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More "Commoner" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... case; but many of them are obscure even to the practitioner of mental medicine, to whom their results come daily. Distasteful as the task may be, the social worker should familiarize herself, through reading or through instruction by a qualified physician, in the commoner forms of these maladjustments. This is not urged because it is part of the social worker's task to make detailed inquiry into such matters or to pass judgment upon them, but because they often clamor ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... there is another way, and that is to wear armour. Then you can frighten your enemy, or at least prevent him from eating you. Some fish, like the Trunk Fish, (p. 52, No. 6), are covered with bony plates, jointed together like armour. Spines and prickles are a commoner defence. ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... itself. It is not to be stated justly in any formula, it is not to be rendered by an epigram. As well one might show a man's skeleton for his portrait. Yet, essentially, Benham's idea was simple. He had an incurable, an almost innate persuasion that he had to live life nobly and thoroughly. His commoner expression for that thorough living is "the aristocratic life." But by "aristocratic" he meant something very different from the quality of a Russian prince, let us say, or an English peer. He meant an intensity, a clearness.... Nobility ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... night of August 11th I had listened to Mr. Disraeli's last speech as a Commoner, and had noticed that on leaving the House in a long white overcoat and dandified lavender kid gloves, leaning on his secretary's arm, he had shaken hands with a good many people, none of whom knew that he was bidding farewell to ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... word of the case for the prosecution there was that in the leading counsel's manner—a gravity, a kindness, an inclination to neglect the commoner methods of scoring—that suggested, with the sudden chill of unexpectedly bad news, a foregone conclusion. The reality of his feeling reference to the painful position of the defendant's father, the sincerity of his regret on behalf of the ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Robin, either then or afterwards, was a snob. He thought no more of a duke or a viscount than of a plain commoner, but he learnt at once the lesson of "Us—and the Others." If you were one of the others—if there was a hesitation about your aspirates, if you wore a tail-coat and brown boots—then you were non-existent, you simply did ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... says Dr. Fuller (i), " a Gentleman- Commoner in Oxford; where, being but fourteen Years old, and yet three Years standing, he was call'd out to dispute ex tempore, before the Earls of Leicester and Warwick, with the ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... would have been little or no difficulty in carrying out a law that nobody should take a part in the business who had not some handle to her name, but it was felt that such an arrangement as that might lead to failure rather than glory. The commoner world must be represented but it should be represented only by ladies who had made great names for themselves. Mrs Conway Sparkes, the spiteful poetess, though she was old and ugly as well as spiteful, ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... and is connected with the native religions of the Pacific islands. We have adopted the word and use it in its true meaning of forbidden. If an article were dedicated to a god, or used in his worship, or had been touched by him, or claimed by a chief or a priest, no commoner dared lay finger on it, for it was as sacred as the ark of the covenant. Some canny planters kept boys out of their orchards and palm groves by offering the fruit to certain gods until it was ripe, for a sign of taboo kept out all marauders till the crop was ready for gathering, when the owner changed ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... the name of Oribrd, were recognised by the real father, as the productions of a promising son: at his instigation, and upon a promise of reform, he was again restored to his former home, and shortly after entered as a gentleman commoner of St. Mary's, Oxford; but not till he had, by some means or other, made the discovery that Orford was not his real name. Congenial spirits are naturally fond of associating, and it was here that he first became acquainted with the Hon. Tom Dashall: they were ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... which Anglo-Canadians share with the stay-at-home type of Englishman. But the special point is that, like the American, the Canadian is still more nautical than the Englishman in his everyday use of sea terms. 'So long!' in the sense of good-bye is a seaport valediction commoner in Canada than in England. Canadians go 'timber-cruising' when they are looking for merchantable trees; they used to understand what 'prairie schooners' were out West; and even now they always 'board' ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... do both. But in spite of her knowledge of the great world, her heart was neither blinded to the true things of worth nor entirely hardened. If she ever married, it would be for wealth and position, as the world counted such things, but never a man—lord or commoner—who did not come to her with the light of pure witchery in his eyes. She remembered, smiling down at the half-written letter to her New York agent, how that light had shone in the honest eyes of a young ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... it; but he would never have mentioned it else. This 'concealing of evil' is considered very meritorious, and where women are concerned positively a religious duty. Le scandale est ce qui fait l'offense is very much the notion in Egypt, and I believe that very forgiving husbands are commoner here than elsewhere. The whole idea is founded on the verse of the Koran, incessantly quoted, 'The woman is made for the man, but the man is made for the woman'; ergo, the obligations to chastity are equal; ergo, as the men find it difficult, they argue that the women ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... produced bitter personal attacks and willingness on either side to bring an antagonist under the libel laws. At the date of this 'Spectator' paper Henry St. John, who had been made Secretary of State at the age of 32, was 34 years old, and the greatest commoner in England, as Swift said, turning the whole Parliament, who can do nothing without him. This great position and the future it might bring him he was throwing away for a title, and becoming Viscount Bolingbroke. His last political ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the flavour of his peaches and grapes, confessed by Frenchmen to equal those of France; with his having had the honour to naturalise in this country four kinds of grapes, with his liberal distribution of them, because "he ever thought all things of this kind the commoner they are the better." In a word, with his passionate attachment to his garden, where he desired his heart to be buried, of his desire to escape from great employments, and having passed five years without going to town, where, by the way, "he had a large house always ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... attended Matins and Mass in the chapel, studied grammar and logic, mastered difficult passages in the Fathers, or copied out portions for himself in the chamber which he as a gentleman commoner, as we should call him, possessed, instead of living in a common dormitory with the other scholars. Or in the open cloister he listened and took notes of the lectures of the fellows and tutors of the college, and seated on a bench or walking up and down received special instructions. Then ensued ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... right honourable Dumany Kornel, a member of the Hungarian landed gentry, and also of the medical profession, if I rightly remember, a rather fast-living bachelor, and rejected Commoner, has been metamorphosed into Cornelius Dumany, the Silver King, the South American nabob, the matador of the Bourse, husband of a beautiful countess, and father of five children, within such a short period. Tell me this, ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... the nation had so clamorously demanded, and which in part they had now achieved. From 1820 to 1831 he had incessantly labored in the lower House, and but little was done without his aid. It would have been better for his fame had he remained a commoner. He was great not only as a parliamentary orator, but as a lawyer. His labors were prodigious. Altogether, at this period he was the most prominent man in England, the most popular among the friends of reform, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... follow. The two forms of emotion are so far similar that we need not distinguish between them in considering the general content of the term "dramatic." It is plain that the latter or secondary form of emotion must be by far the commoner, and the one to which the dramatist of any ambition must make his main appeal; for the longer his play endures, the larger will be the proportion of any given audience which knows it beforehand, in outline, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... wealth and power. "Wherever there is virtue there is nobility," says Dante, "but where there is nobility there need not necessarily be virtue." A time had come when personal distinction was in every man's grasp, no matter whether he was learned or unlearned, a nobleman or a commoner. Certainly the commoner was never on an equality with the aristocrat, partly because he was dependent on the largess of the great. Even Dante was compelled to seek princely patronage, and not until the Renascence do we hear of writers whose ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... to you to-day and said I wanted to marry one of my own nation—say even a commoner—in preference to the daughter of some foreign princeling, let me do it! It breaks with a foolish tradition—largely our own importation when, as foreigners, we were seeking to keep up our prestige—it may annoy or even embarrass the Government. Well! ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... female voice, but only to that special modification of the male voice seldom employed now, and almost never except by tenors. With this writer, "falsetto" as applied to female voices replaces "middle," in the commoner usage. ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... art of goldsmith from his nephew's father. Though Robert's indentures bound him for ten years, Sir William is supposed to have offered no remonstrance when he was asked, long before that term expired, to cancel the engagement and allow Robert to enter Cambridge, which he did as fellow-commoner at St. John's College. At the end of two years he transferred himself to Trinity Hall, with a view to economy and the pursuit of the law—the two frequently go together. He received his degree of B. A. in 1617, and his ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... and historian of the 17th century, was descended of an ancient, but decayed family in the county of Sussex, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth[1], and was educated a fellow commoner in Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge. He afterwards removed to London, and lived about the court, where he contracted friendships with several gentlemen of fashion and distinction, especially with ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... one is mentioned); try and think what PITT looked like generally, and what he did with his arms, which you finally decide to fold across your chest, though conscious that you more resemble NAPOLEON crossing the Alps than the Great Commoner sitting at his drawing-room ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... should thwart a lord! Yet not a commoner. A baronet Is fish and flesh. Nine parts plebeian, and Patrician in the tenth. Sir Thomas Clifford! A man, they say, of brains! I abhor brains As I do tools: they're things mechanical. So far are we above our forefathers They to their brains did owe their ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles
... of an old family with large estates, settled at Alderton, in Suffolk. He was at Cambridge in the latter years of Elizabeth's reign, having entered as Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, and obtained a Fellowship at Trinity Hall. Naunton went to Scotland in 1589 with an uncle, William Ashby, whom Queen Elizabeth sent thither as Ambassador, and was despatched to Elizabeth's ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... dilapidated aborigine with poi, which is compounded of the roots of the water lily, with iamaka, which is raw fish, and with pounded kukui nut and limu, which latter is seawood tender to the toothless, digestible and savoury. It was the old feudal tie, the faithfulness of the commoner to the chief, the responsibility of the chief to the commoner; and Martha, three-quarters haole with the Anglo-Saxon blood of New England, was four-quarters Hawaiian in her remembrance and observance of the well-nigh vanished customs ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... but merely honorary, and every way expensive), and put himself into a port and course of living agreeably thereunto, and having also removed my brother from Thame school to Merton College in Oxford, and entered him there in the highest and most chargeable condition of a Fellow Commoner, he found it needful to retrench his expenses elsewhere, the hurt of which fell upon me. For he thereupon took me from school, to save the charge of maintaining me there; which was somewhat like plucking green fruit from the tree, and laying it by before it was come ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... and one could not help continually making guesses about them. Yes, the feeling that Marco had was that his father's attraction for him was a sort of spell, and that others felt the same thing. When he stood and talked to commoner people, he held his tall body with singular quiet grace which was like power. He never stirred or moved himself as if he were nervous or uncertain. He could hold his hands (he had beautiful slender and strong ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... gentleman, Ralph Burton, was born at Lindley in Leicestershire on the 8th of February 1576-7. He was educated at the free school of Sutton Coldfield and at Nuneaton grammar school; became in 1593 a commoner of Brasenose College, and in 1599 was elected student at Christ Church, where he continued to reside for the rest of his life. The dean and chapter of Christ Church appointed him, in November 1616, vicar of St Thomas in the west suburbs, and about 1630 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... it is a pity that he should not have given himself a chance to commemorate some of the types that flourished in the richest soil of the place. Like almost all people who possess in a strong degree the storytelling faculty, Hawthorne had a democratic strain in his composition and a relish for the commoner stuff of human nature. Thoroughly American in all ways, he was in none more so than in the vagueness of his sense of social distinctions and his readiness to forget them if a moral or intellectual sensation were to be gained by it. He ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... proceed to marriage with this chit of a girl? He did: the wish had come at last. It was true that as he studied her he saw defects in addition to her social insufficiencies. Judgment, hoodwinked as it was, told him that she was colder in nature, commoner in character, than that well read, bright little woman Avice the First. But twenty years make a difference in ideals, and the added demands of middle-age in physical form are more than balanced by its concessions as to the spiritual content. He looked at himself in the glass, and felt glad at those ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... be a perilous bride for any commoner, and let that thought, if no other, keep thee from lowering thine eyes to such as he. Were I and thy brother taken out of the way, none would stand between thee and both thrones! What would English or Scots say to find thee a household ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Chinese cart, which soon drove off and left us fairly launched out on the Plain. We had two tents—one for ourselves and one for our servants. They were both alike, made of common blue Chinese cloth outside, and of commoner white Chinese cloth inside. It was originally intended that our tent should be private for our retirement and for Mrs. Gilmour's use; but we soon found that this idea could not be carried out. The Mongols ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... that became a maid of quality to be mistress of; and Horatio having gone thro' all the learning of the school, was taken home to his own house, from whence he was to go to Oxford, in order to finish his studies in the character of a gentleman-commoner. ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... Shih Huang-ti. Lue Pu-wei came with his protege to Ch'in, where he became his Prime Minister, and after the prince's death in 247 B.C. Lue Pu-wei became the regent for his young son Shih Huang-ti (then called Cheng). For the first time in Chinese history a merchant, a commoner, had reached one of the highest positions in the state. It is not known what sort of trade Lue Pu-wei had carried on, but probably he dealt in horses, the principal export of the state of Chao. As horses were an absolute necessity for the armies of that time, it is easy to imagine that a horse-dealer ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... with the same number of species, then we may conclude that only one species of each of the six older genera has left modified descendants, constituting the six new genera. The other seven species of the old genera have all died out and have left no progeny. Or, which would probably be a far commoner case, two or three species of two or three alone of the six older genera will have been the parents of the six new genera; the other old species and the other whole old genera having become utterly extinct. ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... baronet," he said. "Shall I tell you a secret, Miss Amory? I promoted all my characters at the request of the publisher. The young duke was only a young baron when the novel was first written; his false friend the viscount, was a simple commoner, and so on with all ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... influence of great fortunes, Mr. Greg seems to take a rather sanguine view of the probable character and conduct of their possessors. He admits that a broad-acred peer or opulent commoner "may spend his L30,000 a year in such a manner as to be a curse, a reproach, and an object of contempt to the community, demoralizing and disgusting all around him, doing no good to others, and bringing ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... to doctrine. He possessed no industry or energy of any kind; but he was good-natured and charitable, lived on friendly terms with all his neighbours, and was intimate with every one that dwelt within ten miles of him, priest and parson, lord and commoner. ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... few facts known of the inconspicuous life of Thomas Traherne. He was born about the year 1636, the son of a Hereford shoemaker, and came in all probability (like Herbert and Vaughan) of Welsh stock. In 1652 he entered Brasenose College, Oxford, as a commoner. On leaving the University he took orders; was admitted Rector of Credenhill, in Herefordshire, in 1657; took the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1669; became the private chaplain of Sir Orlando Bridgman, at Teddington; and died there a few months after his patron, in 1674, aged ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... shaking under me at the prospect of committing some solecism in his sight. Lady DeWolfe's husband has been noble only four months, and Parker of course knows it, and perhaps affects even greater hauteur to divert the attention of the vulgar commoner from the ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... parts of India striped horses of more than one breed are apparently commoner than in any other part of the world; and I have received information respecting them from several officers, especially from Colonel Poole, Colonel Curtis, Major Campbell, Brigadier St. John, and others. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... near Hyderabad, India, noted for its diamonds. CRYPTOGRAPHS: from two Greek words meaning hidden and write. The commoner term ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... Refusing to reflect on it, she naturally had no proof of it; and, having no proof of it, she had no ground for believing that she was not perfectly innocent and upright—a very pretty process, much commoner than perhaps might be suspected. After the lapse of two or three hours there was in fact no test by which to distinguish the validity of this belief from that of her other beliefs, nor indeed, it may be said, from that of the beliefs in which many ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... the chief is to die, the special woman attendant will give him the blow on the head, as in the case of the ordinary villager. The shouting of the men outside when the chiefs death is announced is much louder than in the case of a commoner; and as they shout they brandish their spears, and strike the roof of the chiefs house with the spear points, and some of the men strike it with adzes and clubs. The spreading of the news to other communities ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... A. Waugh, professor of horticulture, University of Vermont. A treatise on the general principles governing outdoor art; with sundry suggestions for their application in the commoner problems of gardening. Every paragraph is short, terse and to the point, giving perfect clearness to the discussions at all points. In spite of the natural difficulty of presenting abstract principles the whole matter is made entirely plain ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones
... serves the despotic ends of European despots: they point to the freest government in the world for examples of their own absolutism, shield their autocracy beneath its democracy, and with it annihilate the rights of the commoner. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... hold. The bee-master and I divided the sandwiches, and washed them down with handfuls of the running rill, so fresh, so cold, so limpid, that (like the saints and martyrs of a faith) it would convert any one to water-drinking who did not reflect on the commoner and less shining streams which come to us through lead pipes and in evil communication ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... diocese in order to enlist the sympathy of a wider audience. But this connexion dropped out of sight for many years and seems to have had little influence on Patteson's life at Oxford, where he spent four years at Balliol. He went up in 1845 as a commoner, and this fact caused him some disquietude. He felt that he ought to have won a scholarship, and, conscious of his failure, he took to more steady reading. He was also practising self-discipline, giving up his cricket to secure ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... keener pleasure in life than the recognition of genius. Good work is commoner than it used to be, but the best is as rare as ever. All the more gladly, therefore, do we welcome in "Maelcho" a piece of work of the first order, which we do not hesitate to describe as one of the most remarkable literary achievements of this generation. Miss ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... many floating islands of fantastic shape, on which birds rested in graceful pose. We saw the garza blanca, the aigrets of which are esteemed by royalty and commoner alike, along with other birds new and strange. To several on board who had looked for years on nothing but the flat Argentine pampas, this change of scenery was most exhilarating, and when one morning the sun rose behind ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... of their being also natives of India, whence they have been described; but there has been no recent attempt on the part of colonial or European botanists even to throw into a useful form the already published descriptions of the commoner plants of the island. Such a work would be the first step to a Singhalese Flora. The preparation of such a compendium would seem, to belong to the duties of the colonial botanist, and as such it was an object of especial solicitude to the late superintendent, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... impossible scenes—Consuello and he on a yacht skimming the rolling waves of the ocean off Catalina, leisurely inspecting some "gabled foreign town"; she another Princess Patricia with "silken gowns" and "jewels for her hair," loving and wedding him, a "commoner" like the real princess' husband, despite the frowns of kings and queens, and settling down to rule a Graustark-like ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... to be born to a romantic history. The humdrum always think that you are lying. In real truth romance is common in life, commoner, perhaps, than the commonplace. But the commonplace always ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... without recognizing it as such, unless there happens to be in it something which attracts special attention, such as a figure in armor, or in antique costume. It is probable that occasional glimpses of these reflections of the Akashic Records are commoner than the published accounts would lead us to believe. As usual, we find examples of all degrees of the power to see into this 'memory of Nature,' from the trained man who can consult the record for himself ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... carried a large crescent-shaped powder-horn, with a pouch for bullets; and over the saddle of each was strapped the robe or kaross, differing only from their father's in that his was of the rarer leopard-skin, while theirs were a commoner sort, one of antelope, and the other of jackal-skin. Little Jan also wore wide trousers, jacket, "feldt-schoenen," and broad-brimmed beaver,—in fact, Jan, although scarce a yard high, was, in point of costume, a type of his father,—a diminutive type of the boor. Truey was ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... preparation, some of which were of a political nature. One, in particular, from General Ireton's regiment, called for "impartial and speedy justice" upon public criminals, and demanded "that the same fault may have the same punishment in the person of King or Lord as in the poorest Commoner." Such petitions to Fairfax appear to have dropped in upon him from regiment after regiment at St. Alban's during the next fortnight. One Petition, however, heard of in London Oct. 30, was from Colonel Ingoldsby's regiment, then in garrison at Oxford. It also demanded "immediate care that justice ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... number come in the course of a year. Besides the shed just visited, there would be certain to be another more or less ornamented near the keeper's cottage, and probably others scattered about, where the commoner vermin could be nailed without the trouble of carrying them far away. Only the owls and hawks, magpies, and such more striking evidences of slaughter were collected here, and ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... sweeter fruits, which are eaten raw. As for the plant on which they grow, no mere words can picture the simple grandeur and grace of a form which startles me whenever I look steadily at it. For however common it is—none commoner here—it is so unlike aught else, so perfect in itself, that, like a palm, it might well have become, in early ages, an object ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... names are not historic. Snobbery makes acceptable the portrait of a great lady, though it be by Boldini; and even Mr. Lavery may be welcome if he come with the picture of a king. But how are our ediles to know whether a picture of a commoner, or of some inanimate and undistinguished object, by Degas or Cezanne is good or bad? They need not know whether a picture by Hals is good; they need only know that it ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... and more out of place than ever in the choir— better, that is to say, in the sense of being more attractive; but he was not looking strong, and the common faces about him seemed commoner still when contrasted with the exceptional refinement of his own. The constant self-denial he had been obliged to exercise in order to indulge the fancies of that rapacious Boy, although a pleasure in itself, was beginning to tell upon him. His features had sharpened ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... particular garb consisting of a cloak and often a mask, supposed to protect them from infections at this time, so that it was not difficult to make a characteristic picture as a sign for a pharmacy. These symbolic signs were much commoner and very necessary when people generally were not able to read. It is from that period that we have the mortar and pestle as also the colored lights in the windows of the drug stores, and the many-colored barber-pole. Also the big boot, key, watch, hat, bonnet, and the like, the last ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... substance; his house the poorest in the village. It was currently supposed that his elder brother, Kauanui, must have helped him out. But how comes it that the elder brother should succeed to the family estate, and be a wealthy commoner, and the younger be a poor man, and yet rule as chief in Anaho? That the one should be wealthy and the other almost indigent is probably to be explained by some adoption; for comparatively few children are brought ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reflect the idiosyncrasies of their makers, and have never won wide approbation. Morality must remain largely experimental, individual. Conscience will play a very useful role in spurring us to our recognized duty in the commoner situations, but for all the more delicate decisions we need a more ultimate touchstone. We must grasp the underlying principles of right conduct, and weigh the relative goods attainable by each possible act. A well-balanced and normal conscience will save us the recurrent ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... The commoner modern form Parish is seldom to be derived from our word parish. This rarely occurs, while the entry de Paris is, on the ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... beginning of the art of story-telling, the narrators must have gone to actuality to get suggestions for their character-drawing; and nothing is commoner than the accusation that this or that novelist has stolen his characters ready-made,—filching them from nature's shop-window, without so much as a by-your-leave. Daudet is bold in committing these larcenies from life and frank ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the air the stimulus could be anything that is normally seen in the air. Balloons, airplanes, and astronomical bodies are the commoner stimuli. Birds and insects are common also, but usually are seen at such close range that they are nearly always recognized. Infrequently observed things, such as sundogs, mirages, huge fireballs, and a host of other unusual flying objects, ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... Dict. Arch. and Prov. Words, says, "The term is used in contradistinction to gentleman commoner." In Gent. Mag., 1787, p. 1146, is the following:—"There was formerly at Oxford an order similar to the sizars of Cambridge, called battelers (batteling having the same signification as sizing). ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... but it seems King Ranulf insists that he's entitled to precedence, or, rather, his Lord Marshal does. This Lord Koreff insists that his king is not going to yield precedence to a commoner." ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... in that cellar of gloom and desolation. Then he went out of doors. The brightness and the freedom of the streets made him feel adventurous and happy. But at two o'clock he was back in the corner of the big room. Soon the work-girls went trooping past, making remarks. It was the commoner girls who worked upstairs at the heavy tasks of truss-making and the finishing of artificial limbs. He waited for Mr. Pappleworth, not knowing what to do, sitting scribbling on the yellow order-paper. Mr. Pappleworth came at ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... limited Scott's humour and irony to the commoner fields of experience, and prevented him from ever introducing into his stories characters of the highest type of moral thoughtfulness, gave to his own morality and religion, which were, I think, true to the core so far as they went, a shade of distinct conventionality. ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... too long for insertion here, in relation to this cortes, showing the sturdy stuff of which a Castilian commoner in that day was made. (Teoria, part. 2, cap. 7.) It will scarcely gain credit without a better voucher than the anonymous scribbler from whom he ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... conqueror of this commoner was but four years of age when Numantia fell, and came into public life later than Marius. Lucius Cornelius Sulla was an optimate of illustrious ancestry and hereditary wealth, a student of the literature and art of Greece ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... whom contemplation is waste of time, do not enjoy the oneness with nature shared by these Polynesians with the sacred Commoner whose beatitudes were to bring anarchy upon the Roman world, and destroy the effects of the philosophies of the ablest minds of Greece. The fishermen of Samaria were gay and somber by turn, as were the Tahitians, doing little work, but much thinking, and innocent and ignorant of the perplexing ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... honor," said Charles Gardiner West, "is of a commoner kind. They want to make me president ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... to accept one farthing beyond his salary. His pride never appeared in loftier and nobler form than in his attitude towards the people at large. No leader had ever a wider popularity than "the great commoner," as Pitt was styled, but his air was always that of a man who commands popularity, not that of one who seeks it. He never bent to flatter popular prejudice. When mobs were roaring themselves hoarse for "Wilkes and liberty," ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... beauty, too. Nothing is commoner than the talent and beauty of American girls. But they'd better trust ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... the freed soul, striving for another body, should have selected one of distinguished French ancestry? The commoner would inevitably seek ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... who is often a little ragged boy or girl, light of weight and made for a chase, pursues the carriage and prolongs the whine, repeating, with a mechanical iteration, "Signore! Signore! datemi qualche cosa, Signore!" until his legs, breath, and resolution give out at last; or, what is still commoner, your patience is wearied out or your sympathy touched, and you are glad to purchase the blessing of silence for the small sum of a baiocco. When his whining fails, he tries to amuse you; and often resorts to the oddest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... graceless and suicidal seems the unwisdom of the world, in action against all who offer it salvation from its pain; aye, though he be Christ or Commoner. ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... did not know it then? I wanted to appear to you as a commoner—just a normal, every day woman. And see! you loved me when you thought I was a mere servant! That is the wonderful part of ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... wast wont of commoner clay to build Some rough Achilles or some Ajax tall; Thou whose free brush too oft was wont to gild Some single virtue till it ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... pale. "I don't know what they want," she said forlornly. "They say we are all so extravagant. I don't know what difference that makes to them if we pay for what we buy. We never hurt them. I wish we were not rich at all. It would be much nicer to be poor. I should like to be a—what is it?—a commoner—or a communist or something. Then nobody would ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... farmer lives more sumptuously. He occasionally has fresh meat and fresh fish, and the dried articles nearly every day. He also indulges in cheese, usually of the commoner kind, known as prim, or mysost, which is not unlike brown Windsor soap. There are two other native cheeses, but they are considered somewhat expensive luxuries. They are called gammelost and pultost, and are made from sour skimmed milk, being afterwards kept in a ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... Edward, who was the haughtiest of the human race, speedily put an extinguisher on the prince's courtesy by replying, in a roar, "No, your highness: my lord duke is of mine." This was true: Sir Edward, the commoner, was of that branch which headed the illustrious house of Seymour; and the Duke of Somerset, at that era, was a cadet of this house. But to all foreigners alike, from every part of the Continent, this story is unfathomable. How a junior branch ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... different. Of course, the past cannot be different from what it was, but no more can our present wishes be different from what they are; this again is merely the law of contradiction. The facts seem to be merely (1) that wishing generally depends upon ignorance, and is therefore commoner in regard to the future than in regard to the past; (2) that where a wish concerns the future, it and its realisation very often form a "practically independent system," i.e. many wishes regarding the ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... in the rough, that would not have been stronger and more brilliant by cutting," said Bart, with vehemence. "All I contend for is, that genius, as I have supposed, can make the most and best of things, often doing with them what other and commoner minds ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... not left to go forgotten to their solitary graves. There was a tax laid on them by the 7th William III., after the twenty-fifth year of their age, which was L12. 10s. for a duke, and 1s. for a commoner. At present they are taxed by an extra duty upon their servants: for a male, L1. 5s.; for a female, 2s. 6d., above the usual duties ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... could not fail to be observed and recorded. Because a fact has not been recorded it does not follow that it has not been observed. Any one who is concerned in an organisation for the collection of a particular species of facts knows how much commoner those facts are than people think, and how many cases pass unnoticed or without leaving any written trace. It is so with earthquakes, cases of hydrophobia, whales stranded on the shore. Besides, many ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... most extensive orchards in the state, in which are apples, pears of all kinds, plums, prunes, which do admirably here, and all the commoner large and small fruits. There is also a large vegetable garden, for the use of those who have none at their houses. The orchards are in fine order, and were laden with fruit when I saw them in June, 1873. Near the orchard ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... Gent. Mag. for 1755, p. 42, among the deaths is entered 'Sir James Lowther, Bart., reckoned the richest commoner in Great Britain, and worth above a million.' According to Lord Shelburne, Lord Sunderland, who had been advised 'to nominate Lowther one of his Treasury on account of his great property,' appointed him to call on him. After waiting ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... Goldsmith was nearly seventeen, he went to Trinity College, Dublin, as a sizar. As you know, in those days sizars had to wear a different dress from the commoners. Oliver's elder brother had gone as a commoner and Oliver had hoped to do the same. But as his father could not afford the money he was obliged, much against his will, to go as a sizar. Indeed had it not been for the kindness of an uncle he could not have gone to ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... Howard's inner council of war. "Howard," says Thomas Fuller, "was no deep-seaman, but he had skill enough to know those who had more skill than himself and to follow their instructions." As far as as possible for a commoner, Drake exercised command. ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... he received the thanks of the House. At that time we find a reference to Ipswich as a place which 'the Lord hath long made famous and happy as a valley of Gospel vision.' Such places, alas! seem to have been commoner ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... material for two of the finest literary fragments of modern times. I take it that the most stirring and profoundly wise piece of modern history is Carlyle's brief account of William Pitt, given in the "Life of Frederick the Great." Once we have read it we feel as though the great commoner had stood before us for a while under a searching light; his figure is imprinted on the very nerves, and no man who has read carefully can ever shake off an impression that seems burnt into the fibre of the mind. This superlatively fine historic portrait was painted by Carlyle ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... that a gentleman can't look like a common man, even in rags. Stan disputes that theory with her, when he isn't too lazy, and wants to bet he could so disguise himself that she would take him for a green grocer or a fishmonger, who have the air of being commoner than other men, I think—at least in our village at Battlemead—because they wear fat tufts of curls frothing out over their foreheads from under their caps, which are always ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... use of the Roentgen rays has shown that fracture of individual carpal bones is commoner than was previously supposed, and that many cases formerly looked upon as severe sprains ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... Homeric poems, we can see that these ideas are transient. Parities of circumstance were probably commoner in the simple mechanism of ancient society than they are now, and in the succession of similar cases awards are likely to follow and resemble each other. Here we have the germ or rudiment of a Custom, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... usage and convention; safeguarded by legislation, judicial interpretation, and the whole power of organized society. That structure is the American Empire—as real to-day as the Roman Empire in the days of Julius Caesar; the French Empire under the Little Corporal, or the British Empire of the Great Commoner, William E. Gladstone. ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... THE VISION, AND EVEN LEAD TO ITS COMPLETE DESTRUCTION.... W ehave had a number of verbal reports of eye complications, some of them relating to very serious conditions; and we are sure they are much commoner than the references we have communicated would indicate.... In fact we are strongly of the opinion that any diagnostic procedure which will so frequently result in serious lesions of the eye ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... raisins. Everything was good, and the beaming colonel declared that the first thing in war was to keep your soldiers well fed. We dined with him in his tent: soup and several meat courses, and cherry compote, and at the end various kinds of nuts, including the cracked hazelnuts, commoner in Turkey than bananas ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... scores, some with long beards reaching to their feet, some without any beards at all, some with bald heads, and some with matted hair that looked as though it had not been combed for centuries. For days there were so many magicians about the palace that they were commoner than cats, and it was impossible to enter any room without surprising one or the other of them, sitting in deep reflection and looking as wise as only a magician can look. But nothing came of their thinking, and one after the other they gave up the ...
— The Sleeping Beauty • C. S. Evans
... reign. With most of them we are already familiar. The requirement that the witch should repeat certain words after the justice of the peace was used once in the reign of James. It was an unusual method at best.[24] A commoner form of proof was that adduced from the finding or seeing clay or waxen images in the possession of the accused.[25] The witness who had found such a model on the premises of the defendant or had seen the defendant handling it, jumped readily to the conclusion that the image represented ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... they sprawled over the marble slabs. And then he would watch gentlemen in silk hats and black gloves bargaining with the fish-wives, and finally going off with boiled lobsters wrapped in paper in the pockets of their frock-coats.[*] Farther away, at the temporary stalls, where the commoner sorts of fish were sold, he would recognise the bareheaded women of the neighbourhood, who always came at the same hour to make ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... ensuing between a gentleman commoner, whom the party designated Pontius Pilate{23} and Tom Echo, relative to the comparative merits of their hunters, afforded me an opportunity of surveying the larium of my friend; the entrance to which was through a short passage, that served the varied ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... battlefield, I did not accept, as I came later to realize, the transcendent personal merit and public service of Henry Clay. Being of Tennessee parentage, perhaps the figure of Andrew Jackson came between; perhaps the rhetoric of Daniel Webster. Once hearing me make some slighting remark of the Great Commoner, my father, a life-long Democrat, who, on opposing sides, had served in Congress with Mr. Clay, gently rebuked me. "Do not express such opinions, my son," he said, "they discredit yourself. Mr. Clay was a very great man—a born ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... exclude. These are such as, for want of a better word, we call ingratiating: the Latin name used by theologians (gratum faciens) denotes that they make a man pleasing to God, grateful to Him, if we understand grateful of that which gives pleasure, and not in its commoner sense, which is ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... a great deal of good talk these days about regenerating society. It used to be that men talked about "reaching the masses." Now the other putting of it is commoner. It is helpful talk whichever way it is put. The Gospel of Jesus is to affect all society. It has affected all society, and is to more and more. But the thing to mark keenly is this, the key to the mass is ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... to the history of better days, was a pair of gold eye-glasses, given her by her dying mother. Within a few months her dire necessity had often pointed to the glasses; but she could not see without them, nor could she sell the gold frames unless she had means to have the glass set in commoner ones. Moreover, the harpies who feed and thrive on the miseries of the poor, would in no case have given her more than twenty-five cents for them; and the short respite derived from that amount would not have compensated for the sacrifice. She had looked at them that morning; felt that starve ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... and eloquence" of the versatile hero; and a life of General Weaver is soon to be issued by the State Historical Society of Iowa. William J. Bryan's "The First Battle" (1896) and numerous biographies of "the Commoner" treat of his connection with the Populists and the campaign of 1896. Herbert Croly's "Marcus A. Hanna" (1912) should also be consulted ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... sent first to the private school of considerable reputation at Ramsbury in Wiltshire, kept by the Rev. Edward Meyrick, and, after four years there, became a commoner at Winchester College, where it is said that he and Dr. William Sewell were the only boys who jointly retarded the breaking out of the rebellion against Dr. Gabell, which took place after their departure. However, in April 1818 he left Winchester, and became a commoner ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... eundem. I fetch up past opportunities. I can rise at the chapel-bell, and dream that it rings for me. In moods of humility I can be a Sizar, or a Servitor. When the peacock vein rises, I strut a Gentleman Commoner. In graver moments, I proceed Master of Arts. Indeed I do not think I am much unlike that respectable character. I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and bed-makers in spectacles, drop a bow or curtsy, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... of her oratory she chanced to cast her eyes upon Mr. Prattle. With the character of Mr. Prattle, the reader is already partly acquainted. But he does not yet know, for it was not necessary for our story he should do so, that the honourable Mr. Prattle was a commoner and a placeman. Good God, sir, represent to yourself with what a flame of indignation our amazon surveyed him! She rose from her seat, and, taking him by the hand, very familiarly turned him round in the middle of the company. "This," ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... everything, his father had chosen the best college, as far as he knew, that in which social and scholastic advantages were believed to be found in pre-eminent combination, and he had chosen what was thought to be the best position in the college; so that it was as gentleman-commoner of Christ Church that John Ruskin made his entrance into the ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... notes, I find that this was not my first idea. The distracting intervening woman was to have been of a commoner type, intellectual indeed rather than sensuous, but yet of the predatory type and class, which delights in the capture of man. When I began to write the first scene in which Eugenie was to appear, she was still ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... discovered so soon, and could be rectified without any of those unpleasant consequences of iconoclasm to which the robe-maker's infringement of the "statues" seemed to point; but as that gentleman put the scholar's gown on one side, and brought out a commoner's, he might have been heard to mutter, "I don't know which is the freshest, - the ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... so pure, so far above the reach of common thought, that, although shadowed out in all the harmonic glories of color, and speech, and song, and scent, and motion, and shine, yea, even of eyes and loving hands, to common minds—and the more merely intellectual, the commoner are they—it seems but a phantasm. To unchildlike minds, the region of love and worship, to which lead the climbing stairs of duty, is but a nephelocockygia; they acknowledge the stairs, however, thank God, and if they will but climb, a hand will be held out to them. Now, to pray to a God, the very ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... carried that dire guest, And in her chamber, through the hours of rest, The darkness was alight for her with sheen Of arms, and plumed helm; and bright between Their commoner gloss, like the pure living spring 'Twixt porphyry lips, or living bird's bright wing 'Twixt golden wires, the glances of the king Flashed on her soul, and waked vibrations there Of known delights love-mixed to new and rare: The impalpable dream was ...
— How Lisa Loved the King • George Eliot
... said, in perfect English, as he raised his cap, "that you have lost the rest of your party. You are also in the wrong course, so to speak. We are the commoner people here, you see. Can I help you to ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... aristocrat has stood still at the same half-savage level, a hunter and fighter, an orgiastic roysterer, a killer of wild boars and wearer of absurd mediaeval costumes, too childish for the civilised and cultivated commoner. ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... glow and sparkle as if, like the heavens, it had its galaxies and constellations. These are the jelly-fishes, or sea-nettles (Acalephae), as they are often called, from the stinging properties with which some of them are endowed. The commoner forms are well known, for the beach is often strewn with the carcasses of the larger species. On fine days in summer and autumn, whole fleets of these strange voyagers appear off our coasts. Their ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... pay their tribute to the memory of the Cid by the virulence of their hatred. Aben Bassam wrote: "The might of this tyrant was ever growing until its weight was felt upon the highest peaks and in the deepest valleys, and filled with terror both noble and commoner. I have heard men say that when his eagerness was greatest and his ambition highest he uttered these words, 'If one Rodrigo brought ruin upon this Peninsula, another Rodrigo shall reconquer it!' A saying that filled the hearts of the ...
— The Lay of the Cid • R. Selden Rose and Leonard Bacon
... was a mighty person in Cumberland, and one who well understood of what nature were the duties, and of what sort the magnificence, which his position as a great English commoner required of him. He had twenty thousand a year derived from land. His forefathers had owned the same property in Cumberland for nearly four centuries, and an estate nearly as large in Durham for more than a century and a half. He had married an earl's daughter, and ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... tells of the lives and habits of the commoner wood folk, such as the crow, the rabbit, the wild duck. The book is profusely illustrated by Charles Copeland ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... circuit." All his hopes of promotion at an end, the commission so unequal to the demands for subsistance upon it, was disposed of, and he was at once entered a student of the Law Society of Lincoln's Inn, and a Commoner ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... An empty bottle: so called at the university of Cambridge, where fellow commoners are not in general considered as over full of learning. At Oxford an empty bottle is called a gentleman commoner for the same reason. They pay at Cambridge 250 l. a year for the privilege of wearing a gold or silver tassel to their caps. The younger branches of the nobility have the privilege of wearing a hat, and from thence are denominated HAT ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... scarcely fair samples, however. Commoner words and some of their more musical phrases are instanced in the following, taken in the dialect of this region of ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... times and everywhere to erect within their own limits a number of barriers against free choice and love. In France, Germany, and other European countries there is still a strong prejudice against marriages between nobles and commoners, though the commoner may be much nobler than the aristocrat in everything except the genealogical table. Civilization is gradually destroying this obstacle to love, which has done so much to promote immorality and has led to so many tragedies involving a number ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the half-conscious work below it, the fulfilment of the shortcomings of less complete minds: but it will waste much of its power, and have much less influence on men's minds, unless it be surrounded by abundance of that commoner work, in which all men once shared, and which, I say, will, when art has really awakened, be done so easily and constantly, that it will stand in no man's way to hinder him from doing what he will, good or evil. And as, on the one hand, I believe that art made ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... College, Dublin, in 1744; Goldsmith entered college the following year, and Flood was a fellow-commoner; but these distinguished men knew little of each other in early life, and none of them were in any way remarkable during their academic career. In 1753 Burke arrived in London, and occupied himself in legal studies and the pursuit of literature. His colloquial ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... givers of two gifts which shall be like in all respects. It is plain enough in this case also that "the gracious favour" of his royal highness, even if halved, would more than counterbalance the whole value of the commoner's "donation." (11) ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... me some music, look that it be sad. I'll soothe my melancholy, till I swell, And burst myself with sighing.— [Soft music.] 'Tis somewhat to my humour; stay, I fancy I'm now turned wild, a commoner of nature; Of all forsaken, and forsaking all; Live in a shady forest's sylvan scene, Stretched at my length beneath some blasted oak, I lean my head upon the mossy bark, And look just of a piece as I grew from it; My uncombed locks, matted ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... stately swiftness on its path about the sun. Usually it was all a living progress that altered under his regard. But now fatigue a little deadened him to that incessancy of life, it seemed now just an eternal circling. He lapsed to the commoner persuasion of the great fixities and recurrencies of the human routine. The remoter past of wandering savagery, the inevitable changes of to-morrow were veiled, and he saw only day and night, seed-time and harvest, loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... our personal property, roughly speaking—hair-brushes, shoes, writing materials, pincushions, photographs, underclothing, gloves, medicines,—is bagged. The strings in the bags pull both ways, and nothing is commoner than to see Benella open and close seventeen or eighteen of them when she is searching for Francesca's rubbers or my gold thimble. But what other lady's-maid or travelling companion ever had half the Derelict's unique charm and interest, ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... looked at the room, not to please himself but to obey Lady Kitty, Ashe became aware of a new impression. The crowd was no less, numerically, than he had seen it in the early winter; but it seemed to him less distinguished, made up of coarser and commoner items. He caught the face of a shady financier long since banished from Lady Tranmore's parties; beyond him a red-faced colonel, conspicuous alike for doubtful money-matters and matrimonial trouble; ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... interesting to refer to the application of forestry to a woodlot containing native nut trees. Like many farmers who regard every tree as just a tree, useful for timber or fire wood, I found several years ago that indiscriminate cutting on my woodlot was destroying walnuts, along with the commoner species of the stand. My first step was to halt the cutting of all black walnuts, hickories, butternuts, oaks and beeches on the seven-acre woodlot. I took an inventory of these trees and found ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... it was a relic of his early admiration and study of Baudelaire that set Wagner to extorting ecstasy from his orchestra by images of death and love; and no doubt the temperament which seeks such combinations—a temperament commoner in mediaeval days than ours—was inherent in Wagner. He makes his Isolde sing mournfully and madly over a corpse and, throwing herself upon the dead body of Tristan, die shaken by the sweet cruel pains of love. Richard Strauss closely patterns after Wagner in his Salome, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... contents. For some while I groped among linen and cotton. Then my teeth were set on edge with silk, of which I drew forth several strips covered with mysterious characters. And these settled the business, for I recognised them as a kind of bed-hanging, popular with the commoner class of the Chinese. Nor were further evidences wanting, such as night-clothes of an extraordinary design, a three-stringed Chinese fiddle, a silk handkerchief full of roots and herbs, and a neat apparatus ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... medicine, to whom their results come daily. Distasteful as the task may be, the social worker should familiarize herself, through reading or through instruction by a qualified physician, in the commoner forms of these maladjustments. This is not urged because it is part of the social worker's task to make detailed inquiry into such matters or to pass judgment upon them, but because they often clamor for attention and need to be recognized by the first responsible person to whose notice ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... types that flourished in the richest soil of the place. Like almost all people who possess in a strong degree the storytelling faculty, Hawthorne had a democratic strain in his composition and a relish for the commoner stuff of human nature. Thoroughly American in all ways, he was in none more so than in the vagueness of his sense of social distinctions and his readiness to forget them if a moral or intellectual sensation were to be gained by it. ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... dropped their crucifixes, and, like the commoner sons of the Church, howled: "The ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... more on those walls. A pair of spurs, of make modern enough, hung between two pewter dish-covers. Hanging book-shelves came next; for although most of my uncle's books were in his bed-room, some of the commoner were here on the wall, next to an old fowling-piece, of which both lock and barrel were devoured with rust. Then came a great pair of shears, though how they should have been there I cannot yet think, for there was no garden to the house, ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... Walpole, and from commoner and coarser men who occupied the same office, Peel forbade that a name which he had made illustrious should be degraded and stigmatized by any title of nobility. For he knew that all those titles had their origin and nomenclature from military services, and belong to military men, ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... childlike without being childish, devout with a fearless familiarity, the spirit to which the Dies Irae and the sermons of St Francis were equally natural expressions, and which, if it could sometimes exasperate itself into the practices of the Inquisition, found a far commoner and more genuine expression in the kindly humanities of the Ancren Riwle. There is no lack of knowledge and none of inquiry; though in embarking on the enormous ocean of ignorance, it is inquiry ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... not be generally known that this epigram came from the pen of Reginald Heber, late Bishop of Calcutta, who was then a commoner of Brazenoze College, and who wrote that extremely clever satire called The Whippiad of which the same Dr. Toe (the Rev. Henry Halliwell, Dean and Tutor) was the hero. The Whippiad was printed for the first time a few ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... others say at Beckington, near Philip's Norton, or at Wilmington in Wiltshire. Anthony Wood tells us that he came "of a wealthy family;" Fuller that "his father was a master of music." Of his earlier years next to nothing is known; but in 1579 he was entered as a commoner at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and left the university three years afterwards without taking a degree. His first book—a translation of Paola Giovio's treatise on Emblems—appeared in 1585, when he was about twenty-two. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... son of a local commoner, stood by the hedge of one of the vegetable gardens. What had been red calico once made up his torn shirt; but his face!—it was like that of an angel in a tawny mask covered with spots of dirt and dust. Wings are for light feet, but what can the earth do? Only dust and clay cling ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... satisfied with the loss of the first ten thousand pounds; but Lady Arabella was made of higher mettle. She had married a man with a fine place and a fine fortune; but she had nevertheless married a commoner and had in so far derogated from her high birth. She felt that her husband should be by rights a member of the House of Lords; but, if not, that it was at least essential that he should have a seat in the lower chamber. She would by degrees sink into nothing if she allowed ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... considered very meritorious, and where women are concerned positively a religious duty. Le scandale est ce qui fait l'offense is very much the notion in Egypt, and I believe that very forgiving husbands are commoner here than elsewhere. The whole idea is founded on the verse of the Koran, incessantly quoted, 'The woman is made for the man, but the man is made for the woman'; ergo, the obligations to chastity are equal; ergo, ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... ages. They crowned the wheat-sheaves with flowers, they sung, they shouted, they danced, they invited each other, or met to feast as at Christmas, in the halls of rich houses; and, what was a very amiable custom, and wise beyond the commoner wisdom that may seem to lie on the top of it, every one that had been concerned, man, woman, and child, received a little ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... democratic government. Whether Whigs or Tories were in power, it was always the great families who ruled. For them the Church, at least in its higher branches, existed; and the difference between nobleman and commoner at Oxford is as striking as it is hideous to this generation. For them also literature and the theatre made their display; and if Dr. Johnson could heap an immortal contumely upon the name of patron, we all know of the reverence he felt in the presence of the king. Divine Right and non-resistance ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... mountain-barrier which, refreshed by the Pacific, bears the noble forests of the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Ranges, and among them trees which are the wonder of the world. As I stood in their shade, in the groves of Mariposa and Calaveras, and again under the canopy of the commoner redwood, raised on columns of such majestic height and ample girth, it occurred to me that I could not do better than to share with you, upon this occasion, some of the thoughts which possessed my mind. In their development they may, perhaps, lead ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... extent; but even to the smaller plantations of the Downs it is wonderful what a number come in the course of a year. Besides the shed just visited, there would be certain to be another more or less ornamented near the keeper's cottage, and probably others scattered about, where the commoner vermin could be nailed without the trouble of carrying them far away. Only the owls and hawks, magpies, and such more striking evidences of slaughter were collected ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... will never require more than two coats and the commoner class of goods only one. I would not advise the tradesman in a small way of business to go to the expense of a trough, etc., as it calls for much more room than is ordinarily available, but if he has the necessary plant for bicycle ...
— Handbook on Japanning: 2nd Edition - For Ironware, Tinware, Wood, Etc. With Sections on Tinplating and - Galvanizing • William N. Brown
... not strange that he forgot certain restrictions which a Royal man, in conversing with a commoner, is not supposed to forget. In fact, he forgot that he was Royal, or that she was not, and his voice grew unsteady, his tone eager, as if he had been some poor subaltern with the girl ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... Kureel, which is a Capparis; Phoke —— and Bheir. Mr. E. also says that the material of which the tope of Manikyalah is built, resembles petrified vegetable matter, an observation to be kept in view. The mottled kingfisher occurs throughout, but is commoner ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... the conversation between these two historical characters, the janitor of the theatre put his head into the room and reminded the celebrities that it was very late; whereupon both king and commoner rose with some reluctance and washed themselves—the king becoming, when he put on the ordinary dress of an Englishman, Mr. James Spence, while Cromwell, after a similar transformation, became Mr. Sidney Ormond; and thus, ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... sides of the Atlantic from a common ancestry, their political habits had become mutually incomprehensible. To the Englishman, the rule of the nobility was normal—the ideal political system. He was content, if a commoner, with the place assigned to him. To the colonist, on the other hand, government in which the majority of adult male inhabitants possessed the chief power was the only valid form,—all others were vicious. Patriotism meant two contradictory things. The Englishman's patriotism was ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... aristocratic wife of George Dandin, a French commoner. She has a liaison with a M. Clitandre, but always contrives to turn the tables on her husband. George Dandin first hears of a rendezvous from one Lubin, a foolish servant of Clitandre, and lays the affair before M. and Mde. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... possible you can take my consent for granted. Sara is the daughter of plain people with no family to boast of, but I tell you this, sir, I am a man with few wants, and I will give Sara the largest dowry that has ever been given by prince or commoner. I reckon I'm worth five million pounds, and I'll settle four and a half upon her. Theos wants money, and that may take things a bit smoother in ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... for fair play forces his resignation. Bryan's resignation at this critical moment is the greatest service the Commoner has ever rendered his country, because it has aroused the people to see the danger of the foreign policy now ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... him unsound, and did n't want him; but to save the situation they would be glad to keep him. She did n't want him, but she refused to lose her right to say, "Commoner girls may break their promises; I will not!" He sat down at the table between the candles, covering his face. His grief and anger grew and grew within him. If she would not free herself, the duty was on him! She was ready without love to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Lon's been awful quiet since she told him he had a picturesque name. Said it'd do for to put into a book which she's goin' to write, but when it come to choosin' a husband she'd prefer to tie up to a commoner name. An' so Lon didn't graze on that ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... reunion between the husband and wife, such as can never endure, and which only humiliated and fatigued a woman whose apparent superiority was unreal, while her unseen superiority was genuine. This whimsical medley is commoner than people think. Dinah, who was ridiculous from the perversity of her cleverness, had really great qualities of soul, but circumstances did not bring these rarer powers to light, while a provincial life debased the small change of her wit from day to day. Monsieur de la Baudraye, ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... unchanged, she would not hear a word against the Highlanders, though Colonel Fraser and his Seventy-Eighth Highland regiment had taken her prisoner. It is true, Jeannette was treated with deference, and her food was sent to her from the officer's table, and she had privacy on the ship which the commoner prisoners had not. It is also true that Colonel Fraser was a gentleman, detesting the parish-burning to which his command was ordered for a time. But the habitantes laid much to his blue eyes and yellow hair, ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... men was my peer; but, native or foreign, white or black, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, awake or asleep, sober or drunk, each and every man of them was my political superior; hence, in no sense, my peer. Even, under such circumstances, a commoner of England, tried before a jury of lords, would have far less cause to complain than should I, a woman, tried before a jury of men. Even my counsel, the Hon. Henry R. Selden, who has argued my cause so ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... is to face important subjects objectively. The ablest and most highly cultivated people continually discuss religion, politics, and sex: it is hardly an exaggeration to say that they discuss nothing else with fully-awakened interest. Commoner and less cultivated people, even when they form societies for discussion, make a rule that politics and religion are not to be mentioned, and take it for granted that no decent person would attempt to discuss sex. The three subjects are feared because they rouse the ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... estimates of Pitt none breathes deeper devotion than that of Wellesley. Was it not because he at last saw the pettiness of his own pride and petulance when contrasted with the self-abnegation of him who was truly the Great Commoner? And did not even his meteoric career in the East pale before the full-orbed splendour of the quarter of a century of achievement which made up the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... bearing a spray of sweet peas. Gillian longed to secure it for her mother, but it was very expensive, owing to the uncommon stones used in giving the tints, and Mr. Stebbing evidently did not regard it with so much favour as the jessamines and snowdrops, which, being of commoner marbles, could be sold at a rate fitter for the popular purse. Several beautiful drawings in her office had been laid aside as impracticable, 'unless we had a carte blanche wedding order,' he said, with what Gillian ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and motion of the commoner streets; through the roar and jar of many vehicles, many feet, many voices; with the blazing shop-lights lighting him on, the west wind blowing him on, and the crowd pressing him on, he is pitilessly urged upon his way, and nothing ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... him more cautious;—that's all," said Miss Penge. Miss Penge was now a great heiress, having had her lawsuit respecting certain shares in a Welsh coal-mine settled since we last saw her. As all the world knows she came from one of the oldest Commoner's families in the West of England, and is, moreover, a handsome young woman, only twenty-seven years of age. Lady Penwether thinks that she is the very woman to be mistress of Rufford, and I do not know that Miss Penge herself is ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... University: the competitors are incepting Bachelors of Arts after the examination for that Degree. My day of examination (apparently) was Jan. 21st. The candidates were Turner, Cankrein, Cleasby, and Mr Gordon. The first three had been my private pupils: Mr Gordon was a Fellow-commoner of St Peter's College, and had just passed the B.A. examination as Senior Wrangler, Turner being second. My situation as Examiner was rather a delicate one, and the more so as, when I came to examine the papers of answers, Turner appeared distinctly the first. Late at night I carried ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... what he was reading. Yet the taste was not only genuine, it was exclusive; I tried in vain to offer him novels; he would none of them, he cared for nothing but romantic language that he could not understand. The case may be commoner than we suppose. I am reminded of a lad who was laid in the next cot to a friend of mine in a public hospital, and who was no sooner installed than he sent out (perhaps with his last pence) for a cheap Shakespeare. My friend pricked up his ears; fell at once in talk with his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Science that is curious: And as for such knowledge as is no less than requisite for Men of Families, and Estates to have in regard of the proper business of their Station; it may, I think, be said that never was this more neglected than at present; since there is not a commoner complaint in every County than of the want of Gentlemen Qualified for the Service of their Country, viz. to be Executors of the Law, and Law Makers; both of which it belonging to this Rank of English Men to be, some insight ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... fatally as a pretender to the throne. Again, it seemed to explain the name "A-lektra" (as if from [Greek: lektron] "bed;" cf. Schol. Orestes, 71, Soph. El. 962, Ant. 917) more pointedly than the commoner version. And it helps in the working out of Electra's character (cf. pp. 17, 22, &c.). Also it gives an opportunity of introducing the fine character of the peasant. He is an [Greek: Autourgos] literally "self-worker," a man who works his own land, far from the ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... novella by Bandello, and is indeed more than worthy of the pen of the good Dominican Bishop of Agen. In all its incidents and motives the story is eternally true. The fateful beauty, playing now the part of Potiphar's wife, and now the yet commoner role of an enchantress whose charms drive men to madness and crime, men who adore her even from their prison cell and are glad to go to a shameful death for her sake, appears in all history, in all literature, nay, in the very newspaper ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... (1892), a curious eulogy supplemented by "excerpts from the wit, wisdom, poetry and eloquence" of the versatile hero; and a life of General Weaver is soon to be issued by the State Historical Society of Iowa. William J. Bryan's "The First Battle" (1896) and numerous biographies of "the Commoner" treat of his connection with the Populists and the campaign of 1896. Herbert Croly's "Marcus A. Hanna" (1912) should also ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... of those men was my peer; but, native or foreign born, white or black, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, sober or drunk, each and every man of them was my political superior; hence, in no sense, my peer. Under such circumstances a commoner of England, tried before a jury of lords, would have far less cause to complain than have I, a woman, tried before a jury of men. Even my counsel, Hon. Henry R. Selden, who has argued my cause so ably, so earnestly, so unanswerably before your honor, is my political sovereign. Precisely ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... meagre account of Johnson's Oxford career we gather some facts which supplement the description of Gibbon. The future historian went into residence twenty-three years after Johnson departed without taking his degree. Gibbon was a gentleman commoner, and was permitted by the easy discipline of Magdalen to behave just as he pleased. He "eloped," as he says, from Oxford, as often as he chose, and went up to town, where he was by no means the ideal of "the Manly ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... this branch of the work alone takes up about forty per cent. of the entire output. Then there is the genuine porcelain for table and decorative use; the porcelain necessary for electrical purposes; stoneware, or the commoner household articles found in the kitchen comprising yellow ware, Rockingham ware, and red earthenware; and in addition the great quantities of sanitary ware for plumbing, drain-pipes, and tiling. Of all these varieties of porcelain the hardest ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... even than these in its immediate results, Dante, while he began his poem in Latin, the learned language of the time, soon transposed and completed it in Italian, the corrupted Latin of his commoner contemporaries, the tongue of his daily life. That is, he wrote not for scholars like himself, but for a wider circle of more worldly friends. It is the first great work in any modern speech. It is in very truth the recognition of a new world of men, a new and more practical set of merchant ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the witch trials of the reign. With most of them we are already familiar. The requirement that the witch should repeat certain words after the justice of the peace was used once in the reign of James. It was an unusual method at best.[24] A commoner form of proof was that adduced from the finding or seeing clay or waxen images in the possession of the accused.[25] The witness who had found such a model on the premises of the defendant or had seen the defendant handling it, jumped readily ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... affirmed, none the less, that one barrel of the original stuff was more than enough for three barrelfuls of the bottled product. Cultured members, on drinking it, were wont to say things about Locusta and Borgia. The commoner sort swore like hell at Freddy Parker. It made you feel squiffy after the sixth glass—argumentative, magisterial, maudlin, taciturn, erotic, sentimental, sea-sick, ecstatic, paralysed, lachrymose, hilarious, pugilistic—according to your temperament. Whatever your temperament it gave ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... its name implies, was doubtless a commoner quality of the rich and precious samite, which ranked in costliness and beauty with baldekin and cloth of gold, and above satin and velvet. Samite was a silk material, of which no more is known than that it was very expensive, and had a glossy ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... also the whelping season, and hundreds of thousands are killed, females and young preponderating. They are still common along the east and south, but diminishing steadily, especially in the St. Lawrence. The Bearded, or "Square-flipper," seal is rare in the St. Lawrence and on the Atlantic, but commoner in Hudsonian waters. It is a large seal, eight feet long, and bulky in proportion. The Grey, or Horse-head, seal runs up to about the same size occasionally and is one of the gamest animals that swims. It is rare on the Atlantic and not common anywhere on the St. Lawrence. ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... in carrying that measure, so valuable for the safety and concord of the state, by which it was rendered impossible for any citizen to be either rich or poor. Solon's power could not reach this height, as he was only a commoner and a moderate man; yet he did all that was in his power, relying solely upon the confidence ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... life or service in this. There were as yet no independent schools or scholars, the monks and clergy represented the one learned class, Theology was the one professional study, the ability to read and write was not regarded by noble or commoner as of any particular importance, and all book knowledge was in a language which the people did not understand when they heard it and could not read. Society was as yet composed of three classes—feudal warriors, who spent their time in amusements or fighting, and who had evolved ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... muffled drums are still. The broken earth of the prairies is wrapped around the dead commoner, the fallen apostle of humanity, the universal brother of all who toil ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... piece of tin or "crampit" before referred to, grasp the stone firmly by the handle and hurl it along the ice. It is almost essential to let go the stone at the right moment, otherwise it will hurl you. The game is almost identical with the commoner game of "bowls," except for the language, which is worse. The term "wood" is inappropriate and must be avoided, as the use of it may lay you under a charge of ignorance or flippancy, which you will find almost impossible to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... and every way expensive), and put himself into a port and course of living agreeably thereunto, and having also removed my brother from Thame school to Merton College in Oxford, and entered him there in the highest and most chargeable condition of a Fellow Commoner, he found it needful to retrench his expenses elsewhere, the hurt of which fell upon me. For he thereupon took me from school, to save the charge of maintaining me there; which was somewhat like plucking green fruit from the tree, and laying it by before it was come to its due ripeness, ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... Ireton's regiment, called for "impartial and speedy justice" upon public criminals, and demanded "that the same fault may have the same punishment in the person of King or Lord as in the poorest Commoner." Such petitions to Fairfax appear to have dropped in upon him from regiment after regiment at St. Alban's during the next fortnight. One Petition, however, heard of in London Oct. 30, was from Colonel Ingoldsby's regiment, then in garrison at Oxford. It also demanded "immediate care ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... this game dates from the period when stiff cylinder-shaped horsehair sofa-cushions were commoner than they are now. One of these is placed in the middle of the room and the players join hands and dance round it, the object of each one being to make one of his neighbors knock the cushion over and to avoid knocking it over himself. Whoever does knock ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... preacher to whom I have alluded did not stand alone in his view, though perhaps it was not often so frankly expressed. But at least acquiescence in the existence of separated bodies of Christians, as a thing inevitable, was commoner than ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... been found there. The tin which she brought from the Cassiterides she distributed generally, for she did not discourage her colonists from manufacturing for themselves to some extent. There was probably no colony which did not make its own bronze vessels of the commoner sort and ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... singed the result is a further improvement. Yarns and fabrics constructed of the ordinary grades of cotton cannot be mercerized to advantage. The cost of producing high-grade mercerized yarn is about three times that of an unmercerized yarn of the same count, spun from the commoner qualities of cotton. ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... was little more than seven years old, the care of his education devolved upon his mother, who placed him under the celebrated schoolmaster, Thomas Farnaby; and in November 1623 he was admitted a Fellow-commoner of Jesus College, Cambridge, where he is said to have prosecuted his studies with success, and to have evinced a taste for classical literature. Being intended for the Bar, he was entered of the Inner Temple on the 22nd of January 1626; but that profession ill-accorded with ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... more sumptuously. He occasionally has fresh meat and fresh fish, and the dried articles nearly every day. He also indulges in cheese, usually of the commoner kind, known as prim, or mysost, which is not unlike brown Windsor soap. There are two other native cheeses, but they are considered somewhat expensive luxuries. They are called gammelost and pultost, and are made from sour skimmed milk, ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... college herself had altered greatly since his day. The fair court that Ralph Symons had constructed had now its complement in the fair new court of Francis Clerke. The enlargement of his mother-college was not so marvellous to him, however, as the enlargement of one among her sons. A fellow-commoner of his time had, like himself, come again to Cambridge, arriving thither by a different road. This fellow-commoner was now the member in Parliament for Cambridge, had buckled a soldier's baldric over a farmer's coat, had carried things with a high hand in the ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... another had actually succeeded in persuading nature to form a socket of gristle just in front of each ear, the socket being in relief and carrying a bunch of feathers. A few men had even painted their faces scarlet or yellow. No one seemed to know the significance of this habit (commoner farther north than at Bontok), but the paint was put on much after the fashion prevailing in Manchuria, and, if possibly for the same reason, certainly with the same result. The pigment or color ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... Europe, England's position was almost as contemptible. Such was the result of the attempt of the aristocracy to rule England. There was only one man who could save England, and he was an old man, poor, a commoner, and sick almost to death. But in 1757 William Pitt was called to the English helm, accepted the responsibility, and steered the country from her darkest to her most brilliant hour. The campaigns which drove the soldiers of ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... retained its privileged position. It was considered a law of nature that the noblemen should assist the monarch in the administration of the State and as leaders of the army; the peasant should cultivate the fields and provide food; the commoner should provide money through ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... successor to Hollweg, was the first commoner to be appointed to that high office, without even a "von" ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... commoner in the southern and eastern parts of Ohio than in the north, but there was at least one whose chief exploit had the north for its scene. Captain Samuel Brady, in 1780, gathered a number of his neighbors and pursued ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... again, and held the crowds by his self-chosen privations no less than by his fierce, fiery eloquence. His desert life and contempt for ease and luxury spoke of a strength of character and purpose which fascinated commoner men, and make the next point the more striking—namely, the utter humility with which this strong, self-reliant, fiery rebuker of sin, and despiser of rank and official dignities, flings himself at the feet of the coming ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... or the remains of a house, could be discerned. Hence the lieutenant and his friends were disposed to believe, that the people were destitute of dwellings, as well as of clothes; and that like the other commoner of nature, they spent their nights in the open air. Tupia himself was struck with their apparently unhappy condition; and shaking his head, with an air of superiority and compassion, said that they were taata enos, ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... evidently felt ashamed of themselves, every now and then I would come upon one or another running on toes and finger-tips, and quite unable to recover the vertical attitude. They held things more clumsily; drinking by suction, feeding by gnawing, grew commoner every day. I realised more keenly than ever what Moreau had told me about the "stubborn beast-flesh." They were ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... had not traversed the archery-ground twenty-five feet, from target to target, on her way to the refreshment-tent, ere half-a-dozen of the household troops, a bachelor baronet, and the richest young commoner of his year were presented by her host, at their own earnest request. Dick's high spirits went down like the froth in a glass of soda-water, and he fell back discouraged, to exchange civilities with ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... The ease with which fruit can be produced, when grown under conditions suitable to its proper development, is often remarkable, and is a constant source of wonder to all who have been accustomed to the comparatively slow growth of many of our commoner varieties of fruits when grown in less favoured climes, and to the care that is there necessary to produce profitable returns. Here all kinds of tree life is rapid, and fruit trees come into bearing much sooner than ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson
... appointed carriage and she heard John say: "Rather sultry. Home down the lake shore, George." She wished their driver had not been named "George," but after all it made no difference. There could not be a commoner name than John, and she knew of but one that she liked better. For the ensuing three days she lived in a Lake Shore home of wealth. She watched closely not to trip in the heavy rugs and carpets. She looked at wonderful paintings and long shelves of books. She never had touched such china, or tasted ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... a still commoner disease than syphilis; how common it is very difficult to say. It is also an older disease, for the ancient Egyptians knew it, and the Biblical King Esarhaddon of Assyria, as the records of his court show, once caught ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Adityan, but it seems King Ranulf insists that he's entitled to precedence, or, rather, his Lord Marshal does. This Lord Koreff insists that his king is not going to yield precedence to a commoner." ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... would watch gentlemen in silk hats and black gloves bargaining with the fish-wives, and finally going off with boiled lobsters wrapped in paper in the pockets of their frock-coats.[*] Farther away, at the temporary stalls, where the commoner sorts of fish were sold, he would recognise the bareheaded women of the neighbourhood, who always came at the same hour to ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... articles of the creed, indeed,—"Father, almighty Maker of heaven and earth." But I fear that creed is not written in the tables of flesh, that is, the heart. There is a twofold mistake among men about the point of believing. Some, and the commoner sort, do think it is no other than simply to know such a thing, and not to question it, to hear it, and not to contradict it, or object against it, therefore they do flatter themselves in their own eyes, and do account themselves to have faith in God, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... together. What we may call emotional similarity of setting is therefore not necessarily a fallacy. Even when it subverts the actual, as in the fable of the morning stars, it may yet be representative of reality. In its commoner and less exaggerative phases it is very useful for purposes of suggestion; and only when it becomes blatant through abuse may it be said to belie the ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... rich deposits occur are exceedingly few and far between when compared with the vast areas of continental land, and we have every reason to believe that in past ages, as now, numbers of curious species were rare or local, the commoner and more abundant species giving a very imperfect idea of the existing series of animal forms. Yet more important, as showing the imperfection of our knowledge, is the enormous lapse of time between the several formations in which we find organic remains in any abundance, ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... am sure that by the time I was old enough to stumble over Mr. Harper's favorite big words I was old enough to tell the difference between an ordinary animal—say, a house cat—and any one of the commoner forms of plant life, such as, for example, the scaly-bark hickory tree, practically at a glance. I'll add this too: Nick Carter never wasted any of the golden moments which he and I spent together in elucidating for me the radical points of difference between ...
— A Plea for Old Cap Collier • Irvin S. Cobb
... as never before the reservoirs of ink, for he used every device of newspaper and pamphlet to drive home his message. He even printed his creed in Gaelic, Welsh and Erse. Third, he employed his kinship with the people to the fullest extent. The Commoner won. As the great structure of social reform rose under his dynamic powers so did the influence of the House of Lords crumble like an Edifice of Cards. Democracy in ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... assumptions, whether they call them dogmas or not; and they must clearly be assumptions common enough to stamp those who reject them as eccentrics or lunatics. And the greater and more heterogeneous the population the commoner the assumptions must be. A Trappist monastery can be conducted on assumptions which would in twenty-fours hours provoke the village at its gates to insurrection. That is because the monastery selects its people; and if a Trappist does ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... pictured for him gloriously delightful, utterly impossible scenes—Consuello and he on a yacht skimming the rolling waves of the ocean off Catalina, leisurely inspecting some "gabled foreign town"; she another Princess Patricia with "silken gowns" and "jewels for her hair," loving and wedding him, a "commoner" like the real princess' husband, despite the frowns of kings and queens, and settling down to rule a Graustark-like ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... win any renown in her profession, a geisha must be pretty or very clever; and the famous ones are usually both,—having been selected at a very early age by their trainers according to the promise of such qualities Even the commoner class of singing-girls must have some charm in their best years,—if only that beaute du diable which inspired the Japanese proverb that even a devil is pretty at eighteen(1). But Kimiko was much more than pretty. She was according to the Japanese ideal of beauty; and that standard is ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... motive, her conduct in the matter reacted on my lord; the fellow was in the way, very much so. How could he himself pay court to her when she frivolously, if only for the moment, preferred this commoner's company? That very afternoon my lord, entering the music-room of the great mansion, had found her at the piano playing for him, her slim fingers moving over the keys to the tune of one of Chopin's nocturnes. ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... wealth enormous; its parliamentary influence, as "a Great House," was a part of the British Constitution. At this period, the House of Vipont found it convenient to rend itself into two grand divisions,—the peer's branch and the commoner's. The House of Commons had become so important that it was necessary for the House of Vipont to be represented there by a great commoner. Thus arose the family of Carr Vipont. That division, owing ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... came from there, Juan. He may have come from the mountains of Biscaya, where fair skins are commoner than they are in the south. It is only that he described to us a port, which must have been Cadiz, as the last thing he recollected ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... mountains lift their snows, and send their brooks Down babbling with the news of silent things! But love itself is commonest of all, And loveliest of all, in all the worlds! And he that hath not forest, brook, or hill, Must learn to read aright what commoner books Unfold before him. If ocean solitudes— Then darkness dashed with glory, infinite shades, And misty minglings of the sea and sky. If only fields—the humble man of heart Will revel in the grass beneath ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... is readin' me frind Grover Cleveland out iv th' party. He's usin' the Commoner to read him out. ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... resident, and of Hoffmann the Austrian resident, who tell us much that is sought vainly in the meagre pages of Hansard. Then came the epoch of Dr. Johnson and his colleagues in Grub Street. But when the Whig reign ended, at the resignation of the great Commoner in 1761, the Whigs had not admitted the nation to the ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... born in London, 1644, From a private school at Chigwell, Essex, he entered, in 1660, as a gentleman commoner at Christ Church, Oxford; but, as he withdrew from the national forms of worship with other students, who, like himself, had listened to the preaching of Thomas Loe, a Quaker of eminence, who was fined for Non-conformity, and, the next year, as he pertinaciously ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... unto the letter: And why should not That, which authority Prescribes, esteemed be Advantage got ? If th' prayer be good, the commoner the better, Prayer in the Church's words, as well As sense, of all prayers ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... we can see that these ideas are transient. Parities of circumstance were probably commoner in the simple mechanism of ancient society than they are now, and in the succession of similar cases awards are likely to follow and resemble each other. Here we have the germ or rudiment of a Custom, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... no little interest to the development of this romance. Its sudden termination astonished and mortified her. Had Lashmar turned away to make some brilliant alliance, her pique would have endured only for a moment; Lord Dymchurch's approach would have more than compensated the commoner's retirement. But that she should merely have amused his idle moments, whilst his serious thoughts were fixed on Constance Bride, was an injury not easy to pardon. For she disliked Miss Bride, and she knew the sentiment ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... two elder ladies; they were talking together eagerly. She walked over to the bow-shaped window, and opened the commoner envelope: ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... silence of the grave. Their immortal words ring still down the columned years of our country's history. They appeal to noble sons to emulate the heroes of this great conflict. Shall the slave's chains clank westward? No! Above the din of commoner men, the logic of John Bell, calm and patriotic, brings conviction. The soaring eloquence of Stephen A. Douglas claims ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... often placed above or below the coil so as only to receive a portion of its effect, enough for all practical purposes in the commoner class ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... lacked playmates, indeed, but was by no means neglected or unhappy, my father took me to Winchester College, his old school, to be improved in those classical studies which I had hitherto followed desultorily under our vicar, Mr. Grylls, and there entered me as a Commoner in the house of Dr. Burton, Head-master. I had spent almost four years at Winchester at the date (Midsummer, 1756) ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... our daily work, an' so we can, if we've a mind to! Daily work and common things shows Him to us,—why look there!"— here he pulled from his pocket a small paper-bag, and opening it, showed some dry loose seed—"There ain't nothin' commoner than that! That's pansy seed—a special stock too,—well now, if you didn't know how common it is, wouldn't it seem a miracle as wonderful as any in the Testymen, that out o' that handful o' dust like, the finest flowers of ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... mirrors.' Philosophers should. 'You write verse.' 'Tis permitted. 'You examine fish.' Following Aristotle. 'You worship a piece of wood.' So Plato. 'You marry a wife.' Obeying law. 'She is older than you.' Nothing commoner. 'You married for money.' Take the marriage-settlement, remember the deed of ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... man had committed an infamous crime; no one thanked the emperor for having bestowed upon the Austrian people the inestimable gift of equality before the law. The commoner himself felt aggrieved at the monarch who had treated a nobleman no better than he would ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... will be always but the blossom of all the half-conscious work below it, the fulfilment of the shortcomings of less complete minds: but it will waste much of its power, and have much less influence on men's minds, unless it be surrounded by abundance of that commoner work, in which all men once shared, and which, I say, will, when art has really awakened, be done so easily and constantly, that it will stand in no man's way to hinder him from doing what he will, good or evil. And as, on the one hand, I believe ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... at our lodgings, and she rushed out of the theater and up the street in an agony of terror. She got us out of the house all right, took us to the theater, and went on with the next act as if nothing had happened. Such fortitude is commoner in our profession, I think, than in any other. We "go on with the next act" whatever happens, and if we know our business, no one in the audience will ever guess that anything is wrong—that since the curtain last went down some dear friend has died, or our children ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... in perfect English, as he raised his cap, "that you have lost the rest of your party. You are also in the wrong course, so to speak. We are the commoner people here, you see. Can I help you ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... equals, or if anything she was the better of us two. I never made love to her in the commoner sense of the word, a sense in which the woman is conceived of as shy, unawakened, younger, more plastic, and the man as tempting, creating responses, persuading and compelling. We made love to each other as youth should, we were friends lit by a ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... was thronged with the deputies of the noblesse, the higher clergy, and the invited guests. But the members of the tiers, whose presence had been especially desired by His Majesty, were conspicuous by their absence. Here and there one saw a commoner in black coat and simple white tie, but he seemed to be separated from the rest of the splendid company by some invisible barrier, constrained, uneasy. Indeed, there was over the whole scene that same feeling of ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... letter he claimed to be the most rabid of Sansculottes. It is unlikely that he was ever very bare-kneed and crimson in his anarchy. He believed always that cruelty should be swiftly punished, whether in king or commoner, and that tyrants should be destroyed. He was for the people as against kings, and for the union of labor as opposed to the union of capital, though he wrote of such matters judicially—not radically. The Knights of Labor organization, then very powerful, seemed to Clemens the salvation of oppressed ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... great Commoner, but for whose aid We all should have gone with short commons to bed; And since he has saved all the fat from the fire, I move that the house be call'd Whitbread's Entire. {64} Tol de ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... entirely pleased with the result, but did not consider it necessary to tell him so, no idea having crossed their minds that he might be in one of those moods so frequent with artistic natures, when words of approbation and praise are as necessary to them, as the air we breathe is to us, mortals of a commoner clay. ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... made slaves (sa guiguilir)—through war, by the trade of goldsmith, or otherwise—happened to possess any gold beyond the sum that he had to give his master, he ransomed himself, becoming thus a namamahay, or what we call a commoner. The price of this ransom was never less than five taels, and from that upwards; and if he gave ten or more taels, as they might agree, he became wholly free. An amusing ceremony accompanied this custom. After having divided all the trinkets which the slave possessed, if he maintained a house ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... the outset. For these streets that were not paved at all until the fifteenth century, are only covered with rude stones, and look more like the interior of a vast open drain than anything; pigs and other animals stroll into them from the open doorways of the commoner houses, and even the richer families seem to consider that the highway is little ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... first to the private school of considerable reputation at Ramsbury in Wiltshire, kept by the Rev. Edward Meyrick, and, after four years there, became a commoner at Winchester College, where it is said that he and Dr. William Sewell were the only boys who jointly retarded the breaking out of the rebellion against Dr. Gabell, which took place after their departure. However, in April 1818 he left Winchester, and became a commoner ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
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