His eldest son Hermenegild, who was invested by his father with the royal diadem, and the fair principality of Baetica, contracted an honorable and orthodox alliance with a Merovingian princess, the daughter of Sigebert, king of Austrasia, and of the famous Brunechild.
— 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

These men sailed southwards with their ships against King Olaf, and as soon as they met gave battle.
— from Heimskringla; Or, The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway by Snorri Sturluson

It had cost Adam a great deal of trouble and work in overhours to know what he knew over and above the secrets of his handicraft, and that acquaintance with mechanics and figures, and the nature of the materials he worked with, which was made easy to him by inborn inherited faculty—to get the mastery of his pen, and write a plain hand, to spell without any other mistakes than must in fairness be attributed to the unreasonable character of orthography rather than to any deficiency in the speller, and, moreover, to learn his musical notes and part-singing.
— from Adam Bede by George Eliot

[ 306 ] There was a call for some kind of Apollonius, and Faustus arose.
— from Demonology and Devil-lore by Moncure Daniel Conway

The Soldan of Babylon sendeth a daughter of his to be married to the King of Algarve, and she, by divers chances, in the space of four years cometh to the hands of nine men in various places.
— from The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio

From deficiency of proper insight into all this, many a man will make all kinds of abortive attempts, will do violence to his character in particulars, and yet, on the whole, will have to yield to it again; and what he thus painfully attains will give him no pleasure; what he thus learns will remain dead; even in an ethical regard, a deed that is too noble for his character, that has not sprung from pure, direct impulse, but from a concept, a dogma, will lose all merit, even in his own eyes, through subsequent egoistical repentance.
— from The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) by Arthur Schopenhauer

There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an unattainable thing.
— from The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy by William James

And first of all you must help us to consider how the kings of Argos and Messene in olden days destroyed their famous empire—did they forget the saying of Hesiod, that 'the half is better than the whole'?
— from Laws by Plato

In England, at all events, we know that [Pg xxv] government in all its different forms, whether as King, or as a caste of nobles, or as an oligarchical plutocracy, or even as trades unions, is so dwarfing in its action that, for the sake of the future, the individual must revolt.
— from On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

Another kind of alabaster also found in Derbyshire is crystallised in long needlelike silky fibres,
— from The Subterranean World by G. (Georg) Hartwig

He couldn't be more than 15,000 feet from the front of the trail, and you can recognize any kind of an airplane 15,000 feet away in the clear air of the substratosphere.
— from The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by Edward J. Ruppelt

He does not know, or at any rate he does not tell his readers, what Hamilton requires them to believe concerning the unknowable; but he himself believes, and requires them to believe, that this unknown something is incompatible with the doctrine that knowledge is relative.
— from The Philosophy of the Conditioned by Henry Longueville Mansel

As I had used the same bladder for transferring various kinds of air, and among the rest fixed air , I first imagined that this effect might have been occasioned by a mixture of this fixed air with the nitrous air, and therefore took a fresh bladder; but still the effect was the same.
— from Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air by Joseph Priestley

17 She had conceived the idea of [81] giving quite a new reading, which undoubtedly would have been the true reading, of the character of Katherine of Arragon, and instead of playing it with the splendid poetical colouring in which Mrs. Siddons had arrayed it, bring it down to the prosaic delineation which Shakspeare really gave, and history and Holbein have transmitted to us; but the experiment was deemed too hazardous; and it was so.
— from Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad, Vol. 3 (of 3) With Tales and Miscellanies Now First Collected by Mrs. (Anna) Jameson

Moreover, Zeppelins can do a lot of hurt, but they can't take London; and Ostend and Antwerp are no nearer Britain for any kind of air attack than Berlin is, and above all our perspective is doubtless better than yours—any one can see that to try and take towns and to fight in streets filled with civilians has not a pennyworth of military value.
— from Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary by W. P. (William Pringle) Livingstone

In the trade-winds’ belts, where the wind is steady and sail is seldom handled from one day’s end to another, many original kinds of amusements are indulged in upon ships whose masters stand for frolics.
— from The Voyage of the Arrow to the China Seas. Its Adventures and Perils, Including Its Capture by Sea Vultures from the Countess of Warwick, as Set Down by William Gore, Chief Mate by T. Jenkins (Thornton Jenkins) Hains

There are, amongst them, several kinds of arms and instruments of cruelty, designed for torturing their English prisoners; and the following list of them will prove the barbarity of Spain at that period.
— from City Scenes; or, a peep into London by Ann Taylor

What would be the opinion of a geologist, viewing such an enormous collection of bones, of all kinds of animals and of all ages, thus embedded in one thick earthy mass?
— from Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage Round the World of H.M.S. Beagle Under the Command of Captain Fitz Roy, R.N. by Charles Darwin

"But you are some kind of an artist, then," he insisted when he had finished, with an open contempt on the "artist."
— from A Daughter of the Snows by Jack London