instead of finding a father, I learned that his estate, which was situated on the coast, had, during his absence, been laid waste by the Rover who had carried my mother and me into captivity: that his castle had been burnt to the ground, and that my father on his return had sold what remained, and was retired into religion in the kingdom of Naples, but where no man could inform me.
— from The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

The obscure millions of a great empire have much less to dread from the cruelty than from the avarice of their masters, and their humble happiness is principally affected by the grievance of excessive taxes, which, gently pressing on the wealthy, descend with accelerated weight on the meaner and more indigent classes of society.
— 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

‘As much as makes it,’ continued Sam, ‘altogether, eleven hundred and eighty pound.’
— from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Mrs. Jasper Bell said she hoped I wouldn’t let college spoil me, as it did some people; and I felt in my bones that the end of my four Redmond years would see me a most insufferable creature, thinking I knew it all, and looking down on everything and everybody in Avonlea; Mrs. Elisha Wright said she understood that Redmond girls, especially those who belonged to Kingsport, were ‘dreadful dressy and stuck-up,’ and she guessed I wouldn’t feel much at home among them; and I saw myself, a snubbed, dowdy, humiliated country girl, shuffling through Redmond’s classic halls in coppertoned boots.”
— from Anne of the Island by L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery

But a step in the required direction it was beyond yea or nay and both monetarily and mentally it contained no reflection on his dignity in the smallest and it often turned in uncommonly handy to be handed a cheque at a muchneeded moment when every little helped.
— from Ulysses by James Joyce

A more ancient method, it consists in drawing with a silver point on paper the surface of which has been treated with a faint wash of Chinese white.
— from The Practice and Science of Drawing by Harold Speed

At present, six or seven hundred thousand men are maintained in constant pay and admirable discipline by the powers of Germany.
— 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 may show what man, as man, is capable of, what may be his new birth, and the religion of his simple manhood.
— from Demonology and Devil-lore by Moncure Daniel Conway

He became a Bencher in 1795, and was made a Master in Chancery in 1815, through the influence of the Prince Regent.
— from The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2 Elia and The Last Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb

I call this feeling mean for the very reason that I am not responsible to anybody except to myself, and myself I cannot deceive.
— from Without Dogma: A Novel of Modern Poland by Henryk Sienkiewicz

The music and merrymaking instantly ceased, and the sweet weird chant rang out far and wide through the still evening air over the silent village, dying away at last in a long musical cry of La illaha il Allah!
— from Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, November, 1878 by Various

Another movement is to benefit the daughters of more well-to-do people, to give them when they marry, a more intellectual career, to elevate the wife through a broader education above the pettiness of purely domestic interests and the superficiality of ordinary social life, and so to make her the true comrade of her husband.
— from The Americans by Hugo Münsterberg

When I trotted, I rattled like a crate of dishes, and that annoyed me; and moreover I couldn’t seem to stand that shield slatting and banging, now about my breast, now around my back; and if I dropped into a walk my joints creaked and screeched in that wearisome way that a wheelbarrow does, and as we didn’t create any breeze at that gait, I was like to get fried in that stove; and besides, the quieter you went the heavier the iron settled down on you and the more and more tons you seemed to weigh every minute.
— from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

But as the whole episode is found only in Matthew and Mark, it cannot figure in Dr. Petrie’s Nucleus; and for similar reasons it is absent from the Primitive Gospel of the school of Bernhard Weiss.
— from The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions by J. M. (John Mackinnon) Robertson

You tell me he was asleep at the mirrors, Argo?" "Master, I could not help it!
— from Tarrano the Conqueror by Ray Cummings

"It was believed," David Henkel declared with respect to the latter point, "laymen would act more impartially, since the ministers are more immediately concerned in this controversy.
— from American Lutheranism Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod by F. (Friedrich) Bente

Other men tell me as much in company.
— from The Lady of Lynn by Walter Besant

“Helen was to have married a man in Canada, but the engagement was broken off.
— from The Girl from Keller's by Harold Bindloss

He could no more tell April himself than he could murder a man in cold blood.
— from Roland Whately: A Novel by Alec (Alexander Raban) Waugh