The single combats of the heroes of history or fable amuse our fancy and engage our affections: the skilful evolutions of war may inform the mind, and improve a necessary, though pernicious, science.
— 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

[1] Dr. Barwise, Medical Officer of Health for the County Council of Derbyshire, giving evidence before a Select Committee of the House of Commons, on 25th April, 1894, on the Chesterfield Gas and Water Bill, said, in answer to Question 1873: “At Brimington Common School I saw some basins full of soapsuds, and it was all the water that the whole of the children had to wash in.
— from Garden Cities of To-Morrow Being the Second Edition of "To-Morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform" by Howard, Ebenezer, Sir

While they stepped carefully on, they heard the vesper-bell of a convent.
— from The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Ward Radcliffe

But the pleasure is the determining ground of this judgement only because we are conscious that it rests merely on reflection and on the universal though only subjective conditions of the harmony of that reflection with the cognition of Objects in general, for which the form of the Object is purposive.
— from Kant's Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant

I saw you on Saturday cantering over the hill on a nag not worthy of you.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

I am collecting my tools to descend to my cottage down in the village below, where it is already dark, when I raise my eyes, and see coming over the hill six soldiers.
— from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Mary aforesaid felt a face, which she judged to be a woman's face, presently then she had a great blow on her fingers which pained her 2 days after, which she complained of to her father & mother, & made her fingers black and blue.
— from The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) by John M. (John Metcalf) Taylor

The fundamental reason which induces nations to {250} hedge its subjects about with this restriction, was thus concisely stated by the Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1844.
— from The Treaty of Waitangi; or, how New Zealand became a British Colony by Thomas Lindsay Buick

Then the king made great clerks to come before him, that they should chronicle of the high adventures of the good knights.
— from Bulfinch's Mythology by Thomas Bulfinch

They turned, and, making a second circuit of the house, they crossed the plateau noiselessly, and re-entered the grove.
— from Dorothy, and Other Italian Stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson

She could only tell him that they were still asleep, and seemed very tired.
— from Fairy Tales from Gold Lands: Second Series by May Wentworth

Obeying a quick impulse, Percival stepped to the curb as she came opposite to him.
— from The Spenders: A Tale of the Third Generation by Harry Leon Wilson

It is true that a hundred châlets dotted the Alps, or those mountain pasturages which spread themselves a thousand fathoms above the Leman, on the foundation of rock that lay like a wall behind Montreux, shining still with the brightness of a bland even, but all below was fast catching the more sombre colors of the hour.
— from The Headsman; Or, The Abbaye des Vignerons by James Fenimore Cooper

She came over to his chair.
— from The Tempting of Tavernake by E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim

His reply contained a severe censure of the Home and Foreign Review for the "absence of all reserve or reverence in its treatment of persons or of things deemed sacred, its grazing even the very edges of the most perilous abysses of error, and its habitual preference of uncatholic to Catholic instincts, tendencies, and motives."
— from Letters of Lord Acton to Mary, Daughter of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone by Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Baron

The Fifth Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Holyhead Roads furnishes ample proof of the great superiority of steam vessels.
— from On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures by Charles Babbage