IT befell in the days of Uther Pendragon, when he was king of all England, and so reigned, that there was a mighty duke in Cornwall that held war against him long time.
— from Le Morte d'Arthur: Volume 1 by Malory, Thomas, Sir

Would you, in time of peace, find a man capable of wisely governing the state of a commonwealth, of a kingdom, of an empire, of a monarchy; sufficient to maintain the clergy, nobility, senate, and commons in wealth, friendship, unity, obedience, virtue, and honesty?
— from Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

To take series of events and repeat them in another key or another environment, or to invert them whilst still leaving them a certain meaning, or mix them up so that their respective meanings jostle one another, is invariably comic, as we have already said, for it is getting life to submit to be treated as a machine.
— from Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic by Henri Bergson

And there never was a more humble man than the once proud George Darling, as he sat in the kennel of an evening talking with his wife of their children and all their pretty ways.
— from Peter Pan by J. M. (James Matthew) Barrie

Ameno′phis (or Amenhotep ) III, a king of ancient Egypt about 1500 B.C. ; warred successfully against Syrians and Ethiopians; built magnificent temples and palaces at Thebes, where the so-called Memnon statue is a statue of this king.
— from The New Gresham Encyclopedia. A to Amide Vol. 1 Part 1 by Various

And E arriving ever and anon they seemed to have come from a long journey, and they went forth with gladness into the meadow, where they encamped as at a festival; and those who knew one another embraced and conversed, the souls which came from earth curiously enquiring about the things above, The meeting in the meadow.
— from The Republic of Plato by Plato

But next minute I whirled in on a kind of an explanation how a valley was different from a common servant and had to go to church whether he wanted to or not, and set with the family, on account of its being the law.
— from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Dealing with the love adventures of two famous kings of ancient epic legend, they represent scenes far removed from reality, in which heaven and earth are not separated, and men, demigods, nymphs, and saints are intermingled.
— from A History of Sanskrit Literature by Arthur Anthony Macdonell

After King Olaf and Erling Skjalgson had this meeting at Augvaldsnes, new differences arose between them, and increased so much that they ended in perfect enmity.
— from Heimskringla; Or, The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway by Snorri Sturluson

On the 20th I had a visit from Kawakatsu Omi, an ex-commissioner for Foreign Affairs.
— from A Diplomat in Japan The inner history of the critical years in the evolution of Japan when the ports were opened and the monarchy restored, recorded by a diplomatist who took an active part in the events of the time, with an account of his personal experiences during that period by Ernest Mason Satow

It was some kind of an exhibition.
— from The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales by Francis A. (Francis Alexander) Durivage

Humility doth not exclude all knowledge of any excellency in itself, or defect in another, it can discern, but this is the worth of it: that it thinks soberly of the one, and despises not the other.
— from The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning by Hugh Binning

[1] knew one another; every morning they were the first occupants of the church, and this daily meeting had established a kind of fraternity, and with much coughing and hoarseness they all lamented the cold of the morning and the lateness of the bell-ringer in coming down to open the doors.
— from The Shadow of the Cathedral by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

They do not depict but suggest objects; do not speak directly through the eye to the intelligence, but presuppose in the mind knowledge of an event or fact which the sign recalls.
— from Evolution in Art: As Illustrated by the Life-histories of Designs by Alfred C. (Alfred Cort) Haddon

The knowledge of America even now possessed in Europe is not burdensomely great.
— from James Fenimore Cooper American Men of Letters by Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury

"Now, if I am fortunate enough to knock over an elk, we'll have a supper such as people in the cities do not often enjoy."
— from Frank in the Mountains by Harry Castlemon

On the one hand, in Asia, it had been found impossible to establish military fiefs in Arabia, Kurdistan, or anywhere east of it, on the system which had secured the Osmanli tenure elsewhere.
— from The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey by Arnold Toynbee

You're the only man here Maurice was at all friendly with—I shouldn't turn to you, you scoffer, you may be sure of it, if I knew of anyone else.
— from Maurice Guest by Henry Handel Richardson

It is impossible (especially for a man with a family and keeping any kind of an establishment) not to spend a vast deal of money here.
— from The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Frank Preston Stearns

It was at that time in my life almost a passion with me to analyze human nature—to theorize over the motives and the results of human action; over the probable causes of known or assumed effects, and the reverse—in short, I thought myself a philosopher.
— from A Strange Discovery by Charles Romyn Dake