Offer to her your left arm, and at the table wait until she is seated, indeed wait until every lady is seated, before taking your own place.
— from The Gentlemen's Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness Being a Complete Guide for a Gentleman's Conduct in All His Relations Towards Society by Cecil B. Hartley

“What then have you learned?” asked the great man.
— from The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale by Joseph Conrad

I went to the Heights as I proposed: my housekeeper entreated me to bear a little note from her to her young lady, and I did not refuse, for the worthy woman was not conscious of anything odd in her request.
— from Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

I hold it, sir, my bounden duty To warn you how that Master Tootie, Alias, Laird M'Gaun, Was here to hire yon lad away 'Bout whom ye spak the tither day, An' wad hae don't aff han'; But lest he learn the callan tricks— An' faith I muckle doubt him— Like scrapin out auld Crummie's nicks, An' tellin lies about them; As lieve then, I'd have then Your clerkship he should sair, If sae be ye may be Not fitted otherwhere.
— from Poems and Songs of Robert Burns by Robert Burns

Dryden held it, two hundred years later, and said of the fairies: I speak of ancient times, for now the swain Returning late may pass the woods in vain, And never hope to see the nightly train.
— from British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions by Wirt Sikes

"Ill would it become a teacher of the divine art of medicine," said Professor Pietro Baglioni, in answer to a question of Giovanni, "to withhold due and well-considered praise of a physician so eminently skilled as Rappaccini; but, on the other hand, I should answer it but scantily to my conscience were I to permit a worthy youth like yourself, Signor Giovanni, the son of an ancient friend, to imbibe erroneous ideas respecting a man who might hereafter chance to hold your life and death in his hands.
— from Mosses from an Old Manse, and Other Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne

if I'd had the luck to call at the stone house wi' my pack, as lies here,"–stooping and thumping the bundle emphatically with his fist,–"an' th' handsome young lasses all stannin' out on the stone steps, it ud' ha' been summat like openin' a pack, that would.
— from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Neither did Confucius (551–479 B.C.) nor Mencius, who lived two hundred years later, add any legends to history.
— from Myths and Legends of China by E. T. C. (Edward Theodore Chalmers) Werner

This same infernal law had existed in our own South in my own time, more than thirteen hundred years later, and under it hundreds of freemen who could not prove that they were freemen had been sold into lifelong slavery without the circumstance making any particular impression upon me; but the minute law and the auction block came into my personal experience, a thing which had been merely improper before became suddenly hellish.
— from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Ef you see Hiram, tell him ye left an old woman behind ye to defend the place whar you uster hide with her darter.”
— from Cressy by Bret Harte

Now I should like, Herr Narr, to have you look at the other side for a moment: for there is a positive and a negative pole.
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 63, January, 1863 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various

It ran: "Dear Mr. Leek, I am so glad to have your letter, and I think the photograph is most gentlemanly.
— from Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days by Arnold Bennett

Then the whaleboat continued on over to the "Hastings," where Eph and his companions were taken off and the remaining three workmen from the home yard left aboard as guards.
— from The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise The Young Kings of the Deep by Victor G. Durham

Two hundred years later, Alexander von Humboldt revived this knowledge, and Humphry Davy wrote about the benefits of guano to the soil.
— from History of Phosphorus by Eduard Farber

And I dinna like to hear you laughing at folk, as though you didna believe in them and their doing.
— from David Fleming's Forgiveness by Margaret M. (Margaret Murray) Robertson

Oh, my Laurence, was there no one to hear your last agony and save you?
— from The Mystery of Orcival by Emile Gaboriau

Euphuism, to be revived two hundred years later, and find a new avatar in the Johnsonian balance; Euphuism, dead now, yet alive enough in its day.
— from On the Art of Writing Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 by Arthur Quiller-Couch