In fact, having once satisfied themselves that no egress could have been made in this quarter, they would naturally bestow here a very cursory examination.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 1 by Edgar Allan Poe

If mere parsimony could have made a man rich, Sir Pitt Crawley might have become very wealthy—if he had been an attorney in a country town, with no capital but his brains, it is very possible that he would have turned them to good account, and might have achieved for himself a very considerable influence and competency.
— from Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

It is a rectory, but a small one; the late incumbent, I believe, did not make more than 200 L per annum, and though it is certainly capable of improvement, I fear, not to such an amount as to afford him a very comfortable income.
— from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

For though Lady Bertram rather shone in the epistolary line, having early in her marriage, from the want of other employment, and the circumstance of Sir Thomas's being in Parliament, got into the way of making and keeping correspondents, and formed for herself a very creditable, common-place, amplifying style, so that a very little matter was enough for her: she could not do entirely without any; she must have something to write about, even to her niece; and being so soon to lose all the benefit of Dr. Grant's gouty symptoms and Mrs. Grant's morning calls, it was very hard upon her to be deprived of one of the last epistolary uses she could put them to.
— from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

He was very hairy all up the chink of his arse, and had a very coarse skin and an almost black arsehole, so deep a brown it was, the very sight of which always drove me mad with lust.
— from The Romance of Lust: A classic Victorian erotic novel by Anonymous

I thought his advice very considerate, particularly when I saw that all the punters lost, and that the Greek, very calm in the midst of the insulting treatment of those he had duped, was pocketing his money, after handing a share to the officer who had taken an interest in the bank.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

Having lost his coat, and not having means to buy another, he prayed to the Twenty Martyrs, [980] who have a very celebrated memorial shrine in our town, begging in a distinct voice that he might be clothed.
— from The City of God, Volume II by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

I had a very confused knowledge of kingdoms, wide extents of country, mighty rivers, and boundless seas.
— from Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

A friend gave him a very curiously tied knot to undo and was told: "Fool, do you think that I wish to untie a thing which gave so much trouble to fasten."
— from The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

One day, Oliver and Noah had descended into the kitchen at the usual dinner-hour, to banquet upon a small joint of mutton—a pound and a half of the worst end of the neck—when Charlotte being called out of the way, there ensued a brief interval of time, which Noah Claypole, being hungry and vicious, considered he could not possibly devote to a worthier purpose than aggravating and tantalising young Oliver Twist.
— from Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

But the exalted rank and prominent position of her own family, the high military grade and reputation of her husband, the wide-spread hopes and fears of which he had recently been the centre in the affair of the conspiracy, joined to the fame of her talents, learning, [Pg 329] and virtues, which had been made the subject of enthusiastic praise by nearly all the Ischia knot of poets and wits, rendered her a very conspicuous person in the eyes of all Italy.
— from A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 1 (of 2) by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

We have a vague consciousness that the different habits which are separated by abstraction and ranged under different categories (art, religion, political institutions), are not isolated in reality, that they have common characteristics, and that they are closely enough connected for a change in one of them to bring about a change in another.
— from Introduction to the Study of History by Charles Seignobos

'I have attended very closely to the case, and I know I should have been against him on a jury.
— from John Caldigate by Anthony Trollope

he almost shouted in his rage, as he thrust her aside violently, "Carrera will be here within ten minutes, and all our lives are forfeit by your treason."
— from The Silent Rifleman! A tale of the Texan prairies by Henry William Herbert

‘How is that walking hospital?’ asked Vandeloup, carelessly taking off his hat; ‘I suppose she is ill as usual.’
— from Madame Midas by Fergus Hume

I said to myself, ‘Of course she will send it back,’ but I had a very chill sensation of doubt about my heart.
— from Neighbours on the Green by Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

The senator then went to his friends and said: "Have I remarked to you at any time that our president was not a gentleman and had somewhere in his ancestry very common blood?
— from My Memories of Eighty Years by Chauncey M. (Chauncey Mitchell) Depew

"He appeared very calm," says Madame de Staël, Necker's observant daughter.
— from The Story of Versailles by Francis Loring Payne

But just then she heard a voice calling her, a well-known voice, her aunt's.
— from Fairies Afield by Mrs. Molesworth