They have no house, land, or domestic cares: they are maintained by whomsoever they visit: lavish of another's property, regardless of their own; till the debility of age renders them unequal to such a rigid course of military virtue.
— from The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus by Cornelius Tacitus

What do you want in these sick and rotten cities of men?
— from Martin Eden by Jack London

But I did distinctly understand that I had set forth upon a venture totally dissimilar to the safe and respectable careers of my dozen Sunday-school books.
— from McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 by Various

She, wonderful in all her laces and draperies, a marquise , a lady of the old régime , exacting every sign of devotion; he, not made of velvet or brocade, as her cavalier ought to have been, but in the spare and reserved costume of modern days, with a manner very grave, very self-controlled, full of care, and attention, and duty.
— from Lady William by Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

The shyness and reserve characteristic of many cultivated Englishmen, was accentuated in his case by a natural austerity and an absorption in serious thought.
— from An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times by Thomas Hill Green

So far as we can form accurate ideas of the social and religious condition of men at any particular period in the world's history, we may doubt whether the words of the Apostle St. Paul, describing what shall come to pass in what he calls "the last days," ever touched any people so closely as they do those of our times and country.
— from Public School Education by Michael Müller

Somethin' must o' turned him blind, I should say, for him to see a red coat on me ."
— from From Kingdom to Colony by Mary Devereux

It cannot be those of England to see me degraded and sunk; and this certainly, joined to my high notion of your national character , leaves me without apprehension as to the consequences of the declaration I make, which I repeat to be the sole and real cause of my apparent backwardness in continuing the war."
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 353, March 1845 by Various