Distinct upon the stagnant air came the sounds of a trotting horse passing up Longpuddle Lane—just beyond the gipsies' encampment in Weatherbury Bottom.
— from Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

This age wherein we live, in our part of the world at least, is grown so stupid, that not only the exercise, but the very imagination of virtue is defective, and seems to be no other but college jargon: “Virtutem verba putant, ut Lucum ligna:” [“They think words virtue, as they think mere wood a sacred grove.”
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

Bless ye, the world hath changed, she is all submission to-day: 'obedience is honey,' quoth she; and in sooth 'tis a sweetmeat she cannot but savour, eating so little on't, for what with her fair face, and her mellow tongue; and what wi' flying in fits and terrifying us that be soldiers to death, an we thwart her; and what wi' chiding us one while, and petting us like lambs t' other, she hath made two of the crawlingest slaves ever you saw out of two honest swashbucklers.
— from The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade

Amulets, Spells, Sigils and Incantations, practised in other Diseases, are seldom pretended in this; and we find no Sigil in the Archidoxis of Paracelsus to cure an extreme Consumption or Marasmus , which if other Diseases fail, will put a period unto long Livers, and at last makes Dust of all.
— from The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, Volume 3 by Browne, Thomas, Sir

The common people understood little Latin, and Greek not at all.
— from Early European History by Hutton Webster

"If I Must Go" If I must go to heaven's end Climbing the ages like a stair, Be near me and forever bend With the same eyes above me there; Time will fly past us like leaves flying, We shall not heed, for we shall be Beyond living, beyond dying, Knowing and known unchangeably.
— from Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale

(1) A play upon laurea (laurel wreath) and Lauretta.
— from The Decameron, Volume II by Giovanni Boccaccio

These pickets, under Lieutenant Leonidas S. Scranton, of the Second Michigan Cavalry, fell back slowly, taking advantage of every tree or other cover to fire from till they arrived at the point where the converging roads joined.
— from Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, Volume 1, Part 2 by Philip Henry Sheridan