In like sort our gentlewomen do at their usual meetings, one repines or scoffs at another's bravery and happiness.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

The general scarcity of everything, occasioned candles to be borrowed in a rather peremptory manner of Monsieur Gabelle; and in a moment of reluctance and hesitation on that functionary's part, the mender of roads, once so submissive to authority, had remarked that carriages were good to make bonfires with, and that post-horses would roast.
— from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The swenkt grinders in this Treadmill of an Earth have ground out another Day; and lounge there, as we say, in village-groups; movable, or ranked on social stone-seats; ( Rapport de M. Remy in Choiseul, p. 143. )
— from The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle

i, p. 15} The levying of this tax requires a multitude of revenue officers, sufficient to guard the transportation of goods, not only from one province to another, but from one shop to another.
— from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

This is no matter of relief or self-congratulation to the driver, for his immovable philosophy is perfectly undisturbed by anything that happens in the coach.
— from American Notes by Charles Dickens

They proved against several, their consulting several times at a bawdy-house in Moore-Fields, called the Russia House, among many other rogueries, of setting houses on fire, that they might gather the goods that were flung into the streets; and it is worth considering how unsafe it is to have children play up and down this lewd town.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

A people continually exposed to the dangers of the field must esteem the healing powers of medicine, or rather of surgery; but the starving physicians of Arabia murmured a complaint that exercise and temperance deprived them of the greatest part of their practice.
— 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

But many other relics of Saxon times remain, and these will require another chapter for their examination.
— from English Villages by P. H. (Peter Hampson) Ditchfield

There's old Young and young Young, both men of renown, Old sells, and Young plays, the best fiddle in town; Young and old live together, and may they live long, Young to play an old fiddle, old to sell a new song." P.T.W. Greenwich Hospital.
— from The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction Volume 19, No. 552, June 16, 1832 by Various

A march laborious, mountainous, on roads of such quality; but, except baggage-difficulties and the like, nothing material going wrong.
— from History of Friedrich II of Prussia — Volume 13 by Thomas Carlyle

The expression " dead men's cries do fill the empty air," I have hitherto regarded, as doubtless most other readers of Shakspere have done, as either a misprint or an obsolete form of expression, meaning, in the more modern English, " dying men's cries do fill the empty air.
— from On Some Ancient Battle-Fields in Lancashire And Their Historical, Legendary, and Aesthetic Associations. by Charles Hardwick

He made and published many other remarks on similar subjects of quite an opposite tenor, and these more truly represented his true feeling.
— from Hawthorne and His Circle by Julian Hawthorne

I speak of the men doing so, because the horses, &c., are not the property of the Government, but of the men, or rather of some among the men.
— from The March to Magdala by G. A. (George Alfred) Henty

Providence reserves to itself various means by which the bonds of the oppressor may be broken; and it is not for human sagacity to anticipate [ 469 ] whether the army of a conqueror shall moulder in the unwholesome marshes of Rome or stiffen with frost in a Russian winter.”
— from A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes by J. M. (John Mackinnon) Robertson

Information was aquired on royal proprietary rights, escheats, wardships, treasury matters, and official misdoings of royal officers, sheriffs, coroners, and bailiffs, which could be dealt with in an administrative way.
— from Our Legal Heritage: King AEthelbert - King George III, 600 A.D. - 1776 by S. A. Reilly

It wants only moments of repose or sickness, when the influence of external things is diminished, to come into full play, and these are precisely the moments when we are best prepared for the truths it is going to suggest.
— from History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) Revised Edition by John William Draper

In principle these views are in conformity with the manner of reading or scanning the alliterative verse explained by English writers on the subject from the sixteenth century downwards, though their terminology naturally is not the same as Sievers’s.
— from A History of English Versification by J. (Jakob) Schipper