I got the glass of my book-presses to be done presently, which did mightily content me, and to setting my study in a little better order; and so to my office to my people, busy about our Parliament accounts; and so to dinner, and then at them again close.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

"Why," answered Richard de Ashby, "they are that a certain noble lord, a dearer friend of yours than mine, fair cousin, who lay in high peril in Nottingham Castle, has made his escape last night."
— from Forest Days: A Romance of Old Times by G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford) James

He regarded Sandhurst quite definitely as the anteroom to a career; he never imagined it to be anything else.
— from Public School Life: Boys, Parents, Masters by Alec (Alexander Raban) Waugh

Unfortunately the British Parliament does not, at present, quite know that all manner of things and relations of things, spiritual equally with material, all manner of qualities, entities, existences whatsoever, in this strange visible and invisible Universe, are equally inflexible of nature; that, they will, one and all, with precisely the same obstinacy, continue to obey their own law, not our law; deaf as the adder to all charm of parliamentary eloquence, and of voting never so often repeated; silently, but inflexibly and forevermore, declining to change themselves, even as sulphuric acid declines to become sweet milk, though you vote so to the end of the world.
— from Latter-Day Pamphlets by Thomas Carlyle

All the same Peters went up next day at the appointed time, and, curiously enough, James was in the study waiting for the Doctor too.
— from The Human Boy Again by Eden Phillpotts

Upon its branches hung drums and trumpets and toys, and countless candles gleamed like beautiful stars.
— from Children of the Tenements by Jacob A. (Jacob August) Riis

On the other hand, the necessity of resorting to purely mathematical (geometric) quantity clearly shows that it is the space inclosed in the volume of the body (of which alone geometry treats), and not the matter (of which geometry has nothing to say), that is infinitely divisible; and this amounts to a confession that continuous matter has no existence.
— from The Catholic World, Vol. 20, October 1874‐March 1875 by Various

“There’s a flag, there is no doubt about that; and there are creatures of some sort moving about—but to my eyes they look more like birds than men.
— from The South Sea Whaler by William Henry Giles Kingston

But there still may be read in a boyish scrawl the epitome of Universal History, from "a new king who knew not Joseph,"—down through Rameses, and Dido, and Tydeus, and Tarquin, and Crassus, and Gallienus, and Edward the Martyr,—to Louis, who "set off on a crusade against the Albigenses," and Oliver Cromwell, who "was an unjust and wicked man."
— from Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. Volume 1 by George Otto Trevelyan