"Commoner" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Not so. A commoner, without high permanent rank or large fortune, is not lowered in the world's esteem by not being of the Order. You will permit me to say—that a Duke of Omnium has not reached that position which he ought to enjoy unless he be a Knight of the Garter." It must be borne in mind that the old ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... (compare p. 38). Each of the books, which are always of the same size, has a back and one board to itself, the other board, between them, being common to both. As already stated, this form of book occurs rarely in canvas bindings, and it is of commoner occurrence ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... the nation, the extinction of idolatry, the general spread and triumph of true religion. The pious wishes of the prophets, often repeated, became a sort of doctrine, and contributed to sustain the failing spirit of the people. The indefinite idea of a golden age was commoner than that of a personal prince who should reign in equity and peace. Neither was part of the national faith, like the law, or the doctrine of sacrifice; and but a few of the prophets portrayed a king, in their description of ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... indeed more than worthy of the pen of the good Dominican Bishop of Agen. In all its incidents and motives the story is eternally true. The fateful beauty, playing now the part of Potiphar's wife, and now the yet commoner role of an enchantress whose charms drive men to madness and crime, men who adore her even from their prison cell and are glad to go to a shameful death for her sake, appears in all history, in all literature, nay, in the very newspaper scandals and police ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... manager's wife as Tom Liffey was as nothing beside the manager himself; and one would care little to name the two women in the same breath if the end had been different. When The Woman came to Little Goshen there were others of her class there, but they were of a commoner sort and degree. She was the queen of a lawless court, though she never, from first to last, spoke to one of those others who were her people; neither did she hold commerce with any of the ordinary ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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 |
