Agriculture cannot be expected to flourish where the farms are small, the leases short, and the husbandman begins upon a rack rent, without a sufficient stock to answer the purposes of improvement.
— from The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by T. (Tobias) Smollett

“I was a little startled at the nature of the child’s amusement, but the father’s laughter made me think that perhaps he was joking.
— from Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Illustrated by Arthur Conan Doyle

The village of Hurley, five minutes’ walk from the lock, is as old a little spot as there is on the river, dating, as it does, to quote the quaint phraseology of those dim days, “from the times of King Sebert and King Offa.” Just past the weir (going up) is Danes’ Field, where the invading Danes once encamped, during their march to Gloucestershire; and a little further still, nestling by a sweet corner of the stream, is what is left of Medmenham Abbey.
— from Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka) Jerome

So after a cup of burnt wine—[Burnt wine was somewhat similar to mulled wine, and a favourite drink]—at the tavern there, we took barge and went to Blackwall and viewed the dock and the new Wet dock, which is newly made there, and a brave new merchantman which is to be launched shortly, and they say to be called the Royal Oak.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

45° 39' 5 N. this river heads in the 1s Black Mountain, 2 Miles higher up passed a Small River on the L. S. Called Maropa 25 yards wide Chocked up with mud—our hunters discovered a Ricara village on an Island a fiew miles above we passed the 1s Ricara Village about the center of the Island, in presence of Great numbers of Spectators and Camped above the Island on the L. S. at the foot of Some high land.
— from The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 by William Clark

7) Though the work is in most respects inferior, there are a few passages in the Laws, such as the honour due to the soul, the evils of licentious or unnatural love, the whole of Book x. (religion), the dishonesty of retail trade, and bequests, which come more home to us, and contain more of what may be termed the modern element in Plato than almost anything in the Republic.
— from The Republic by Plato

Here an ampler air clothes the meadows in lustrous sheen, and they know their own sun and a starlight of their own.
— from The Aeneid of Virgil by Virgil

and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent
— from Ulysses by James Joyce

But there is some comfort left, such a thing is sentiment, the whole village murmurs at the misfortune; and I hope the vicar's wife will soon find, by the cessation of the villagers' presents, how much she has wounded the feelings of the neighborhhood.
— from The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

And just as the modern chemist is beginning to have good ground for believing that all substances, or so-called elements, may be the result of a series of differentiations and compositions of an originally homogeneous substance, in spite of the fact that he is not yet able to effect the transformations in his laboratory, so, all those centuries ago, the Milesian sage seized on the same root idea and made it the basis of a world philosophy.
— from Nature Mysticism by John Edward Mercer

He was throwing the blacking-boxes and brushes down, as fast as he could, and there they lay scattered about the floor.
— from The Nursery, August 1881, Vol. XXX A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers by Various

After his visit to Prussia he returned to Oxford, and there, in 1667, in the course of his medical work, he met Anthony Ashley, the later Lord Shaftesbury and the Ahitophel of Dryden's great satire.
— from Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham by Harold Joseph Laski

He cleared his throat, loudly, startlingly, as though to warn a would-be drinker; the two looked up, and Alexander, in that quick hunter's way of his, glanced round the room.
— from Yonder by E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young

A tray, inserted beneath a log sill at the foundation line, could be removed, cleaned and reinserted daily.
— from Huntley: A Mason Family Country House by Tony P. Wrenn

General Lindener stood amidst the superior officers on the rampart of the Taschenberg.
— from Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia by L. (Luise) Mühlbach

Seeing also that the least of mercies are not deserved by the best of sinners; men, instead of quarrelling against the God of grace, because they have not what they list, should acknowledge they are unworthy of their breath; and also should confess that God may give mercy where he pleaseth, and that too, both which or what, as also to whom, and when he will; and yet be good, and just, and very gracious still: Nay, Job saith, 'He taketh away, who can hinder him?
— from Works of John Bunyan — Complete by John Bunyan