"We, whose names are underwritten, merchants trading into Barbary in Africa, do hereby certify, all whom it may concern, that we, each of us, having formerly lived for several years in those parts, did then, as we do now, personally know Jonah ben Jacob Xeres, who was born in Saphia, a sea-port town on that coast.
— from Some Jewish Witnesses For Christ by Aaron Bernstein

In the Ethics he has described the character necessary for the good life, but that life is for him essentially to be lived in society, and when in the last chapters of the Ethics he comes to the practical application of his inquiries, that finds expression not in moral exhortations addressed to the individual but in a description of the legislative opportunities of the statesman.
— from Politics: A Treatise on Government by Aristotle

By reason of his excited condition, "which threw him into continual transports, and which had seemed to the concierge of the prison to be the delirium of fever," he had been lodged, not in the tower itself, but in a dependence, one of whose walls formed the outer wall of the prison, and overlooked the exterior courts.
— from The House of the Combrays by G. Lenotre

Some turned their attention to obtaining information for the general good, upon all that related to travelling in frozen regions; others plodded through many a volume, for meteorological information upon which to arrange a safe period of departure for the travellers in the spring; others tried to found some reasonable theory as to the geography of the unexplored regions around us; whilst a portion more actively employed themselves in bringing into action divers practical means of communicating with our missing country-men which had been supplied to us in England.
— from Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal Or, Eighteen Months in the Polar Regions, in Search of Sir John Franklin's Expedition, in the Years 1850-51 by Sherard Osborn

The male, not content with exhausting itself to please its mate with its voice, stretches itself like a cuckoo upon the branches, erects the feathers upon its throat, spreads its tail as it balances and turns its body in all directions, then rises suddenly into the air, fluttering in a most curious manner, with somewhat of the motion of the bat; it next settles upon the tree, throwing itself from one side to the other, after which it will return to its first perch, and recommence its song.
— from Cassell's Book of Birds, Volume 1 (of 4) by Alfred Edmund Brehm

The Italian building is a dignified building of pure Florentine Renaissance lines, with here and there a modern note.
— from The Art of the Exposition Personal Impressions of the Architecture, Sculpture, Mural Decorations, Color Scheme & Other Aesthetic Aspects of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition by Eugen Neuhaus

The story may originally have taken its birth in a diseased craving of some undistinguished couple for notoriety, or, as is more likely, in a lack of striking headlines for some very enterprising American paper.
— from The Strand Magazine, Vol. 17, No. 97, January to June 1899 An Illustrated Monthly by Various

If these wretches, my children, were princes, there would be thousands ready to offer their ministry; but in my opinion, the heart that is buried in a dungeon is as precious as that seated upon a throne.
— from Dalziels' Illustrated Goldsmith by Oliver Goldsmith

The body of the Moro was carried off by an excited populace, who tied a rope to it, beat it, and dragged it through the town to a few miles up the coast, where it was thrown on the sea-shore.
— from The Philippine Islands A Political, Geographical, Ethnographical, Social and Commercial History of the Philippine Archipelago, Embracing the Whole Period of Spanish Rule by Foreman, John, F.R.G.S.

We, in England, may well feel proud that the blood which flows in the veins of the ideal Bostonian is as distinctly and as truly English as that of our own Gladstones and Morleys, our Brownings and our Tennysons.
— from The Land of Contrasts: A Briton's View of His American Kin by James F. (James Fullarton) Muirhead

Sometimes she is supposed to come like the Irish banshee , in a dark mist, to the windows of those who have been long ill; when flapping her wings against the pane, she repeats their names with the same prolonged emphasis; and then it is thought that they must die.
— from Notes and Queries, Number 19, March 9, 1850 by Various