During the seventeen years which followed the appearance of Waverley , Scott wrote on an average nearly two novels per year, creating an unusual number of characters and illustrating many periods of Scotch, English, and French history, from the time of the Crusades to the fall of the Stuarts.
— from English Literature Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World by William J. (William Joseph) Long

A single-track railroad can supply an army of sixty or seventy thousand men, with the usual number of cavalry and artillery; but beyond that number, or with a large mounted force, the difficulty of supply is very great.
— from Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete by William T. (William Tecumseh) Sherman

The poet is like a painter who, as we have already observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colours and figures.
— from The Republic of Plato by Plato

But when the magistrate had come, he was rambling about being at sea, and mixing up names of captains and lieutenants in an indistinct manner with those of his fellow porters at the railway; and his last words were a curse on the 'Cornish trick' which had, he said, made him a hundred pounds poorer than he ought to have been.
— from North and South by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

e would give it up now, of course, and find a cheap boarding house; but the furniture must be rubbed and sent down to an auction room, and she dreaded the separation from all the objects which linked her with the past.
— from Beulah by Augusta J. (Augusta Jane) Evans

The spectrum of a compound certainly does not appear as a sum of the spectra of its components; and therefore the observations of Lockyer can be considered precisely as a proof that iron undergoes no other changes at the temperature of the sun than those which it experiences in the voltaic arc—provided the spectrum of iron is preserved.
— from The Principles of Chemistry, Volume II by Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev

He represented to them the dangers into which the apathy of each plunged the affairs of all; he showed the urgent necessity of combining against the avowed enterprises of the anarchists, of inspiring the National Assembly with the firmness required to repress the intended attacks, and foretold the inevitable calamities which would result from the weakness and disunion of honest men.
— from Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty by Imbert de Saint-Amand