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More "Commoner" Quotes from Famous Books



... or graveyard spectres, we were unapproachable for the diverse forms and malignant enmity of our apparitions. Of invisible beings alone, I continued tolerantly, we had the distinction of being harassed by upwards of seven hundred clearly-defined varieties, while the commoner inflictions of demons, shades, visions, warlocks, phantoms, sprites, imps, phenomena, ghosts, and reflections passed almost without comment; and touching our admitted national speciality of dragons, the honour of ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah

... cerebrum, sed cor ipsum exhausit lusciniola, &c., &c." He mentions, as the rivals most dreaded by her admirers, Norris, the singer, whose musical talents, it was thought, recommended him to her, and Mr. Watts, a gentleman commoner, of very large fortune. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore

... peculiar situation of Ireland. By reason of the decline of Ireland's population during the past half century that portion of the United Kingdom has come to be markedly over-represented at Westminster. The average Irish commoner sits for but 44,147 people, while the average English member represents 66,971. If a new distribution were to be made in strict proportion to members Ireland would lose 30 seats and Wales three, while Scotland would ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... 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

... white-haired, apple-faced old boy, with sleepy eyes and a grey moustache; stout, sedentary, and very innocent, of a type that may often be found in France, but is still commoner in Catholic Germany. Everything about him, his pipe, his pot of beer, his flowers, and his beehive, suggested an ancestral peace; only when his visitors looked up as they entered the inn-parlour, they saw the sword upon ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton

... the man as he replied in those terms. "Look here!" she broke out. "I like to see my way before me. You're a stranger, young Mister; and it's as likely as not you've given me a false name and address. That don't matter. False names are commoner than true ones, in my line of life. But mind this! I don't stir a step farther till I've got half the money in my hand, and my return-ticket ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins

... 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, are ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt

... known as "ce Vassili"—a term of mingled contempt and distrust—bowed very low. He was a plain commoner, while his interlocutor was a baron. The knowledge of this was ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman

... dark cheek of the English prince. "You make my exile so like a home that I forget at times that I am not in very truth back in Castile. Every land hath indeed its ways and manners; but I promise you, Edward, that when you are my guest in Toledo or Madrid you shall not yearn in vain for any commoner's daughter on whom you may deign to cast ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle

... 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 more than ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook

... Woman. DAVID in his sportive days—which continue—has done roguish things with his arm when conducting a lady home under an umbrella from a soiree, and has both chuckled and been scared on thinking of it afterwards. JAMES, a commoner fellow altogether, has discussed the sex over a glass, but is too canny to be in the company of less than two young ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie

... year I had got to a flying machine that lacked nothing but longitudinal stability. My model flew like a bird for fifty or a hundred yards or so, and then either dived and broke its nose or, what was commoner, reared up, slid back and smashed its propeller. The rhythm of the pitching puzzled me. I felt it must obey some laws not yet quite clearly stated. I became therefore a student of theory and literature for a time; I hit upon the string of considerations that led me ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... felt my eyes fill as they have seldom filled since childhood, for I was proud of the western diggers, proud of my blood; and at that moment, with British "Tommies" sprawling on the grass at my feet, and the Boer farmers grouped amongst them, I would sooner have called myself an Australian commoner than the son of any peer in any other land under ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales

... Twing, in the county of Yorkshire, who was executed in 1537 at Tyburn, for high treason. On the death of his grandfather, Lord Lumley, in 1544, John succeeded to the family estates, and in 1547 he was permitted to take the title of Baron Lumley. He matriculated in May 1549, as a fellow-commoner of Queens' College, Cambridge, and was also educated in the court of King Edward VI., whose funeral he attended. On the 29th of September 1553 he was created a Knight of the Bath, and, two days later, was present, together with ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher

... how shall I describe his face when major Marvel entered! he had not even feared his presence. A blank dismay, such as could seldom have been visible there, a strange mingling of annoyance, contempt, and fear, clouded it with an inharmonious expression, which made him look much like a discomfited commoner. In a moment he had overcome the unworthy sensation, and was again impassive and seemingly cool. The major did not choose to see him at first, but was presented to Miss Vavasor by their hostess as her cousin. He appeared a little ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... appears in his earliest writings; it is most marked at the time of the Rambler; whilst in the Lives of the Poets, although I think that the trick of inversion has become commoner, the other peculiarities have been so far softened as (in my judgment, at least), to be inoffensive. It is perhaps needless to give examples of a tendency which marks almost every page of his writing. A passage or two from the Rambler may illustrate the ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen

... far,' he reasoned, 'from cutting off this child from inheritance of my estates, as I have done, I should have rejoiced in the possession of him! He is of pure stock on one side at least, whilst in the ordinary run of affairs he would have been a commoner to the bone.' ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy

... were for him not merely instruments of poetic expression but springs of poetic joy. No poetry can dispense with images from "artificial" things; Wordsworth himself does not always reject them; with most poets they are commoner, merely because they are better known; but for Browning the impress of "our meddling intellect" added exactly the charm and stimulus which complete exemption from it added for Wordsworth. His habitual imagery is fetched, not from flowers ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... now eighteen, was transferred to Oxford as a Gentleman Commoner of Magdalen. And surely never lighted on the Oxford orb so glorious a vision, or such a bewildering phenomenon. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... and deadly, foreign to all other known drug-producing flora. Aconite, digitalis, and the commoner varieties of toxins lie dormant in the producing plant. That is, there are no exhalations of a noxious nature. In Adresol the drug is active—violently active. Adresol extracted and duly treated ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum

... "Barham Downs," between Dover and Canterbury. He was educated at St. Paul's School in Canterbury, where he made the acquaintance of Richard Bentley, who afterward became his publisher. From this school, he wont to Oxford, entering Brazennose College, as a gentleman commoner, where he met Theodore Hook, and formed a friendship with that prince of wits which terminated only with Hook's life. At the University, Barham led a wild, dissipated life—as the bad custom then was—and was noted as a wit and good ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... of raising water, which is commoner in Egypt than in Mesopotamia at the present day, is the shadduf, and is worked by hand. It consists of a beam supported in the centre, at one end of which is tied a rope with a bucket or vessel for raising the water, and at the other end is fixed a counterweight.* ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... our Lord Himself, "can serve two masters: ye cannot serve God and mammon." Not that we are not tempted sometimes to try it. What commoner sin is there amongst professing Christians than the attempt to make the best of both worlds—to lay hold of this world with the one hand, while we give it up with the other—to ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... ends. The 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 it ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various

... sofa!" and she falls down on the sofa, which, truth to say, was the Rev. Charles Honeyman's luxurious sofa from Oxford, presented to him by young Cibber Wright of Christchurch, when that gentleman-commoner ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... while teaching a few privileged persons to taste the special "quality" which Botticelli has and Botticelli's pupils have not, and thus occasionally intensifying aesthetic enjoyment by distinguishing whatever differentiates the finer artistic products from the commoner, modern art-criticism has probably wasted much honest but shamefaced capacity for appreciating the qualities common, because indispensable, to, all good art. It is therefore not without a certain ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee

... one of the most complete collections in Europe; and a great number of valuable MSS., which he directed to be safely locked up, and not to be opened till seven years after his decease. He died on the 6th of April, 1755. To St. John's College, where he had been a gentleman commoner, Dr. Rawlinson left the bulk of his estate, amounting to near 700l. a year: a plate of Abp. Laud, 31 volumes of Parliamentary Journals and Debates, a set of Rymer's Foedera, his Greek, Roman, and English coins, not given ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... so deep, so high, 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 ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... was a native of Shansi, the old rule that a man might not act as magistrate in his own province having been repealed. He was not as his predecessor, carried in a sedan chair, but walked, or rode in a cart as a commoner. He wore cotton clothes in place of the gorgeous silk and satin embroidered gowns, and when he sent to invite us to dine with his wives, his card was foreign except for the characters written ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable

... very day. I found that among the prisoners were three of the commoner sort who have served in Egypt and left that land not three months ago. Of these men two have never heard of the bishop or the others. The third, however, who was wounded in ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard

... national ornament, Mr Merdle, continued his shining course. It began to be widely understood that one who had done society the admirable service of making so much money out of it, could not be suffered to remain a commoner. A baronetcy was spoken of with confidence; a peerage was frequently mentioned. Rumour had it that Mr Merdle had set his golden face against a baronetcy; that he had plainly intimated to Lord Decimus that a baronetcy was not enough for ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... spleen, and kidneys. Local causes of hemorrhage are: inflammation of the lining membrane of the uterus, chronic pelvic inflammations, faulty uterine positions, erosions and ulcerations of the mouth of the uterus, fibroid tumors, and cancer. All competent observers agree that cancer in women is much commoner from forty to fifty years than ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith

... account was sent in on that date. Indeed, as the village of Chizelrigg is but a few miles away, it would have been quite possible for my uncle to have bought the heavy paper in the morning, tried it, and in the afternoon sent for the commoner lot; but in any case, the bill would not have been presented until months after the order, and the two ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr

... work then she'd better not put on airs. Since she married a commoner she should be one like the rest of us. Are we a sort of accursed people? Lord, pardon me for saying it! We too have our communal society and we pay taxes and take part in other obligations. My brother gets money by sweat and toil, and contributes it to the community. She might stay at home ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky

... of 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 ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... travel both by night and day. In this case, as in others, the cause produced the effect; or rather, we should say, the temptation occasioned the crime. Highway-robbery was frequent; and many a worthy man—fat farmer and wealthy commoner—was eased of his purse in despite of all his armed precautions and the most sturdy resistance. The poorer classes, in every part of the country, were, with scarcely an exception, the friends of ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... his wife and she is by no means under his guardianship. This may account for the fact that we have less divorce than in many other countries. We have different laws for the different social classes. A nobleman will pay his taxes according to the law for the nobility, while his wife may be a commoner and have to pay hers according to the laws for the commoners, but both are taxpayers and consequently both are voters. It is quite a common thing to see a woman of the people, a peasant woman, take her place and often her husband's ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... there reclined upon a divan the form of Sir Reginald Elphinstone, sometimes called by his friends "the handsome baronet," said to be the richest commoner in England. At the age of thirty-five, having freely exposed himself to all known sources of peril, except those involved in a trip to the Polar regions, in his eager pursuit of sport and adventure, Sir Reginald seemed, for the moment, to have no object left him in ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... may name: Sir Ingram Hopton, son of Ralph, first Baron Hopton, who entered as a Fellow Commoner 12th May 1631. Sir Ingram fell at the battle of Winceby, 11th October 1643. He there unhorsed Oliver Cromwell in a charge, and knocked him down again as he rose, ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott

... great one as to the contents,"—which brought its author a great name, as well it might. When in London Ward met Wilkins and formed a lifelong friendship with him. They were both men of learning, moderate, dexterous, and successful. Ward entered Wadham as a Fellow Commoner in October 1649, became Savilian Professor of Astronomy, and in 1659 President of Trinity. Like Wilkins, he was ejected from his Headship at the Restoration, and like him obtained high preferment under the new regime and became a Bishop. Both ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson

... went to Oxford, and was entered as a commoner at Balliol. Here his special career very soon commenced. He utterly eschewed the society of fast men, gave no wine-parties, kept no horses, rowed no boats, joined no rows, and was the pride of ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... again; only that gaunt old head raised proudly, owing no man anything but courtesy. The glow deepened, as she thought of it. It was strange, too, that, with the deep, slow-moving nature of this girl, she should have striven so eagerly to throw this light over the future. Commoner natures have done more and hoped less. It was a poor gift, you think, this of the labor of a life for so plain a duty; hardly heroic. She knew it. Yet, if there lay in this coming labor any pain, any ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... been noted in various disorders of nervous character. Periodic insanity has long been known and studied (see, e.g., Pilcz, Die periodischen Geistesstoerungen, 1901); it is much commoner in women than in men. Periodicity has been observed in stammering (a six-weekly period in one case), and notably in hemicrania or migraine, by Harry Campbell, Osler, etc. (The periodicity of a case of hemicrania has been studied in detail by D. Fraser Harris, Edinburgh Medical Journal, July, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... 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 ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... 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 comes from a ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... out was a castle when it was plainly deficient in battlements. She based upon his immovable confidence in respect to it an inquiry into the structure of English society, and she made him tell her what a lord was, and a commoner, and how the royal family differed from both. She asked him how he came to be a lord, and when he said that it was a peerage of George the Third's creation, she remembered that George III. was the one we took up arms against. She found that Lord Lioncourt knew of our revolution generally, but was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... from him,— Phil is a sad idle dog; but with a devil of a spirit, and sharp as a needle. I wish you could see him ride. Well, to return to Arthur. Don't trouble yourself about his education—that shall be my care. He shall go to Christ Church—a gentleman-commoner, of course—and when he is of age we'll get him into parliament. Now for yourself, Bob. I shall sell the town-house in Berkeley Square, and whatever it brings you shall have. Besides that, I'll add L1500. a year to your L1000.—so that's said and done. ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... fire-room, kneels there, and again standing begins to recite prayers. None may enter the fire-room except the priests. Here the fire is kept always blazing in a silver or copper urn on a solid stone pedestal, and is fed day and night with sandal and other commoner woods. A priest is always present, dressed in long white robes, his hands covered with white cloths and his face veiled. The worshipper lays down his offering of sandalwood at the entrance, and the priest takes it up with a pair of tongs, and gives him some ashes ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... high standard, again, involves the possession of rare virtues, and rare virtues are like rare plants or animals, things that have not been able to hold their own in the world. A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... few of the commoner examples, for I wish to make this no tedious catalogue of the flavours of the green people. I am not a scientist, nor would wish to be taken for one. Only last winter I had my pretensions sadly shocked when I tasted ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson

... Council at the War Office, he did so as the founder and representative of the most formidable organization ever known in England. He had no official standing at the Council: he took his seat there as an unofficial commoner. Yet, in a sense, he held the defensive strength of Britain in his hand. But several of the Ministers and officials who formed that Council were members of our Executive, and our relations with the Government were already well defined and thoroughly harmonious. It was from the War Office that ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from the commoner elements with which it may be found in combination. Few artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite cleanly, casting off all debris, and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination has wholly fused and transformed. Take, for instance, the writings of Wordsworth. The heat of his genius, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... rule in your English peerage that when a son becomes a great peer, and the mother is only a commoner, to give her one of the titles. Your Queen does it ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths

... absolute necessity, after having received a certain quantity of buffetings by advance, that we should send a peer of the realm to the scum of the earth to collect the debt to the last farthing, and to receive, with infinite aggravation, the same scorns which had been paid to our supplication through a commoner: but it was proper, I suppose, that the whole of our country, in all its orders, should have a share of the indignity, and, as in reason, that the higher orders ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... 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 ...
— 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.

... 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 freaks to attract your notice. Sometimes the little rascal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... Lambert, at your lordship's service, and who was in his Majesty's some time before you entered it. That, Mr. Warrington, is the first commoner in England, Mr. Speaker Onslow. Where is your uncle? I shall have to present you myself to his Majesty if Sir Miles delays much longer." As he spoke, the worthy General addressed himself entirely to his young friend, making no sort of account of his colleague, who stalked ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... has beauty, too. Nothing is commoner than the talent and beauty of American girls. But they'd ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells

... menaced, wept, prayed; and, if the case was too urgent and insoluble otherwise, the NIE POZWALAM Gentleman still obstinate, they plunged their swords through him, and in that way brought consent. The commoner course was to dissolve and go home again, in a tempest ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... Castle, and had taken possession of them as property found in her own house. John Eustace and the bishop had combined in demanding them on behalf of the heir, and a lawsuit had then commenced! The diamonds were the most costly belonging to any Commoner in England, and had been valued at twenty-four thousand pounds! Lord Fawn had retreated from his engagement the moment he heard that any doubt was thrown on Lady Eustace's right to their possession! Lady Eustace had declared her intention of bringing an action ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... the honor of the High School will have been determined within the next few days. It is possible, however, that this little coterie of self-appointed "exclusives" will continue to refuse to cast their lot with the commoner run of High School boys, to whom some of the "soreheads" have referred as "muckers." A Gridley "mucker," it may be stated in passing, is a Gridley boy of poor parents who desires to obtain a decent education and ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock

... world an inheritance of mental and physical qualities derived first from our parents, or through them from some remoter ancestor, secondly from our race, thirdly from the general condition of mankind into which we are born. Nothing is commoner than the remark, that 'So and so is like his father or his uncle'; and an aged person may not unfrequently note a resemblance in a youth to a long-forgotten ancestor, observing that 'Nature sometimes skips a generation.' It may be true also, that if we knew more about our ancestors, these similarities ...
— The Republic • Plato

... or noble aim—whose whole sphere of ideas is petty and personal. It is not only that such women do nothing themselves—they slowly asphyxiate their friends, their brothers, or their husbands. These are the unawakened women; and education may deliver you from this dreadful fate, which is commoner ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson

... 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 Joan, ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... 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, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... and the practical applied to the ideal brings it at once within everybody's reach, tames it, and familiarizes it to the mind. If the writers on metaphysics would deal more in our every-day speech, use commoner illustrations, seek to find some interpreter of the feelings and affections of the mind in Nature, out of the mind itself, and thus keep the life-principle and the thought-principle constantly wedded, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various

... company, and finds he has the worst of the bargain. His successors, the 'trencher chaplains' who 'from grasshoppers turn bumble-bees and wasps, plain parasites, and make the Muses mules, to satisfy their hunger-starved panches, and get a meal's meat,' were commoner in Burton's days than in our own, and are to be met in ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... unconscious blank verse, which has made it feasible to transcribe about one-half of Dickens's otherwise so admirable Barnaby Rudge in blank-verse lines, a tendency (outdoing our old friend M. Jourdain) commoner than Mr. Saintsbury admits, such lines being frequent in his favourite Dryden; yet, on the other hand, it might be maintained, and would be maintained by its French critics, that our English poetry has been too apt to ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater

... was 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 court from Scotland as a trusty messenger. In 1596-7 he was in France, and ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton

... display of his art, in presence of the assembled chiefs of that region. The bee-hunter had pride in his craft, the same as any other skilful workman who had gained a reputation by his cunning, and he now trod the prairie with a firmer step, and a more kindling eye, than was his wont in the commoner haunts of his calling. Men were there whom it might be an honor to surprise, and pretty Margery was there also, she who had so long desired to see this ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper

... knowledge—with the just possible exceptions of James Stephens and Walter de la Mare—in my own generation. She has, in fact, the true gift of fancy. It has already been displayed in her verse—a form in which it is far commoner than in prose—but Martin Pippin is her first ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon

... with the enunciation of these dry definitions, I should ill exemplify that method of teaching this branch of physical science, which it is my chief business to-night to recommend. Let us turn away then from abstract definitions. Let us take some concrete living thing, some animal, the commoner the better, and let us see how the application of common sense and common logic to the obvious facts it presents, inevitably leads us into all these branches of ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... off the girl, and married her for her lands. This, too, was a plain case of abducting an heiress, not indeed by violence, but with consummate art. Setting aside the rare attractions of the lady, in Moodie's estimation the prize was immense. L'Isle, with all his lofty airs, was but a commoner, with perhaps no fortune but his sword, a mere adventurer, and Lord Strathern's broad acres were an irresistible temptation; though, in truth, this coveted domain counted thousands of acres of sheep-walk to the hundreds of ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen

... did he place above him—the great commoner after whom he had been christened, Henry Clay Dean. He knew how Clay's life had been devoted to averting the coming war, and how his last days had been darkly shadowed by the belief that, when he was gone, the war must come. At times he could hear that clarion ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox

... commoner, who seemed to vie with the pea-green in the desperate folly of getting rid of a suddenly obtained fortune of L130,000 in ready money, as fast as possible, and whose relish for the society of legs, bullies, and fighting men was equally notorious, ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... Paul's School, London, and afterwards at Wadham College, Oxford, under the tutorship of Dr. Wilkins, Cromwell's brother-in-law, a learned and philosophical mathematician. He was admitted gentleman commoner in 1650, and it is said "made great proficiency in several branches of learning, being as exact a Latin and Grecian as any in the university of his age or time." He succeeded to his father's title soon after coming of age, and took a leading part in the politics of the day, becoming ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry

... Raymond narrowly in the long tete-a-tetes they had together. She drew him out, encouraging and pressing him to tell her everything about himself. She was always apprehending a jarring note, the inevitable sign of the man's coarser clay, of his commoner upbringing, the clash of his caste on hers. But she was struck instead by his inherent refinement, by his unformulated instincts of well-doing and honour. He was hazy about the use of oyster-forks, had never seen a finger-bowl, ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne

... nou dianome; and the discussion in the Statesman of the difference between the personal rule of a king and the impersonal reign of law.) The State is based on virtue and religion rather than on knowledge; and virtue is no longer identified with knowledge, being of the commoner sort, and spoken of in the sense generally understood. Yet there are many traces of advance as well as retrogression in the Laws of Plato. The attempt to reconcile the ideal with actual life is an advance; to 'have brought ...
— Laws • Plato

... 1644. He was the son of a naval officer of the same name, who served with distinction both in the Protectorate and after the Restoration, and who was much esteemed by Charles II. and the Duke of York. At the age of fifteen he was entered as a gentleman-commoner at Christchurch, Oxford. He had not been long in residence, when he received, from the preaching of Thomas Loe, his first bias toward the doctrines of the Quakers; and in conjunction with some fellow-students he began to withdraw from attendance on the Established Church, and to hold ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... of the commoner, made himself one of the passengers at once; but Byron held himself aloof, and sat on the rail, leaning on the mizzen shrouds, inhaling, as it were, poetical sympathy, from the gloomy Rock, then dark and stern in the twilight. ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... to whom Edmund Burke referred, Thomas Jefferson was the foremost Commoner of his day, and he allowed no opportunity to pass unimproved, to lift the common people to higher conceptions of life and duty. Such men are rare, and I am glad to be able conscientiously to place the name of Thomas Jefferson, in many important respects, and particularly as the champion of the rights ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson

... of its perfection just before the Revolution. It is made in the province of Bizen. The better kind is made of a white or light bluish clay, and well baked in order to receive the red-brown colour, whereas the commoner kind is of ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... Cytherea did. The healing effect upon her heart of a year's silence—a year and a half's separation—was undone in an instant. One of those strange revivals of passion by mere sight—commoner in women than in men, and in oppressed women commonest of all—had taken place in her—so transcendently, that even to herself it seemed more like a new ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy

... only some of Anacreon and Hesiod," the result of which was that when he went up to Oxford, the Master of his College said he was "the best qualified for the University that {90} he had ever known come there." His College was Pembroke, of which he became a Commoner (not a Servitor, as Carlyle said) in 1728. The Oxford of that day was not a place of much discipline and the official order of study was very laxly maintained. It seems not to have meant much to Johnson, and he is described as having spent a good deal of his time "lounging at the College gates with ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey

... the cousins that they should have gone to different schools. The matter, however, had been left to Mr. Wilkinson, and as he thought Winchester good for his own son, he naturally thought the same school good for Sir Lionel's son. But Bertram was entered as a commoner, whereas Wilkinson was in the college. Those who know Winchester will understand, that though, as regarded school business and school hours, they were at the same establishment, they were not together at the much more important hours of eating, sleeping, and playing. ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope

... to make out the use or function of "bloom," or the waxy secretion on the leaves and fruit of plants, but am VERY doubtful whether I shall succeed. Can you give me any light? Are such plants commoner in warm than in colder climates? I ask because I often walk out in heavy rain, and the leaves of very few wild dicotyledons can be here seen with drops of water rolling off them like quick-silver. Whereas in my flower garden, greenhouse, and hot-houses there ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... oddities; and it was plain to him that with only a small exercise of those will-forces he felt accumulating within him, most of the normal objects of ambition were within his grasp. The English aristocratic class, as we all know, is no longer exclusive. It mingles freely with the commoner world on apparently equal terms. But all the while its personal and family cohesion is perhaps greater than ever. The power of mere birth, it seemed to Jacob, was hardly less in the England newly possessed ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... a commoner's daughter, Dacre; but none the less a noble English girl, fit match for any aristocrat ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.

... type, which is seen in the lower classes and even then not very frequently, its representative is squarely built, and has prominent cheek-bones, oblique eyes, a more or less flat nose with a large mouth. The Malay type is much commoner. Its characteristics are small stature, good and sometimes square build, a face round or angular, prominent cheek-bones, large horizontal eyes, a weak chin, a short neck, broad well-developed chest, short legs, and small delicate hands. As for the Ainu type, Dr. Baelz finds ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... his over-charged feelings, he suddenly turned upon his heel, and shaking his fist in the direction whence he had come, as if against the enemy who had caused his benefactress so much distress, he pronounced a formal and emphatic curse upon their whole race, "from the head-chief to the commoner, from the whisky-soaking warrior down to the pan-licking squall-a-baby," all of whom he anathematised with as much originality as fervour of expression; after which, he proceeded, with more sedateness, to resume ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird

... twenty years ago, was one of great excitement in Peking. The time of the regency of the Empress Dowager for the boy-emperor had ended. I have explained how a prince is not allowed to marry a princess because she is his relative, or even a commoner his cousin for the same reason. That is the rule. But rules were made to be broken, and when the time came for Kuang Hsu's betrothal the Empress Dowager decided to marry this son of her sister to the daughter of ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland

... long run to cultivate business relations with one or more second-hand booksellers, and pay them for their knowledge and experience." But is this quite fair, and is it not likely that the rarer books will be supplied cheaper if the bookseller is allowed to pay himself partly out of the sale of the commoner books, which it is now proposed the librarian shall buy himself? My contention is that it is for the advantage of libraries that intelligent booksellers, ready to place their knowledge at the service ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley

... first of a series of circular galleries, lighted from the lantern of the dome, which also lights the ground-floor. Hundreds, even thousands, of volumes are displayed on the shelves running round their walls. As we mount higher and higher, we find commoner books in shabbier bindings; but there is still the same order preserved, each book being numbered according to a printed catalogue. . . . The formation of such an establishment as this assumes a remarkable power of organization, as well as a large ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts

... admirable, is discouraging in this respect. In the delineation of character, some are good, some are bad, and some indifferent. We have a lovely heroine, a noble hero, developing seemingly in harmony with the inevitable laws of their natures. Associated with them are those of the commoner or baser sort, also developing in accordance with the innate principles of their natures. The first are presented as if created of finer clay than the others. The first are the flowers in the garden of society, the latter the weeds. According to this theory of character, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe

... impassioned eloquence. Second, he unloosed 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 England ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson

... which has been sliced, and there are some young players who are rather inclined to purr with satisfaction when they have pulled, for, though the ball is hopelessly off the line, they have committed an error which is commoner with those whose hair has grown grey on the links than with the beginner whose handicap is reckoned by eighteen or twenty strokes. But after all pulling is not an amusement, and even when it is an accomplishment and ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon

... and behoof of more juvenile questioners, he would stand for an hour together, answering deferential questions about Sheridan, and Percival, and Castlereagh, and Heaven knows who beside, with manifest delight, always inserting a 'Mister' before every commoner's name. ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... or three other men were up talking to them when I arrived, and I guessed that they were taking the scholars and exhibitioners alphabetically, and that I was too late for my turn; though Ward, who was a commoner and fortunate enough to begin with a W, was probably in heaps ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley

... a Gentleman Commoner of Christ Church, Oxford, where, in 1808, he was the first who took the honors of double first-class. In the following year, having attained his majority, he entered the House of Commons for Cashel, as the nominee of Mr. Richard Pennefather. Mr. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... quite open to dispute. There are people who will dispute it and make a very passable case. One may deny the amelioration, or one may deny that it is the result of any Good Will or of anything but quite mechanical forces. The former is the commoner argument. The appeal is usually to what has been finest in the past, and to all that is bad and base in the present. At once the unsoundest and the most attractive argument is to be found in the deliberate idealization of particular ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... 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 and his native land, and he united in his person ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman

... cruel blow, isn't it? It must be. And therefore I will soften my sentence a little, for I can do so. You are an ordinary man astray, Tonio Kroeger,—an erring commoner." ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... could tell how Jimmie felt about Ursula. But the thought of her troubled my sleep. Stripped of her art, she was not in the least the heroine of Jimmie's play. She was of coarser clay, commoner. And Jimmie was fine. The fear I had was that he might clothe her with the virtues which he had created, and the thought, as ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey

... he did not owe as much of his popularity to his ostentatious purity as to his eloquence, or to his talents for the administration of war. It was everywhere said with delight and admiration that the great Commoner, without any advantages of birth or fortune, had, in spite of the dislike of the Court and of the aristocracy, made himself the first man in England, and made England the first country in the world; that his name was mentioned with ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... plural termination is commoner than that in -r; as geisl-ar flashes, tung-ur tongues, &c. Nevertheless, it is not the Icelandic that explains the plural ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham

... the victim of a domestic tyrant, who is, perhaps, Balzac's most finished portrait of the cold-blooded and cunning miser. The sacrifice of a woman's life to paternal despotism is unfortunately even commoner in real life than in fiction; and when the lover, from whom the old miser has divided her during his life, deserts her after his death, we feel that the mournful catastrophe is demanded by the sombre prologue. The book may indeed justify, to some extent, one of the ordinary criticisms ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... exacted any premium. At any rate, when in 1614, his nephew, then of age, desired to leave the business and go to Cambridge, the ten years' apprenticeship did not stand in his way, and he entered as a Fellow Commoner at St. John's. His uncle plainly still managed his affairs, for an amusing series of fourteen letters has been preserved at Beaumanor, until lately the seat of Sir William's descendants, in which the poet asks sometimes for payment of a quarterly stipend ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick

... executive control,—was rarely conferred, although elective, upon any but senators of ancient family and enormous wealth. It was as difficult for a "new man" to reach this dignity, under an aristocratic Constitution, as for a commoner a hundred years ago to become prime minister of England. Transcendent talents and services scarcely sufficed. Only generals who had won great military fame, or the highest of the nobles, stood much chance. For a lawyer to aim at the highest office in the State, without a great family to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord

... 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 ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius

... together through the streets, the young man's uncompromising manner of treating him as an equal had become unpleasing to him. In his workshop he saw in Pollux only the artist, and delighted in his original and dashing powers; but out of it, and among men of a commoner stamp, from whom he was accustomed to meet with deference, the young man's speech and demeanor seemed unbecoming, bold, and hard to be endured. In the eating-house the huge eater and drinker, who laughingly pressed him to do ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... 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 ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte

... of spitting, even unrelated to betel-chewing or tobacco-chewing, is far commoner among ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various

... of integrity he was driven out a commoner of nature, excluded from the regular modes of profit and prosperity, and reduced to pick up a livelihood uncertain and fortuitous; but it must be remembered that he kept his name unsullied, and never suffered himself to be reduced, like too many of the same sect, to mean ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... horses in those days were much less well bred, and the commoner cold-blooded strain can stand bivouacs, cold and wet, much better than our present high-bred material, although the latter stand heat and exertion very much better. The leadership must adapt itself to these conditions. Where circumstances allow the bulk of the horses to take shelter ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi

... came 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 ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... impeachment was illegal. The process was illegal. The service was illegal. If Charles wished to prosecute the five members for treason, a bill against them should have been sent to a grand jury. That a commoner cannot be tried for high treason by the Lords at the suit of the Crown, is part of the very alphabet of our law. That no man can be arrested by the King in person is equally clear. This was an established maxim of our jurisprudence even in the time of Edward the Fourth. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... She never knows what she has read. Yet the social student who failed to take into account the desultory, pastime reader, would miss a great factor in the spread of ideas. Fifth—The person who does not read. He is commoner than most suppose. He is often young, more often boy than girl, oftener young man than young woman. He commits eternally what Mr Putnam aptly calls the great crime against the library of staying away from it. He ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana

... their friends, and if they had no friends, throwing themselves upon the general hospitality. The alehouses were reserved for tippling at a later hour, for it was then customary for both gentleman and commoner, male as well as female, as will be more fully shown hereafter, to take their meals at home, and repair afterwards to houses of public entertainment for wine or other liquors. Private chambers were, of course, reserved for the gentry; but not unfrequently the squire and his friends ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... again upon an unsympathetic world, I was minded to do what I had done so many times before—take the first train and vanish. But a small incident delayed the vanishing—for the moment, at least. On the way to the railroad station I saw a sight, commoner at that time in my native State than it is now, I am glad to be able to say; a young, farmer-looking fellow overcome by liquor, reeling and stumbling and finding the sidewalk far too narrow. He was coming toward me, and I yielded to the impulse which prompts ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde

... variation in tempo. The more evident changes of this sort are indicated by the composer through such expressions as ritardando, accelerando, et cetera; and it may be well to give at this point a list of the commoner of these terms together with their meanings. Obviously, such indications are of two general types dealing respectively with increasing and decreasing speed, and we shall accordingly give the definitions in ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens

... repeat what I have heard. As for me, I don't know any more. I have kept out of the way for more than three months. And besides, it matters little to me whether Micheline be a commoner or a princess, the wife of Delarue or of Panine. I shall be none the richer or the poorer, shall I? Therefore I need not care. The dear child will certainly have millions enough to marry easily. And her adopted sister, the stately Mademoiselle Jeanne, ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... large and beautiful gem, so uncommon and rare, that all search for it is vain, all efforts to obtain it hopeless; but it consists of a series of smaller and commoner gems, grouped and set together, forming a pleasing and graceful whole. Happiness consists in the enjoyment of little pleasures scattered along the common path of life, which, in the eager search for some great and exciting joy, we are apt to ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles

... you did not go to the small theatres or such places. You ought always to go to the Imperial box. For your life at home, you must have regular receptions; that is the only way of winning my approval. Greatness has its inconveniences. An Empress can't go about everywhere like a commoner." ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand

... 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 ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... Tailors' Hall by three hundred members of the House of Commons. Many other circumstances might be related to illustrate the high position which Sir Robert Peel occupied. Anecdotes innumerable might be recorded to show the extraordinary influence in Parliament which made him "the great commoner" of the age; for Sir Robert Peel was not only a skillful and adroit debater, but by many degrees the most able and one of the most eloquent men in either house of parliament. Nothing could be more stately ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various

... or uncommon of the bodily diseases were, as the quotation from Cotta's book shows[1], attributed to the same diabolic source. In an era when the most profound ignorance prevailed with regard to the simplest laws of health; when the commoner diseases were considered as God's punishment for sin, and not attributable to natural causes; when so eminent a divine as Bishop Hooper could declare that "the air, the water, and the earth have no poison in themselves to hurt their lord and master man,"[2] ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding

... interesting part of the garden, is that devoted to wax dolls. There are other beds for the commoner dolls—for the rag dolls, and the china dolls, and the rubber dolls, but of course wax dolls would look much handsomer growing. Wax dolls have to be planted quite early in the season; for they need a good start before the sun is very high. The seeds are ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins

... of the exchequer in Ireland, was born in Dublin in 1615. In 1617 his father became baron of the exchequer in England, and removed to London with his family. In Michaelmas term 1631 the future poet was entered as a gentleman commoner at Trinity College, Oxford. He removed in 1634 to Lincoln's Inn, where he was, says John Aubrey, a good student, but not suspected of being a wit. The reputation he had gained at Oxford of being the "dreamingest young fellow" gave way to a scandalous reputation for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... their natural lot. If any person among those who were 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 ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair

... 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 meets ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... 'mimic fires,' and make it 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 umbrella-shaped, transparent disks float gracefully through the calm water, and ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various

... individuals maintained are so few in number, and (2) that its beauty is so great it can hardly be improved. But the individuals maintained have not been too few for the independent origin of the black-shouldered form, or for the supplanting of the commoner one by it. As to any neglect in selection,{120} it can hardly be imagined that with regard to this bird (kept as it is all but exclusively for its beauty), any spontaneous beautiful variation in colour or form would have been neglected. On the contrary, it would have ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... and a new earth had begun for me, and a delicious longing, clean and sweet, that swept every commoner feeling far away. What matter that the life before me be filled with danger, and all the coarse and cruel things of the hard days of the Santa Fe Trail? In that hour I knew the best of life that a young man can know. Its benediction after all these years of change is ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter

... sometimes the suffering hero, but in both cases the recognized or unrecognized merit of oneself is the big fact in the story, so that the mastery motive is evidently finding satisfaction here as well as in other forms of play. Probably the conquering hero dream is the commoner and healthier variety. A classical example is that of the milkmaid who was carrying on her head a pail of milk she had been given. "I'll sell this milk for so much, and with the money buy a hen. The hen will lay so many ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... smallness of the products which the able man can really claim as his own, the consequent diminution of his claims to any exceptional reward on account of them, and the fact that even the highest ability, however rare it may be, is very much commoner than it seems to be, and will, for this reason in addition to those just mentioned, be obtainable in the future at a very much ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock

... glance, the creature abandoned to grief made a romantic and striking picture, and Sophia thought for an instant that she had at length encountered life on a plane that would correspond to her dreams of romance. And she was impressed, with a feeling somewhat akin to that of a middling commoner when confronted with a viscount. There was, in the distance, something imposing and sensational about that prone, trembling figure. The tragic works of love were therein apparently manifest, in a sort of dignified beauty. But ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... with marine articulata; but a knowledge of the crustacea of the island is at present a desideratum; and with the exception of the few commoner species that frequent the shores, or are offered in the markets, we are literally without information, excepting the little that can be gleaned ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... officers' decision as to what they should or should not do, so he left to the politicians, in whose hands the gifts lay, to decide what they would, or should, accord to a successful admiral. Pitt, the Great Commoner, left Hawke a commoner. Possibly he recognized that only by stretch of imagination could Hawke be reckoned one of the creations of a great ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan

... some former generation of the family had produced patchwork curtains and coverlet; and patchwork was patchwork in those days, before the early Yates and Peels had found out the secret of printing the parsley-leaf. Scraps of costly Indian chintzes and palempours were intermixed with commoner black and red calico in minute hexagons; and the variety of patterns served for the useful purpose of promoting conversation as well as the more obvious one of displaying the work-woman 's taste. Sylvia, for instance, began at once to her old friend, Molly Brunton, who had accompanied her into this ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell

... indeed, and a beautiful young widder besides. So she and Mr. Brudenell, they fell in love long of each other. But law, you see her kinfolks was bitter agin her a-marrying of him—which they called him a commoner, as isn't true, you know, 'cause he is not one of the common sort at all—though I s'pose they being so high, looked down upon him as sich. Well, anyways, they was as bitter against her marrying of him, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... order to transact their business with something like due dispatch, to travel both by night and day. In this case, as in others, the cause produced the effect; or rather, we should say, the temptation occasioned the crime. Highway-robbery was frequent; and many a worthy man—fat farmer and wealthy commoner—was eased of his purse in despite of all his armed precautions and the most sturdy resistance. The poorer classes, in every part of the country, were, with scarcely an exception, the friends of those depredators; by whom, it is true, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... did not certainly know if that immobile eye of his was glass—something has changed it from a liquid brown to a serene and confident blue. That shoulder-blade is an extremely doubtful document, and I would like to put it side by side with the gnawed scapulae of a few of the commoner domestic animals before I admitted ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells

... go forever and forever on!' He is the leader appointed by Heaven for sublime events. I am sent to him as a knight of God. I go to York. I was true at Metz to liberty, and in the council hall I shall be true, whatever is offered me, to Washington, our Washington beloved! to the world's great commoner! Farewell." ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth

... 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, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... entered a colt or two at Epsom: her consort, Prince George of Denmark, loved horse-racing and drank Epsom waters. Greatest of all memories of the Turf, Eclipse lived for years by Epsom downs, and won poor little races for an obscure commoner. He would have won any race he could have been asked by a king, but it was the fate of the finest racehorse ever foaled to live before the Derby was founded, and before he could race another horse worthy to pass the starting post with him. Pownall, in his History ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... standard, again, involves the possession of rare virtues, and rare virtues are like rare plants or animals, things that have not been able to hold their own in the world. A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... deal when in the Carlyle 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 ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... Herr Professor there reclined upon a divan the form of Sir Reginald Elphinstone, sometimes called by his friends "the handsome baronet," said to be the richest commoner in England. At the age of thirty-five, having freely exposed himself to all known sources of peril, except those involved in a trip to the Polar regions, in his eager pursuit of sport and adventure, Sir Reginald seemed, for the moment, to have ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... innate delicacy would never permit him to go into these sordid details, too many of which I have perhaps told you. But I am made of rougher stuff than he. I am never quite as unreasonable as he can be at times, but I am commoner." ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... publicity through books and newspapers, who, though they ought to be the warmest in their enthusiasm, have never felt drawn to hear him, and, if they know of him at all, think of him as one who pleases in a simple way the commoner folk, forgetting in their pride that every really great man pleases the common ones, and that simplicity and directness are attributes ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell

... little chance of finding it. And it can not be pretended that to judge of an induction when found is perfectly easy, is a thing for which aids and instruments are superfluous; for erroneous inductions, false inferences from experience, are quite as common, on some subjects much commoner than true ones. The business of Inductive Logic is to provide rules and models (such as the Syllogism and its rules are for ratiocination) to which if inductive arguments conform, those arguments are conclusive, and not otherwise. This is what ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... to her affectionate friend, being sure that, the moment she opened her lips, the mother would side with her son against 'Sammy,' with love against prudence, and perhaps even compel her to the intolerable degradation of marrying a commoner. ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... Villon to make sport! I have dropped the 'de,' Monsieur La Mothe, there are so many rascals amongst the nobility nowadays that I find it more distinguished to be the simple commoner. Dull at the Chateau! Good Lord! don't I know it!" He paused, lifting his head with a quick, bird-like motion: a cunning smile wrinkled his face and he smote the table with his open hand. "Dull, are ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond

... Chatham, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1708-1778), this distinguished statesman and orator. He became very popular as a statesman and was known as "The Great Commoner."] ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... readin' me frind Grover Cleveland out iv th' party. He's usin' the Commoner to read him ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne

... Parliament. It was William Burke's influence with Lord Verney that procured for his namesake the seat at Wendover. Burke made his first speech in the House of Commons a few days after the opening of the session of 1766 (January 27), and was honoured by a compliment from Pitt, still the Great Commoner. A week later he spoke again on the same momentous theme, the complaints of the American colonists, and his success was so marked that good judges predicted, in the stiff phraseology of the time, that he would soon add the palm of the orator to the laurel of ...
— Burke • John Morley

... 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

... you, and I imagine you haven't been having any too easy a time with dear mamma-in-law, I'm mighty glad you're going to get away with Dicky by yourself. A week in the mountains ought to set you up wonderfully, and you certainly need it when you start weaving mysterious tragedies about the commoner garden variety of 'masher.'" ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison

... 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

... as the house in which Townsend Bishop lived, called "Bishop's Mansion." This continues to a period subsequent to the style of its architecture, and within recent tradition and the memory of the living. In the old Salem Commoner's records, it is called "Bishop's Cottage," which was the name generally given to dwelling-houses in those early times. Having, as occasion required, been seasonably repaired, it is as strong and good a house to-day as can be found. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... 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 for attention and need to be recognized by ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord

... room at Portray Castle, and had taken possession of them as property found in her own house. John Eustace and the bishop had combined in demanding them on behalf of the heir, and a lawsuit had then commenced! The diamonds were the most costly belonging to any Commoner in England, and had been valued at twenty-four thousand pounds! Lord Fawn had retreated from his engagement the moment he heard that any doubt was thrown on Lady Eustace's right to their possession! Lady Eustace had declared ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... contradictory facts and speeches to himself,—which means subduing, and in a manlike and godlike manner conquering them to himself,—might have merely thrown new contention into them, new unwisdom into them, and so been conquered by them; much the commoner case! In that way he had proved no 'Saint,' or Divine-looking Man, but a mere Sinner, and unfortunate, blameable, more or less Diabolic-looking man! No landlord Edmund becomes infinitely admirable ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... the madake. Made of bamboo split into long narrow strips, these tightly wrapped in twisted hempen cord to the thickness of a sun (inch), with the convenient leverage of a couple of shaku (feet), the mere sight brought Kondo[u] to terms. As he entered he had seen them lead away a heimin (commoner) who had undergone the punishment. The man's back, a mass of bruised and bleeding flesh, was vivid to mind. At once he prostrated himself; made full confession. At last they were at the source. Kondo[u] was a witness ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... privately over his ancestry and his landed estates. But if the nobleman tries to make these ancestors or these landed estates the condition of special influence and privilege in the government, of control over public policy, then the anger of the commoner rises against the nobleman and he ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... been 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 ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope

... misfortune 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 ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... 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, was to have a stall and a bevy, because there was thought to be no doubt about ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope

... the great Commoner, considered money as dirt beneath his feet compared with the public interest and public esteem. ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... who had been estranged and angered for many months, met, and with friendly smiles greeted each other again. The ladies in the gallery above rose up as if by a common impulse, to look down, with smiles, upon the great commoner. One whose silvered hair, parted smoothly and modestly upon her aged forehead, fell in two massy folds behind her ears, clasped her hands, and audibly ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... successor to Hollweg, was the first commoner to be appointed to that high office, without even a ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... Sydney writes to Mrs. Lefanu from Stanmore Priory to the effect that she is the best-lodged, best-fed, dullest author in his Majesty's dominions, and that the sound of a commoner's name is refreshment to her ears. She is surrounded by ex-lord-lieutenants, unpopular princesses (including her of Wales) deposed potentates (including him of Sweden), half the nobility of England, and many of the best wits and writers. She had sat to Sir Thomas Lawrence for her portrait, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston

... imitation porcelain used by those who cannot afford the real; 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 in quality, and the only one absolutely non-absorbent, ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett

... 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 ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... carried off the girl, and married her for her lands. This, too, was a plain case of abducting an heiress, not indeed by violence, but with consummate art. Setting aside the rare attractions of the lady, in Moodie's estimation the prize was immense. L'Isle, with all his lofty airs, was but a commoner, with perhaps no fortune but his sword, a mere adventurer, and Lord Strathern's broad acres were an irresistible temptation; though, in truth, this coveted domain counted thousands of acres of sheep-walk to the hundreds of ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen

... does me wrong, my lord; if I were so He might have bought me at a common price: Do not believe him. O, behold this ring, Whose high respect and rich validity Did lack a parallel; yet, for all that, He gave it to a commoner o' the camp, If I ...
— All's Well That Ends Well • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... the invention consisted in its rendering the commoner sorts of cotton available for fine spinning. The manufacturers were thereby enabled to select the most suitable fibres for high-priced fabrics, and to produce the finer sorts of yarn in much larger quantities. It ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles

... long wet hair, to be Fitz-Stephen. 'Where is the Prince?' said he. 'Gone! Gone!' the two cried together. 'Neither he, nor his brother, nor his sister, nor the King's niece, nor her brother, nor any one of all the brave three hundred, noble or commoner, except we three, has risen above the water!' Fitz-Stephen, with a ghastly face, cried, 'Woe! woe, to me!' and ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens

... him, and the unwarranted supposition that he wishes to employ him. Just as the commoner once held his land by the munificence and condescension of the lord, so to-day the working-man holds his labor by the condescension and necessities of the master and proprietor: that is what is called possession by a precarious [15] ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... "villa life" might be considered even more aristocratic than at "Monte"; and Dom Ferdinand took himself and his ally out of danger's way when Dodo refused to understand that only flirtation, not marriage, was possible with a "commoner." The price of Dauntrey hospitality had, however, fallen. Those who could be attracted by the bait of their barren title had now to be looked for low in the social scale: and it was difficult to get eligible partis with whom to dazzle heiresses. The slender Austrian count, whom Dodo ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... of all sizes and shapes, their beautiful tiles gleaming here and there as the light from the rising moon touched them, delicate spires, pointing upwards, tipped with silver light, low roof of the commoner's dwelling and pillared facade of old and stately palace intervening, and, far away, those cold white, solitary peaks overtopping all else, rising into the region of the stars, made up a ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross

... With this object you stand on the 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 ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various

... Squire but a man of learning, and thus become greater even than his father before him, preparations and arrangements were made something sooner than had been intended, and not long afterward he was entered a gentleman commoner ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... the hands of the artists; that is well. Artists, as a rule, are the last to organise themselves into official castes, and such castes, when organised, rarely impose on the choicer spirits. Rebellious painters are a good deal commoner than rebellious clergymen. On compromise which is the bane of all religion—since men cannot serve two masters—almost all the sects of Europe live and grow fat. Artists have been more willing to go lean. By ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... rows in the side aisles, just as their commoner sisters stand in rows upon the pavement edge to ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest

... any decision as to their respective characters. Ned wished to be Richard the Third, and Charlie that of Richmond and repeat the triumphs of Bosworth; but meeting such obstinate opposition from their council, turned their attention to "something commoner," as Ned expressed himself. After several hours intermingled with side-splitting laughter and grave discussion, a fair representation of Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday was produced, while Marguerite and her friends received more compliments from the young aspirants than ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... life 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 bears ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton

... living. But once when I was at Washington I went into the Patent Office, where the models of the inventions are deposited; the building is about as large as the Ducal Palace, and it is full of them. The people there told me nothing was commoner than for the same invention to be repeated over and over again by different inventors. Some few succeed, and then they have lawsuits with the infringers of their patents; some sell out their inventions for a trifle to companies that have capital, and that grow ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells

... (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 be consulted ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck

... Occasionally, however, the interest of his letters changes from personal to public, and we get a glimpse of scenes and personages that have become historical. He was present in the House of Commons at the first grand debate on the German war after the Great Commoner's retirement from office—"the pitched battle," as Sterne calls it, "wherein Mr. P. was to have entered and thrown down the gauntlet" in defence of his military policy. ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill

... Elijah come to life 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 One. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... his services. Voules, supposing from his appearance that he was one of the other guests who had mistaken his room, made him a polite bow, and said something to that effect. The valet, uncertain whether the young gentleman was a lord or a commoner, thought it wise to be on the safe side, and addressing him as "My lord," said that he had been sent by Lord John to brush his clothes and shoes, and as the portmanteaus had not arrived, to put any of his lordship's wardrobe ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston

... 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 England meant something ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson

... concluded, he begged permission from his seat beside Plunkett, to address the House sitting, which was granted, and then in a discourse of two hours' duration, full of his ancient fire and vigour, he asserted once again, by the divine right of intellect, his title to be considered the first Commoner of Ireland. Gifted men were not rare in that assembly; but the inspiration of the heart, the uncontrollable utterance of a supreme spirit, not less than the extraordinary faculty of condensation, in which, perhaps, he has never ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... were of an illicit kind, and poor as he was, Pitt refused 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," he denounced Wilkes as a worthless profligate; ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green

... by Vaughan's namesake. He has indeed another poem in that volume signed "Hen. Vaugh., Jes. Soc." but that is in Latin, and it is not unexampled for one man to contribute more than one poem, especially in different tongues, to such collections. Or it may be by Herbert Vaughan, who was a Gentleman-commoner of the College in 1641, and has, with Henry Vaughan the Fellow, verses in the [Greek: proteleia] Anglo Batava of ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan

... 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

... bit of ground where the kitchen garden meets the flowers, Japan has long since enlarged its bill of fare with the tuber of a cousin of our common hedge nettle, with the roots of the large burdock, commoner still. In Florida, the calla lily has use as well as beauty; it is ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various

... up to his room and weighed his duty to himself and to some unshaped rules of courtesy and conduct that he had inherited from a house more renowned for its sense of ceremonial honour, perhaps, than for commoner virtues. His instinct as a stranger in a most remarkable dwelling, creeping with mystery and with numberless evidences of things sinister and perhaps malevolent, told him it was fair to make a reconnaissance, even if no more was to be discovered than a servant's sordid amours. On the other hand, ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... She has beauty, too. Nothing is commoner than the talent and beauty of American girls. But they'd better trust to ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells

... way save by a great upheaval and change could the nation break away from that iron feudal system which held her limbs. But now it was a new country which came out from that year of death. The barons were dead in swaths. No high turret nor cunning moat could keep out that black commoner who struck ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... result in the species being exceedingly numerous. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that no two botanists agree as to the number of species comprising the Gossypium family. A list, however, of the commoner varieties found in various cotton-growing areas of the globe will be given, but before doing so, it is deemed advisable to give a general ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson

... fate of the nation depends on the conduct of the King and his ministers. Were they to side openly with the Commons, the revolution would be completed without a convulsion, by the establishment of a constitution, tolerably free, and in which the distinction of Noble and Commoner would be suppressed. But this is scarcely possible. The King is honest, and wishes the good of his people; but the expediency of an hereditary aristocracy is too difficult a question for him. On the contrary, his ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... Rosy, that it is wonderful what an amount of money slips away in our housekeeping. I suppose the servants are careless, and we have had a great many people coming. But there must be many in our rank who manage with much less: they must do with commoner things, I suppose, and look after the scraps. It seems, money goes but a little way in these matters, for Wrench has everything as plain as possible, and he has ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... lying in that stupor. And Pierson stood gazing down at him compassionately. Like most parsons, he had a wide acquaintance with the sick and dying; and one remorseless fellowship with death. Death! The commonest thing in the world, now—commoner than life! This young doctor must have seen many die in these last two years, saved many from death; and there he lay, not able to lift a finger to save himself. Pierson looked at his daughter; what a strong, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... of sea shells or land shells, or of strings of perforated sea shells. The most elaborate kind of wampum was that of the Amerindians of Canada and the eastern United States, the shell beads of which were generally white. The commoner wampum beads were black and violet. Wampum belts were made which illustrated events, dates, treaties of peace, &c, by a rude symbolism (figures of men and animals, upright lines, &c), and these were worked neatly on string ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston

... forms of the irregular verbs were freely used, but later these are comparatively rare, and the impersonal and auxiliary forms became so much commoner that the full inflected form can only be gathered from the early writings and from the rather imperfect paradigms ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner

... wearily; 'I have discovered that infinitely worse things are infinitely commoner. But that there's ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare

... in Africa or Monte Carlo. Was the father of Bryanism, an odious word meaning things Bryan. Later secured one Wilson to attend to Washington detail work. Motto: All things come to him with bait. Ambition: Short ballot with one name. Publications: The Commoner, a newspaper devoted to Bryan advertisements. Address: Mail forwarded from Washington. Epitaph: He Will ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous

... which 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

... However, the commoner form of injury done tendons, is strain or sprain. Because of the sudden tensile strain brought to bear upon tendons in the shocks of concussion, as well as in propulsion of the body, there frequently occurs a rupture of fibers and this ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix

... one that purposes ill? Oh no, by no means. He is a far commoner character—one that hath no purpose, and so being, doth more real ill than he that sets forth to ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt

... and so sedate that it was said playfully of him he rather kept his parents and teachers in awe than needed correction; but in after-life his quick wit made him full of playfulness in conversation. In 1629 he entered Trinity College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner. There he had for tutor William Chillingworth, a Fellow of the college, who after conversion to the Church of Rome had reasoned his way back into Protestant opinions. Chillingworth became a famous champion of Protestantism ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington

... 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

... top of the mound, in the centre, there was a deep hole. Its import was obvious. The mortal remains of one who had lain for centuries in a grandeur befitting his lordly rank had been torn from their sepulchre, probably by some irreverent commoner, and were now doubtless exhibited to the vulgar ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan

... subordinated to the other that it takes on the character of a grammatical element. We may symbolize this by A b, a type that may gradually, by loss of external connection between the subordinated element b and its independent counterpart B merge with the commoner type A (b). A word like beautiful is an example of A b, the -ful barely preserving the impress of its lineage. A word like homely, on the other hand, is clearly of the type A (b), for no one but a linguistic student is aware ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir

... for the box, suggested "To bakcho." Pryme says that among the undergraduates, of whom he was one, tobacco had no favour, and "an attempt of Mr. Ginkell, son of Lord Athlone ... to introduce smoking at his own wine-parties failed, although he had the prestige of being a hat-fellow-commoner." ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson

... who 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 ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte

... 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 ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope

... 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). The sizar and ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... wrote once during a painful crisis of his life, "is now reading my book aloud to her sister at my elbow; they chuckle, and I feel flattered.—Yours, R. L. S. P.S.—Now they yawn, and I am indifferent. Such a wisely conceived thing is vanity." If only vanity so conceived were commoner! And whatever might be the abstract and philosophical value of that somewhat grimly stoical conception of the universe, of conduct and duty, at which in mature years he had arrived, want of manliness is certainly not its fault. Take the kind of maxims which he was accustomed to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... now to begin this with telling MD that I dined with the Secretary to-day, who is much out of order with a cold, and feverish; yet he went to the Cabinet Council tonight at six, against my will. The Secretary is much the greatest commoner in England, and turns the whole Parliament, who can do nothing without him; and if he lives and has his health, will, I believe, be one day at the head of affairs. I have told him sometimes that, if I were a dozen ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... 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

... only repeat what I have heard. As for me, I don't know any more. I have kept out of the way for more than three months. And besides, it matters little to me whether Micheline be a commoner or a princess, the wife of Delarue or of Panine. I shall be none the richer or the poorer, shall I? Therefore I need not care. The dear child will certainly have millions enough to marry easily. And her adopted ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... is the birthright and the criterion of the gentleman at his best; and it is in popular apprehension even more than that, for this demeanour is accepted as an intrinsic attribute of superior worth, before which the base-born commoner ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... of Pennsylvania, 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 adhered ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward

... author a great name, as well it might. When in London Ward met Wilkins and formed a lifelong friendship with him. They were both men of learning, moderate, dexterous, and successful. Ward entered Wadham as a Fellow Commoner in October 1649, became Savilian Professor of Astronomy, and in 1659 President of Trinity. Like Wilkins, he was ejected from his Headship at the Restoration, and like him obtained high preferment under the new regime and became a Bishop. ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson

... 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, ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman

... WOULDN'T come to pass; but he looked patient—very patient—and fawned like a spaniel dog. Even now, while he warmed and rubbed his hands before the blaze, he had the air of one who only presumed to enjoy it in his degree as a commoner; and though he knew his lord was not regarding him, he looked into his face from time to time, and with a meek and deferential manner, smiled as ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens

... old boy, with sleepy eyes and a grey moustache; stout, sedentary, and very innocent, of a type that may often be found in France, but is still commoner in Catholic Germany. Everything about him, his pipe, his pot of beer, his flowers, and his beehive, suggested an ancestral peace; only when his visitors looked up as they entered the inn-parlour, they saw the sword upon ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton

... Eloquent, who was brought up to look upon justice as the first of political virtues, used to wonder wistfully whether such fearlessness could be achieved by one whose face at present showed none of those characteristics of force, strength, and pugnacity manifested in the portraits of the great commoner. But he found comfort in the reflection that "Dada," mirror of all the virtues, was yet quite mild and almost insignificant in appearance; a small, stout, dapper, very clean-looking little tradesman, with trim white whiskers, a bald head, and a round, rosy face, wherein ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker

... of that very 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 at —- College, Cambridge ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper

... those who might not be disposed to give from motives of charity. The narrow streets are thronged with coolies in quality of beasts of burden, having their loads suspended from each end of an elastic pole balanced on the shoulder, or carrying their betters in sedan chairs, two bearers for a commoner, four for a "swell," and six or eight for a magnate. High officials borne in these luxurious vehicles are accompanied by lictors on horse or foot. Bridegrooms and brides are allowed to pose for the nonce ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin

... heritage of the past, made him timid and overcautious in dealing with abuses. Although he stood with Pitt in defending the American colonies, he had no confidence in the thoroughgoing reforms which the great Commoner proposed. When the Stamp Act was repealed, Pitt would have gone even further. He would have acknowledged the absolute injustice of taxation without representation. Burke held tenaciously to the opposing theory, and warmly supported the Declaratory Act, which "asserted the ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke

... and the most commonplace, found the preparations rather exciting. Being British she dearly loved the aristocracy, and shrugged her shoulders at any family which took up less than a page in the peerage. She resented deeply the intrusion of the commoner into British politics, and considered Lloyd George an upstart ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... makes such quick triumphant way in English society, as the promise of speedy political distinction. It will supply to its happy possessor the want of family and fortune—it rapidly melts away all distinctions. The obscure but eloquent commoner finds himself suddenly standing in the rarefied atmosphere of privilege and exclusiveness—the familiar equal, often the conscious superior, of the haughtiest peer of the realm. A single successful speech ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren

... one of the King's scholarships when between nine and ten, but as 'ill-usage was apprehended' the appointment was declined.[207] He was at a boarding-house, and the life of the boys on the foundation was probably rougher. In June 1760 his father took him to Oxford, and entered him as a commoner at Queen's College. He came into residence in the following October, when only twelve years old. Oxford was not more congenial than Westminster. He had to sign the Thirty-nine Articles in spite of scruples suppressed by authority. The impression made upon him by this childish compliance never ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... noted in various disorders of nervous character. Periodic insanity has long been known and studied (see, e.g., Pilcz, Die periodischen Geistesstoerungen, 1901); it is much commoner in women than in men. Periodicity has been observed in stammering (a six-weekly period in one case), and notably in hemicrania or migraine, by Harry Campbell, Osler, etc. (The periodicity of a case of hemicrania ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... which leads to "The Lounging Rooms" and to the first of a series of circular galleries, lighted from the lantern of the dome, which also lights the ground-floor. Hundreds, even thousands, of volumes are displayed on the shelves running round their walls. As we mount higher and higher, we find commoner books in shabbier bindings; but there is still the same order preserved, each book being numbered according to a printed catalogue. . . . The formation of such an establishment as this assumes a remarkable power of organization, as well as ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts

... page's place, belike, with some great lord, Or some small lord, that other proving shy Of merit that had not yet clipt its shell. Day after day, in weather foul or fair, With lackeys, hucksters, and the commoner sort, At Whitehall and Westminster he stood guard, Reading men's faces with most anxious eye. There the lords swarmed, some waspish and some bland, But none would pause at plucking of the sleeve To hearken to him, and the lad had died On London stones for ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... Inn it was enacted, "in 38 Eliz., that if any Fellow of this House, being a commoner or repaster, should within the precinct of this house wear any cloak, boots and spurs, or long hair, he should pay for every offence five shillings for a fine, and also to be put out of commons." The attempt to put down beards at Lincoln's Inn failed. Dugdale says, in his notes on that Inn, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson

... acknowledged my father's bow, and overlooked him. She seemed to have made her courtiers smile. The ladies and gentlemen obeyed the wave of her hand by quitting the ground; the band headed a long line of the commoner sort, and a body of foresters gathered the remnants and joined them to the rear of the procession. A liveried groom led away Temple's horse and mine. Temple declared he could not sit after seeing the statue descend from ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... active life, but seldom remain upon the shelf—either life or death takes them down. In five years' time we find the King offering Pitt anything in sight, and Mr. Pitt, the Great Commoner, became Viscount Pitt, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... our story descended the bean-stalk, and came back to the common world, where fare and work were alike hard; where ugly competitors were much commoner than beautiful princesses; and where the everlasting battle with self was much less sure to be crowned with victory than a turn-to with a giant. We have done the like. Thousands upon thousands of our fellows, thousands ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... 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

... rage. One man actually inspected my carriage without noticing me. This flattering homage probably came from a carriage-maker. I have been quite out in the reckoning of my forces. Plainly, beauty, that rare gift which comes from heaven, is commoner in Paris than I thought. I saw hats doffed with deference to simpering fools; a purple face called forth murmurs of, "It is she!" My mother received an immense amount of admiration. There is an answer to this problem, and I mean to ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac

... supreme executive control,—was rarely conferred, although elective, upon any but senators of ancient family and enormous wealth. It was as difficult for a "new man" to reach this dignity, under an aristocratic Constitution, as for a commoner a hundred years ago to become prime minister of England. Transcendent talents and services scarcely sufficed. Only generals who had won great military fame, or the highest of the nobles, stood much chance. For a lawyer to aim at the highest office in the State, without ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord

... method of teaching this branch of physical science, which it is my chief business to-night to recommend. Let us turn away then from abstract definitions. Let us take some concrete living thing, some animal, the commoner the better, and let us see how the application of common sense and common logic to the obvious facts it presents, inevitably leads us into all ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... a modern popular newspaper, Plato's democracy makes it its business to satisfy existing desires and give people a 'good time'. It does not distinguish between higher and lower. Any one man is as good as another, and so is any impulse or any idea. Consequently the commoner have the pull. Even the great democratic statesmen of the past, he now sees, have been ministers to mob desires; they have 'filled the city with harbours and docks and walls and revenues and such-like trash, without Sophrosyne and righteousness'. ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... to be taken up to Krasnoiarsk by steamer, and you can get elk skins for a rouble or two, which will do for sleeping bags, but they are too thick for clothing unless they are very well prepared. At any rate we will get as many squirrel skins as we can, both for clothes, and to exchange for commoner skins ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty

... sword-dance is found chiefly in the north, but with it appear to be identical the morris-dances—characterized by the wearing of jingling bells—which are commoner in the southern counties. Blackened faces are common in both, and both have the same grotesque figures, a man and a woman, often called Tommy and Bessy in the sword-dance and "the fool" and Maid Marian in the morris. Moreover the morris-dancers in England sometimes ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles

... the bannered city - The King and the Commoner, And the hopes of the world were with them, And the heart of the world was astir. For the moss-grown walls seemed falling That have shut away men from Kings; And Deep unto Deep was calling For the coming of ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... are best classed under two heads, Gravimetric and Volumetric, in the former of which the final results are weighed, whilst in the latter they are measured. A commoner and older division is expressed in the terms much used in practice—wet assays and dry assays. Wet assays include all those in which solvents, &c. (liquid at the ordinary temperature), are mainly used; and dry assays, those in which solid re-agents are almost exclusively ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer

... look for thee, and do not see thee come.— If I could see thee, 'twere a commoner thing, And shallower comfort would thy coming bring. Earth, sea, and air lie round me moveless dumb, Never a tremble, an expectant hum, To tell the Lord of Hearts is drawing near: Lo! in the looking eyes, the looked for ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald

... 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, Dr. Gardner. But the heterogeneous ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... for fame; and the last two years during which he sat at the Table were perhaps the merriest of them all. But his attendances, really owing to the illness which ultimately bore him down, were irregular. This irregularity, combined with his habit—then commoner even than now among artists—of wearing his hair very long, brought him one day a letter from his friends and fellow-diners in ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... foreign born, 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 ably, so earnestly, so unanswerably before ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous

... therefore, would feel the effects of the advancing cost of the raw material more sensibly than the refined sorts. Nevertheless, it can not be supposed to compensate the advantages due to the causes I have pointed out which fall to the share of the commoner sorts. It is in this class of goods that the most remarkable reductions in price have been accomplished in the past, and it is in them, probably, that we shall witness in the future the greatest ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... as you know, is not that of a pigmy, fold my arms across my manly chest, cry, 'Ha, ha!' and sing 'Rule Britannia,' whereupon the villains would wilt and withdraw. But Jack has no such security. He is a Russian subject, and, prince or commoner, the authorities here could do what they liked with him. I always think of things when it is too late to act. I wish I had urged Jack ashore at Bar Harbor, and induced him to take the oath of allegiance to the United States. I spoke to him about that coming home in the carriage, and ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr

... passage through a region of pressure, are common; but spherical formations—as if of things that have rolled and rolled along planar regions somewhere—are commoner: ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... 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 ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... be the son of a chief of ancient lineage, the fact that he is of blood royal will not excuse him entering a door before some aged "commoner." Age has more honor than all his patrician line of descent can give him. Those lowly born but richly endowed with years must walk before him; he is not permitted to remain seated if some old employee is standing even at ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... another much commoner sign of the times. The worst form of incompetence is perhaps that which allows a man to be competent without realising it, and, in criminal cases at least, this seems to be the normal attitude of the ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet

... 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

... narrow strip of the colonies the French were paramount. In 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 Louis XV. out of America were the first chapter ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... 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 ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville

... very presence of his majesty; with great credit, however, to his own loyalty, and very much to the amusement of the king." "I do not well see how that could be." "You shall hear a story which our president (Pye had been a gentleman commoner of Magdalen College) told at his own table. The king was out a hunting; P—— was in, and of, the field; the king's horse fell; the king was thrown from the saddle, and his hat and wig were thrown to a little distance from him: he got on his feet again immediately, and began to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 405, December 19, 1829 • Various

... Mrs. Spalding laid herself open to some ridicule from the British Minister's wife because of her inability to understand with absolute clearness the condition of her niece's husband in respect to his late and future seat in Parliament, to the fact of his being a commoner and a nobleman at the same time, and to certain information which was conveyed to her, surely in a most unnecessary manner, that if Mr. Glascock were to die before his father her niece would never become Lady Peterborough, although her niece's son, if she had one, would be the future lord. ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... The commoner varieties will cost from six to fifteen dollars a pair and the rare ones several hundred. To keep the semi-wild birds from flying away they are usually pinioned, a process of taking off the end joint of one wing. The ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller

... the bottom the fruit, which is scarcely two inches long, resembling an oblong cocoa-nut, with an insipid tenacious kernel, called, by the natives, neeoogoola, or red cocoa-nut, as it assumes a reddish cast when ripe. The third sort is called ongo ongo, and much commoner, being generally found planted about their fiatookas. It seldom grows higher than five feet, though sometimes to eight, and has a vast number of oval compressed nuts, as large as a pippin, sticking immediately to the trunk, amongst the leaves, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr

... giving wholeness and continuity. The language of the actual and the practical applied to the ideal brings it at once within everybody's reach, tames it, and familiarizes it to the mind. If the writers on metaphysics would deal more in our every-day speech, use commoner illustrations, seek to find some interpreter of the feelings and affections of the mind in Nature, out of the mind itself, and thus keep the life-principle and the thought-principle constantly wedded, making them mutually ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various

... 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 purple an' yellow will come?—ay! some ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... clung to Pitt closer than ever, and in spite of his isolation from all party support raised him daily into a mightier power. It was the sense that a new England was thus growing up about him, that a new basis was forming itself for political action, which at last roused the Great Commoner to the bold enterprise of breaking through the bonds of "connexion" altogether. For the first time since the Revolution a minister told the peers in their own house that ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green

... included with the Admirals in 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, ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott









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