The naivete of his story is lost in our best modern writers.
— 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

Neither of the two qualifications upon which particular stress is laid in the above Instructions was possessed by Pepys.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

109 Grubstreet a wretched street in London, inhabited in Pope's day by hack writers, most of whom were his enemies.
— from The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems by Alexander Pope

“I will soon explain to what these feelings tended, but allow me now to return to the cottagers, whose story excited in me such various feelings of indignation, delight, and wonder, but which all terminated in additional love and reverence for my protectors (for so I loved, in an innocent, half-painful self-deceit, to call them).” Chapter 14 “Some time elapsed before I learned the history of my friends.
— from Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

They had an excellent taste, and were very nutritious, being something similar to the substance which is sold in England under the name of “Portland sago”; they were also a good substitute for bread, which the settlers in Lincoln Island did not yet possess.
— from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

In the Troppau district of Austrian Silesia the straw figure which the boys make on the fourth Sunday in Lent is dressed by the girls in woman’s clothes and hung with ribbons, necklace, and garlands.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

For two summers I lived in this little world; it was dull and humdrum.
— from The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois

Egregie vero J. C. Scaliger, in Lib. I. de Plantis: Est primum, inquit, sapientis officium, bene sentire, ut sibi vivat: proximum, bene loqui, ut patriae vivat.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Through them all may be detected the unifying principle that literature in its truest sense includes life itself; that intellect is the handmaid to conscience; and that the best books are those which best teach men how to live.
— from Chapters on Jewish Literature by Israel Abrahams

With a barber's shop in Lichfield is associated an amusing story, in which the chief figure was Farquhar, a dramatist, who attained a measure of success in the eighteenth century.
— from At the Sign of the Barber's Pole: Studies In Hirsute History by William Andrews

like liquid sunshine; though, how you, my good young gentleman, who, to my knowledge, can never have seen her face to face in this life, can know the colour of her hair or what she is like, I must confess that passes my comprehension!”
— from The Ghost Ship: A Mystery of the Sea by John C. (John Conroy) Hutcheson

The face, in the first sketch, is laid in with a sort of fury [Pg 177] of impressionism, and in the parade portrait the sitter is realised as a man of great distinction.
— from The Venetian School of Painting by Evelyn March Phillipps

I have since seen it used in a number of Dickens' Household Words , where the scene of a ghost story is laid in an old house, or street (I forget which), called The Pallant .
— from Notes and Queries, Vol. IV, Number 110, December 6, 1851 A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. by Various

The scene of this splendid story is laid in India and tells of the lamp of love that continues to shine through all sorts of tribulations to final happiness.
— from The Witness by Grace Livingston Hill

At length, however, the inevitable change came; the wind died away to a breathless calm; the ocean took on the semblance of a sea of gently undulating glass; and the hitherto cloudless sky imperceptibly lost its intensity of blue as a thin, streaky haze gradually veiled it, through which the sun shone feebly, a rayless disc of throbbing white fire.
— from Dick Leslie's Luck: A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure by Harry Collingwood

She is living in my mistress's apartment until the furniture can be sold."
— from Wyllard's Weird: A Novel by M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon