good Tumbler, and also for another of the same Family, whom I design for my Merry-Andrew, as being an excellent mimick, and the greatest Drole in the Country where he now is.
— from The Spectator, Volume 1 Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essays by Steele, Richard, Sir

This is a gentle delineation, is it not, reader?
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë

In his language, too, there was something typical that had a very great deal in common with what was characteristic in his face, but what it was
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

So acute did his agitation become that he had the greatest difficulty in expressing himself clearly on any point, and I found it no easy matter to inquire what arrangements on our part would persuade him to undertake the morrow's rehearsal.
— from My Life — Volume 1 by Richard Wagner

The rebellion could never be put down, the authority of the paramount Government asserted, and the union of the States declared perpetual, by force of arms, by maintaining the defensive; to accomplish these grand desiderata, it was absolutely necessary the Government should adopt, and maintain until the rebellion was crushed, the offensive.
— from Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete by William T. (William Tecumseh) Sherman

As the government degenerated into military despotism, the Prætorian Præfect, who in his origin had been a simple captain of the guards, * was placed not only at the head of the army, but of the finances, and even of the law.
— 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

I. Of spectral animals there is no great diversity in Cambria, unless one should class under this head sundry poetic creatures which more properly belong to the domain of magic, or to fairyland.
— from British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions by Wirt Sikes

It is evident that Marshall (White) is under great difficulties in the above position.
— from Chess Fundamentals by José Raúl Capablanca

This method, proposed by Arrhenius (1884), and applied on an extensive scale by Ostwald (who developed it in great detail in his Lehrbuch d. allgemeinen Chemie , v. ii., 1887), is founded on the fact that the relation of the so-called molecular electrical-conductivity of weak solutions of various acids (I) coincides with the relation in which the same acids stand according to the distribution, (II) found by one of the above-mentioned methods, and with the relation deduced for them from observations upon the velocity of reaction, (III) for instance, according to the rate of the splitting up of an ethereal salt (into alcohol and acid), or from the rate of the so-called inversion of sugar—that is, its transformation into glucose—as is seen by comparing the annexed figures, in which the energy of hydrochloric acid is taken as equal to 100:— I II III Hydrochloric acid, HCl 100 100 100 Hydrobromic acid, HBr 101 98 105 Nitric acid, HNO 3 100 100 96 Sulphuric acid, H 2 SO 4 65 49 96 Formic acid, CH 2 O 2 2 4 1 Acetic acid, C 2 H 4 O 2 1 2 1 Oxalic acid, C 2 H 2 O 4 20 24 18 Phosphoric acid, PH 3 O 4 7 — 6 The coincidence of these figures, obtained by so many various methods, presents a most important and instructive relation between phenomena of different kinds, but in my opinion it does not permit us to assert that the degree of affinity existing between bases and various acids is determined by all these various methods, because the influence of the water must be taken into consideration.
— from The Principles of Chemistry, Volume I by Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev

He had found her, after great difficulty, in a miserable garret.
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 11, September, 1858 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various

“She has a good deal in her favour,” remarked Mrs. Burgoyne.
— from A Gray Eye or So. In Three Volumes—Volume II by Frank Frankfort Moore

You may judge of the great difference in the taxation of lands and landed property now and under our Kings, when I inform you that a friend of mine, who, in 1792, possessed, in one of the Western Departments, twenty-one farms, paid less in contribution for them all than he does now for the three farms he has recovered from the wreck of his fortune.
— from Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud (Being secret letters from a gentleman at Paris to a nobleman in London) — Volume 7 by Lewis Goldsmith

Experiments have shown, that a pigeon to which four drachms of sugar were given died in four hours, and that a duck which had swallowed five drachms did not live seven hours after.
— from A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins, Volume 1 (of 2) by Johann Beckmann

The New England men seem to have charge of everything of importance in the House and of a good deal in the Senate."
— from Senator North by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

I stalked a herd of antelopes, and having gone some five miles from camp, I was benighted, and on my return had the greatest difficulty in finding my men in the darkness.
— from In the Forbidden Land An account of a journey in Tibet, capture by the Tibetan authorities, imprisonment, torture and ultimate release by Arnold Henry Savage Landor

As we stand on the rustic bridge above the "pill" gazing down into the smooth flowing water, dark trout glide out of sight into their homes in the stonework under the hatch.
— from A Cotswold Village; Or, Country Life and Pursuits in Gloucestershire by J. Arthur (Joseph Arthur) Gibbs

Ever sence you got that fool notion in yo’ head that Creed and Huldy was man and wife, he’s been goin’ down in his mind about as fast as his stren’th come up.
— from Judith of the Cumberlands by Alice MacGowan