He read Alicia's angry crossed and recrossed letter without so much as removing the amber mouth-piece of his German pipe from his mustached lips.
— from Lady Audley's Secret by M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon

" Sir Michael Audley read the above advertisement in the second column of the Times , as he sat at breakfast with my lady and Alicia two or three days after Robert's return to town.
— from Lady Audley's Secret by M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon

The Decrees of that Sixty are not so much as rescinded; they are declared null and non-extant.
— from The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle

And there also enacts, that no poet should so much as read to any private man what he had written, until the judges and law-keepers had seen it, and allowed it.
— from Areopagitica A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England by John Milton

Then, once free, from the day and hour and moment when he was so, he could have but one only thought, which was, to gain Monte Cristo by some means, and remain there alone under some pretext which would arouse no suspicions; and once there, to endeavor to find the wonderful caverns, and search in the appointed spot,—the appointed spot, be it remembered, being the farthest angle in the second opening.
— from The Count of Monte Cristo, Illustrated by Alexandre Dumas

ssy yard, shaded by the dense and massive foliage of the sugar maple; and remember the air of order and stillness, of perpetuity and unchanging repose, that seemed to breathe over the whole place.
— from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize.
— from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

As for the lady, she abode alone and disconsolate till nightfall, when she disguised herself as most she might and repaired to a village hard by, where, having gotten from an old woman that which she needed, she fitted the doublet to her shape and shortening it, made a pair of linen breeches of her shift; then, having cut her hair and altogether transformed herself in the guise of a sailor, she betook herself to the sea-shore, where, as chance would have it, she found a Catalan gentleman, by name Senor Encararch, who had landed at Alba from a ship he had in the offing, to refresh himself at a spring there.
— from The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio

I knew the Grimeshire Mercury , and he said most awfully rude things about me in his paper.
— from Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, June 13, 1891 by Various

It frequently happens that persons, in speaking of sanctification, mean a right thing, although they do not express themselves according to the teaching of holy Scripture.
— from The All-Sufficiency of Christ. Miscellaneous Writings of C. H. Mackintosh, vol. I by Charles Henry Mackintosh

He may do more than this and throw overboard the criterion or distinction itself, together with those false distinctions, proclaiming that all spiritual manifestations are reducible to a single element.
— from The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic by Benedetto Croce

And when at length to my loudest call she murmurs a reply, ’Tis as if hard to conquer sleep, and with half-opened eye; Up starts she, and with straggling steps along the path she’s gone; She brings her basket, but forgets to put the cover on!
— from The Middle Kingdom, Volume 1 (of 2) A Survey of the Geography, Government, Literature, Social Life, Arts, and History of the Chinese Empire and its Inhabitants by S. Wells (Samuel Wells) Williams

Hares seemed to be plentiful on the island, and Etienne went out to set some snares, while the two boys climbed up through the dripping woods, over slippery moss and rocks, to a spot where they could see out over the lake.
— from The Island of Yellow Sands: An Adventure and Mystery Story for Boys by Ethel C. (Ethel Claire) Brill

Faint hopes of accommodation were still entertained; and, when the seceders met at Richmond, they adjourned again to Baltimore, and the 28th of June.
— from The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Complete by Abraham Lincoln

Of the genuflections and embraces, of the advances on each side, measured and recorded to an inch by jealous onlookers, of the piled-up sumptuousness of the garments and the gifts, it boots not here to tell in full, but the King's new liveries alone on this occasion are said to have cost 120,000 ducats; and Howard excused himself for the poverty of his country when he handed to Queen Margaret an Austrian eagle in precious stones worth no more than the same great sum.
— from The Court of Philip IV.: Spain in Decadence by Martin A. S. (Martin Andrew Sharp) Hume

"When the world awakens some morning and reads that at a given hour the forty Robbers of America were sent to their eternal resting place with their crimes on their heads, the shock will not pass away in a day.
— from The Transgressors Story of a Great Sin A Political Novel of the Twentieth Century by Francis Alexandre Adams