I hope the reader has much too good an opinion of Captain and Mrs. Crawley to suppose that they ever would have dreamed of paying a visit to so remote a district as Bloomsbury, if they thought the family whom they proposed to honour with a visit were not merely out of fashion, but out of money, and could be serviceable to them in no possible manner.
— from Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Preferment in the service, like success in any other branch of traffic, will naturally favour those who have the greatest stock of cash and credit, merit and capacity being supposed equal on all sides.’
— from The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by T. (Tobias) Smollett

That we may discover the fallacy of his hypothesis, we need only consider, that a false conclusion is drawn from an action, only by means of an obscurity of natural principles, which makes a cause be secretly interrupted In its operation, by contrary causes, and renders the connexion betwixt two objects uncertain and variable.
— from A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

She is abused, stol'n from me and corrupted By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks; For nature so preposterously to err, Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense, Sans witchcraft could not.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

Forrest, an abler soldier, operated farther west, and held from the National front quite as many men as could be spared for offensive operations.
— from Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete by Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson) Grant

Here was the Form of Justice kept up, which is as much as can be said of several other Courts, that have more lawful Commissions for what they do.—Here was no feeing of Council, and bribing of Witnesses was a Custom not known among them; no packing of Juries, no torturing and wresting the Sense of the Law, for bye Ends and Purposes, no puzzling or perplexing the Cause with unintelligible canting Terms, and useless Distinctions; nor was their Sessions burthened with numberless Officers, the Ministers of Rapine and Extortion, with ill boding Aspects, enough to fright Astræa from the Court.
— from A General History of the Pyrates: from their first rise and settlement in the island of Providence, to the present time by Daniel Defoe

As we have made a comparison between sight and touch, it will be as well to do the same for hearing, and to find out which of the two impressions starting simultaneously from a given body first reaches the sense-organ.
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

‘Be this as it may, a church bell struck two.
— from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Fifteen minutes are consumed by such episodes and divertisements.
— from A Book of Burlesques by H. L. (Henry Louis) Mencken

"Tell me all, Christie, boy," said Treffy, pitifully.
— from Christie's Old Organ Or, "Home, Sweet Home" by Walton, O. F., Mrs.

But the manners and customs became speedily corrupted; the offices, the benefices, were distributed according to the whims of the women, and they were the cause of the adoption of very pernicious maxims by the government."
— from Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 by William Walton

On her head was a large black hat with blue feathers, which fell backward on a wide collar of Flanders lace; her close-fitting coat of pearl-gray taffeta, with large, square basques, had a long skirt of the same material and colour, both skirt and waist ornamented with delicate lace-work of sky-blue silk, whose pale shade matched admirably the colour of the habit
— from The Knight of Malta by Eugène Sue

To natives all white men are chiefs, but "surely these are not great chiefs?" asked one of the Samoan islanders, indicating the whites who dream the idle hours away on the sandy beach of Samoa.
— from Germany's Vanishing Colonies by Gordon Le Sueur

We are now millions, and millions more are coming, by ship and steamer, every day, almost every hour.
— from The Catholic World, Vol. 07, April 1868 to September, 1868 by Various

The whole garrison was then set to work, or as many as could be spared, to remove the powder from the magazines, which was desperate work, rolling barrels of powder through the fire.
— from Project Gutenberg Edition of The Memoirs of Four Civil War Generals by John Alexander Logan