"Commoner" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are incepting Bachelors of Arts after the examination for that Degree. My day of examination (apparently) was Jan. 21st. The candidates were Turner, Cankrein, Cleasby, and Mr Gordon. The first three had been my private pupils: Mr Gordon was a Fellow-commoner of St Peter's College, and had just passed the B.A. examination as Senior Wrangler, Turner being second. My situation as Examiner was rather a delicate one, and the more so as, when I came to examine the papers of answers, Turner appeared distinctly the first. ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... if not the sole reason of the impunity with which it was committed. Who, indeed, among my most abandoned associates, would not rather have disputed the clearest evidence of his senses, than have suspected of such courses the gay, the frank, the generous William Wilson—the noblest and most liberal commoner at Oxford: him whose follies (said his parasites) were but the follies of youth and unbridled fancy—whose errors but inimitable whim—whose darkest vice but a careless and ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... people, residuum of the people, dregs of the people, dregs of society; swinish multitude, foex populi[obs3]; trash; profanum vulgus[Lat], ignobile vulgus[Lat]; vermin, riffraff, ragtag and bobtail; small fry. commoner, one of the people, democrat, plebeian, republican, proletary[obs3], proletaire[obs3], roturier[obs3], Mr. Snooks, bourgeois, epicier[Fr], Philistine, cockney; grisette[obs3], demimonde. peasant, countryman, boor, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... cheaper and commoner luxury (necessary) in the hotels here than with us; a great satisfaction to me, who hope in heaven, if I ever get there, to have plenty of water to wash in, and, of course, it will all be soft rainwater ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... woodlot containing native nut trees. Like many farmers who regard every tree as just a tree, useful for timber or fire wood, I found several years ago that indiscriminate cutting on my woodlot was destroying walnuts, along with the commoner species of the stand. My first step was to halt the cutting of all black walnuts, hickories, butternuts, oaks and beeches on the seven-acre woodlot. I took an inventory of these trees and found there were 160 ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... sumptuously. He occasionally has fresh meat and fresh fish, and the dried articles nearly every day. He also indulges in cheese, usually of the commoner kind, known as prim, or mysost, which is not unlike brown Windsor soap. There are two other native cheeses, but they are considered somewhat expensive luxuries. They are called gammelost and pultost, and are made from sour skimmed milk, being afterwards kept ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... glowing enthusiasm united to cabalistic profundity, and the most morbid tension of the intellectual powers united to clear and well-defined hopes. How has the author succeeded in making Mordecai so human and so true to nature? By mixing the gold with an alloy of commoner metal, and by giving the angelic likeness features which are familiar ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... beyond the 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 of the movement which ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... fainted away. Of all the estimates of Pitt none breathes deeper devotion than that of Wellesley. Was it not because he at last saw the pettiness of his own pride and petulance when contrasted with the self-abnegation of him who was truly the Great Commoner? And did not even his meteoric career in the East pale before the full-orbed splendour of the quarter of a century of achievement which made up ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... is nothing like roughing it, Mr. Stafford, sir," he said. "I can tell in a minute when a man's 'hard' right through, and been doing square and honest work. It seems strange to us commoner people that you gentle folks should be so fond of going through all sorts of hardships and perils just for the fun of it; but, after all, it's not to be wondered at, for that's the kind of spirit that has helped Englishmen to make England what it is. But you're looking a ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... 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 ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... for myself; but now, computing, from past experience, my future possibilities in finance, I saw them fascinating as ever, yet as far from me as though they dashed through some Martian city, and their occupants as removed from my ken as the inhabitants of the farthest planets. Indeed, even in the commoner throng about me I knew no one. It was seldom that I was called on to doff my hat, and then to some of the queer old women who were moulding away in the corners of Miss Minion's boarding-house or to Miss Tucker ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... have him in livery, but in a plain suit of dark blue cloth: for she loved blue, all her men-people being, or having been in the navy. Thus dressed, he looked as much of a gentleman as before: his look of refinement had owed nothing to the contrast of his rags. Better clothes make not a few seem commoner. ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... 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 on me still. Awhile we watched ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... path took him in the direction of "Robinson's," in the windows of which the golden brown of sable furs, the silver gray of rare foxes', and the commoner dim blue of long-haired goats', were beginning to enrich the usual display of silk ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... Bo'sun, sitting upon the empty stocks with his wooden pin sticking straight out before him, sighed as he watched them striding London-wards, the Lord's son, tall, slender, elegant, a gentleman to his finger tips, and the commoner's son, shaped like a young god, despite his homespun, and between them, as it were linking them together, fresh and bright and young as the morning, went ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... work as this, even if, like most summaries, it be something of a repetition. It must surely be obvious to any careful reader that here is something much more than—unless his reading has been as wide elsewhere as it is careful here—he expected from Romance in the commoner and half-contemptuous acceptation of that word. Lancelot he may, though he should not, still class as a mere amoureux transi—a nobler and pluckier Silvius in an earlier As Yon Like It, and with a greater than Phoebe for idol. Malory ought to be enough to set him right there: he need ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... term indicating the presence of albumin in the urine. This may depend on a number of morbid conditions, of which kidney troubles, acute illnesses and venous congestion are some of the commoner. But after exclusion of all known pathological causes, there still remains a large class of cases among subjects who appear to be in perfect health. This form has been called functional or physiological albuminuria, intermittent albuminuria, &c. Its recognition is of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the end of it. Murray and two 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 ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... 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 majority ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... more 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
... parents who were one of several families who shared in the benefit of a Good Uncle. I know nothing certainly of this man except that he was a Radford of Plymouth. I have never learned nor cared to learn of his commoner occupations, but certainly he was one of those shining and distinguished uncles that tower up at times above the common levels of humanity. At times, when we consider our derived and undeserved share of his inheritance ...
— Floor Games; a companion volume to "Little Wars" • H. G. Wells
... I find that this was not my first idea. The distracting intervening woman was to have been of a commoner type, intellectual indeed rather than sensuous, but yet of the predatory type and class, which delights in the capture of man. When I began to write the first scene in which Eugenie was to appear, she was still nebulous ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I 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 the Government. Well! have they not ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... reconstruction of Japan. In the seventeenth century, after the strict formalism of the Tokugawa rule had been developed, it offered the only opportunity possible for the free communion of artistic spirits. Before a great work of art there was no distinction between daimyo, samurai, and commoner. Nowadays industrialism is making true refinement more and more difficult all the world over. Do we not need the ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... 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 his post at the head of ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... scarce any one else—and even invited to borrow his books. His room—a dark and melancholy chamber, grey with dust—always contained a number of curious but not very rare things, which he had picked up in his walks—prettily coloured fungi—vegetable monstrosities of the commoner kind, such as "fause craws' nests," and flattened twigs of pine—and with these, as the representatives of another department of natural science, fragments of semi-transparent quartz or of glittering feldspar, and sheets of mica a little above the ordinary size. ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... 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
... of Sir Henry Neville, and grandson of Sir Henry Neville (1564?-1615), courtier and diplomatist under Elizabeth and James I, Henry Neville was born in Billing-bear, Berkshire, in 1620. He became a commoner of Merton College in 1635, and soon after migrated to University College, where he passed some years but took no degree. He travelled on the continent, becoming familiar with modern languages and men, and returned to England in 1645, to recruit for Abingdon for ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... such, unless there happens to be in it something which attracts special attention, such as a figure in armor, or in antique costume. It is probable that occasional glimpses of these reflections of the Akashic Records are commoner than the published accounts would lead us to believe. As usual, we find examples of all degrees of the power to see into this 'memory of Nature,' from the trained man who can consult the record for himself at will, down to the person who ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... as the children of rich English parents wear. Their fineness, and the smooth quality of the wool, and the good shape appear to soothe Eugen's feelings. He pushes away his heap of striped ones, which look still coarser and commoner now, observing hopefully ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... however, reflect the idiosyncrasies of their makers, and have never won wide approbation. Morality must remain largely experimental, individual. Conscience will play a very useful role in spurring us to our recognized duty in the commoner situations, but for all the more delicate decisions we need a more ultimate touchstone. We must grasp the underlying principles of right conduct, and weigh the relative goods attainable by each possible act. A well-balanced and normal conscience will save us the recurrent reasoning ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... and found it a little more soothing. He soon mastered the moves and the chief gambits and commoner closing positions, and began to beat the Vicar. But then the cylindrical contours of the opposite king began to resemble Pawkins standing up and gasping ineffectually against Check-mate, and Hapley ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... night of August 11th I had listened to Mr. Disraeli's last speech as a Commoner, and had noticed that on leaving the House in a long white overcoat and dandified lavender kid gloves, leaning on his secretary's arm, he had shaken hands with a good many people, none of whom knew that he was bidding farewell ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... long, though in that land of distances the camel had far to come from the horizon to the well, until by the soft jarring of the earth the motionless sentinel knew that the swifter traveler had arrived. Haste is not common in tropical countries, and the camel had been put to his limit of speed. A commoner spirit than the soldiers could not have resisted the impulses of curiosity concerning this hot haste. But he did not turn ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... frame of mind when Mr. Vawdrey came to Heron's Nest for the shooting. He was a commoner, but his family was one of the oldest in Hampshire, and he had lately distinguished himself by some rather clever speeches in the House of Commons. His estate was worth fifteen thousand a year, and he was altogether ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... a way of breaking unexpectedly into spacious parks, into broad natural pastures, into bold, rocky points prophetic of the mountains yet to come. Every once in a while the road drew one side to pause at a cabin nestling among fruit trees, bowered beneath vines, bright with the most vivid of the commoner flowers. They were crazily picturesque with their rough stone chimneys, their roofs of shakes, their broad low verandahs, and their split-picket fences. On these verandahs sat patriarchal-looking men with sweeping white beards, who smoked pipes and gazed across with dim eyes toward the distant ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... fellow, I 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 sister, the ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... the amiable Alice did not mind what the Jews believed, she was sure she "couldn't bear them." Mrs. Davilow corrected her by saying that the great Jewish families who were in society were quite what they ought to be both in London and Paris, but admitted that the commoner unconverted Jews were objectionable; and Isabel asked whether Mirah talked just as they did, or whether you might be with her and not find out that she was ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... in the conversation between these two historical characters, the janitor of the theatre put his head into the room and reminded the celebrities that it was very late; whereupon both king and commoner rose with some reluctance and washed themselves—the king becoming, when he put on the ordinary dress of an Englishman, Mr. James Spence, while Cromwell, after a similar transformation, became Mr. Sidney ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... the common lot for the upholding of the Gridley name and 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 better himself ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... very subtle, but very sharp and firm and unmistakable. It is not analogous to the commoner, slower-going elements, as heat, air, fire, water, but is nearer akin to that elusive but potent something we call electricity. It is abrupt, freaky, unexpected, and always communicates a little wholesome shock. It darts this way and that, and ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... this curious theory of Americanism in its application to Washington may now be found in many places. You shall hear historians describe him as a transplanted English commoner, a second edition of John Hampden. You shall read, in a ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke
... waste with '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, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... of the red coral, the hard skeleton belongs to the interior of the stem and branches only; but in the commoner white corals, each polype has a complete skeleton of its own. These polypes are sometimes solitary, in which case the whole skeleton is represented by a single cup, with partitions radiating from its centre to its circumference. When the polypes ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... government, are now for some ages in the possession of an arbitrary power (which yet no prescription can make legal) and exercise it over their persons and estates in a most tyrannical manner. But here the subjects retain their proportion in the Legislature; the very meanest commoner of England is represented in Parliament, and is a party to those laws by which the Prince is sworn to govern himself and his people. No money is to be levied but by the common consent. No man is for life, limb, goods, or liberty, at the Sovereign's discretion: but we ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... subdued in the presence of his sovereign, and along with many defects had one great virtue in his Majesty's eyes, which was that he shared the King's desire to destroy the factions. The King was accordingly ready to receive the Great Commoner, even though he insisted on bringing "the Constitution," and Earl Temple into the bargain, with him to St. James's Palace. But when it appeared that Earl Temple was opposed to the repeal of the Stamp ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... killed in became the property of the executioner, and the clothes he left behind in the Tower were taken by his gaolers, and that this gaoler thought the silk robe too good for the executioner. So More quietly changed to a commoner dress, for it mattered little to him. When he reached the scaffold, he found he was too feeble to climb up the steps without help, and he asked one of the men to give him an arm, adding: 'I pray you see me safe up; as for my coming down, I may shift for myself.' The executioner ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... hear, did say, if that they should be obliged in this manner to, exempt the Lords from every thing, it would in time come to pass that whatever (be [it] never so great) should be voted by the Commons as a thing penall for a commoner, the contrary should be thought a priviledge to the Lords: that also in this business, the work of a conventicle being but the work of an hour, the cause of a search would be over before a Lord Lieutenant, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... (Now being prepared for publication.), that every grain of sand counts for something in the balance. Much that is confidently stated about the uselessness of different organs would never have been written if the naturalist spirit were commoner nowadays. This spirit is strikingly shown in my father's work on the movements of plants. The circumstance that botanists had not, as a class, realised the interest of the subject accounts for the fact that ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... with energy that which he knew to be the real case with Byron. More than any one, Moore experienced the fatal influence which injures independence in aristocratic England. An Irishman by birth, and a commoner, Moore was flattered to find himself elevated by his talents to a position in aristocratic circles which he owed to his talents, but which he was loath to resign. The English aristocracy then formed a kind of clique whose wish it was to govern England on the condition that its secret ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... cunning. The 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 prejudices, his habits, and his connections decide ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... be pleased, he could look very cruel. And when, in rare moments, he did so, his face seemed almost to change its shape: the cheek-bones to become more salient, the nose sharper, the eyes catlike, the large but well-shaped mouth venomous instead of passionate. He looked older and also commoner directly his insouciance departed from him, and one could divine a great deal of primitive savagery beneath his lively grace and ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Sidney's fortunes. As long as Leicester was unmarried and childless, Philip Sidney, as his natural heir, was a man of great prospects and a very desirable match; but Leicester, married, with the probability of children to inherit his titles and wealth, left Sidney only a poor commoner. ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... of European despots: they point to the freest government in the world for examples of their own absolutism, shield their autocracy beneath its democracy, and with it annihilate the rights of the commoner. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... off enjoying themselves, just as I was and as other people were, seemed very much like their fellow-mortals. It is really easier to feel at home with the highest people in the land than with the awkward commoner who was knighted yesterday. When "My Lord and Sir Paul" came into the Club which Goldsmith tells us of, the hilarity of the evening was instantly checked. The entrance of a dignitary like the present Prince ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... commoner elements may be dismissed. The halo shows that the mica of the rocks is radioactively sensitive. The fundamental criterion of radioactive change is the expulsion of the alpha ray. The molecular system of the mica and of ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... Lymme (all in Kent), Pevensey in Sussex, Porchester near Portsmouth, and perhaps also at Felixstowe in Suffolk. After about 350, barbarian assaults, not only of Saxons but also of Irish (Scoti) and Picts, became commoner and more terrible. At the end of the century Magnus Maximus, claiming to be emperor, withdrew many troops from Britain and a later pretender did the same. Early in the 5th century the Teutonic conquest of Gaul cut the island off from Rome. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... of 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, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... from the commoner forms is the reference to Rom, generally in the phrase "the book of Rom," which appears in some of the romances. The explanation that Rom is a corruption of romance and that the book of Rom is simply the book of romance or the book written in the romance language, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... 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, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... ringed or collared snake (Tropidonotus) is much the commoner and more widely diffused. It ought to escape destruction on account of the ease with which it may be discriminated from the viper by means of the white collar-like mark which appears so conspicuously just ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... twelfth century pay their tribute to the memory of the Cid by the virulence of their hatred. Aben Bassam wrote: "The might of this tyrant was ever growing until its weight was felt upon the highest peaks and in the deepest valleys, and filled with terror both noble and commoner. I have heard men say that when his eagerness was greatest and his ambition highest he uttered these words, 'If one Rodrigo brought ruin upon this Peninsula, another Rodrigo shall reconquer it!' A saying that filled the ...
— The Lay of the Cid • R. Selden Rose and Leonard Bacon
... slabs. And then he would watch gentlemen in silk hats and black gloves bargaining with the fish-wives, and finally going off with boiled lobsters wrapped in paper in the pockets of their frock-coats.[*] Farther away, at the temporary stalls, where the commoner sorts of fish were sold, he would recognise the bareheaded women of the neighbourhood, who always came at the same hour to ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... do: it will be always but the blossom of all the half-conscious work below it, the fulfilment of the shortcomings of less complete minds: but it will waste much of its power, and have much less influence on men's minds, unless it be surrounded by abundance of that commoner work, in which all men once shared, and which, I say, will, when art has really awakened, be done so easily and constantly, that it will stand in no man's way to hinder him from doing what he will, good or evil. And as, on the one hand, I believe that art made by the people and for the people as ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... to his liking, he chews his buyo or withdraws without disturbing the others who perhaps find pleasure in it. Only at times the commoner sort will howl when the actors embrace or kiss the actresses, but they never go beyond that. Formerly, dramas only were played; the local poet composed a piece in which there must necessarily be a fight every second ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... her brain busy, as they entered a finely appointed carriage and she heard John say: "Rather sultry. Home down the lake shore, George." She wished their driver had not been named "George," but after all it made no difference. There could not be a commoner name than John, and she knew of but one that she liked better. For the ensuing three days she lived in a Lake Shore home of wealth. She watched closely not to trip in the heavy rugs and carpets. She looked at wonderful paintings and long shelves ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... friend he has. You will see him using the bodies of the slain for a stepping-stone, rejoicing over every one's misfortunes, attacking princes, dukes, marquises, and nobles, because he himself is a commoner; reviling the work of unmarried men because he forsooth has a wife; and everlastingly preaching morality, the joys of domestic life, and the duties of the citizen. In short, this very moral critic will spare no one, not even infants of tender age. He lives in the Rue Mandar ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... under the name of Oribrd, were recognised by the real father, as the productions of a promising son: at his instigation, and upon a promise of reform, he was again restored to his former home, and shortly after entered as a gentleman commoner of St. Mary's, Oxford; but not till he had, by some means or other, made the discovery that Orford was not his real name. Congenial spirits are naturally fond of associating, and it was here that he first became acquainted with the Hon. Tom Dashall: they were constant companions and ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... of assaying 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 employed. ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... this chit of a girl? He did: the wish had come at last. It was true that as he studied her he saw defects in addition to her social insufficiencies. Judgment, hoodwinked as it was, told him that she was colder in nature, commoner in character, than that well read, bright little woman Avice the First. But twenty years make a difference in ideals, and the added demands of middle-age in physical form are more than balanced by its concessions as to ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... certain, he was not interested a little bit! But they knew well enough that he was the Prince Eitel who had been at Austerlitz and Wagram, and that he could demand of them as a right the satisfaction which they might deny to a commoner. So I was grateful to him for cowing them, though I really believe that your way is the best, Stair. There is nothing like a charge of slugs in the back for ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... progress was necessarily slow, as the gallery was thronged with the deputies of the noblesse, the higher clergy, and the invited guests. But the members of the tiers, whose presence had been especially desired by His Majesty, were conspicuous by their absence. Here and there one saw a commoner in black coat and simple white tie, but he seemed to be separated from the rest of the splendid company by some invisible barrier, constrained, uneasy. Indeed, there was over the whole scene that same feeling ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... pecking and parading creatures, not numerous, but all of distinguished appearance: two or three elegant little cows of refined form and colour, two or three nibbling fawns and a larger company, above all, of peacocks and guineafowl, with, doubtless—though as to this I am vague—some of the commoner ornaments of the barnyard. I recognise that the scene as I evoke it fails of grandeur; but it none the less had for me the note of greatness—all of which but shows of course what a very town-bred small person I ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... me wrong my Lord: If I were so, He might haue bought me at a common price. Do not beleeue him. O behold this Ring, Whose high respect and rich validitie Did lacke a Paralell: yet for all that He gaue it to a Commoner a'th Campe ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... The Senators are appointed by the Governor-General, strictly under advice of the party in office, for life. Senators must be thirty years of age and possess property over four thousand dollars in value above their liabilities. The Senator resides in the district which he represents. The Commoner may represent a district in which he does not reside, and, on the whole, this is more of an advantage than a disadvantage. It permits a district that has special needs to choose a man of great character and power resident in another ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... have 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 ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... the two to follow. The starting-point is always a word representative of an elementary idea—a word and an idea which everybody knows; the advance is into the unknown or the unused, at any rate into the particular. Now fundamental ideas are not very numerous, and these exercises include the commoner ones. Such a method of studying synonyms must therefore ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... But when these commoner emotions are passed, one comes upon a very different thing. A little tower there, jutting out perilously from the wall, shows three courses of a small red brick set in a mortar-like stone. When I saw this kind of building I went close up and ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... by way of preparing the reader to meet the great commoner in these pages. One thing more is necessary to a proper understanding of the final scenes in the book—a part of his letter written to Judge Fine just before the Baltimore ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... of the process, and see just what any given kind of argument aims to do, and how it accomplishes its aim by its appeal to special faculties and interests of the mind. I shall also consider briefly the larger bearings of a few of the commoner and more important types of argument, as the ordinary citizen meets them ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... early, attended Matins and Mass in the chapel, studied grammar and logic, mastered difficult passages in the Fathers, or copied out portions for himself in the chamber which he as a gentleman commoner, as we should call him, possessed, instead of living in a common dormitory with the other scholars. Or in the open cloister he listened and took notes of the lectures of the fellows and tutors of the college, ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... commoner, even now, than to find the investigator of words and their origin looking round about him here and there, in all the languages, ancient and modern, to which he has any access, till he lights on some word, it matters little to him in which of these, more or less ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... custom of the time. The Duke of Hamilton had died two years before, in 1758, and the duchess became subsequently the wife of Colonel John Campbell, afterwards Duke of Argyle. The narrative observes the remarkable circumstance, that the untitled daughter of an Irish commoner should have been the wife of two dukes and the mother of four. By her first husband she was the mother of James, seventh duke, and of Douglas, eighth duke, of Hamilton; and by her second husband, of William, sixth duke, and of Henry, seventh duke, of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... bred", says Dr. Fuller (i), " a Gentleman- Commoner in Oxford; where, being but fourteen Years old, and yet three Years standing, he was call'd out to dispute ex tempore, before the Earls of Leicester and Warwick, with the matchless ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... of peaceful arts from generation to generation; but the aristocrat has stood still at the same half-savage level, a hunter and fighter, an orgiastic roysterer, a killer of wild boars and wearer of absurd mediaeval costumes, too childish for the civilised and cultivated commoner. ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... a commoner; he had nothing in the world but his brain and his arm. Fitzgerald, now, possessed a famous title and an ancient name. These kings and princes hereabout could boast of but little more than he; and there were millions to back him. He could dream of princesses ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... 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 of household suffrage than in the England of Charles James Fox's ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... their snows, and send their brooks Down babbling with the news of silent things! But love itself is commonest of all, And loveliest of all, in all the worlds! And he that hath not forest, brook, or hill, Must learn to read aright what commoner books Unfold before him. If ocean solitudes— Then darkness dashed with glory, infinite shades, And misty minglings of the sea and sky. If only fields—the humble man of heart Will revel in the grass beneath his foot, And from the lea lift ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... construct a nest. Round this tree it establishes a sphere of influence into which none but a favoured few birds may come. All intruders are forthwith set upon by the pair of little furies, and no sight is commoner at this season than that of a crow, a kite, or a hawk being chased by two irate drongos. The nest of the king-crow is a small cup, wedged into the fork of a branch high ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... which science cannot take account of. Science has only truth for its object, and owes its own existence wholly to the reason. If it happens to science to give pain to the heart or to the conscience, no conclusion can thence be drawn against the certainty of its results. "There is no commoner, and at the same time faultier, way of reasoning, than that of objecting to a philosophical hypothesis the injury it may do to morals and to religion. When an opinion leads to absurdity, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that it is false because it entails dangerous consequences."[38] ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... 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 ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... common man, even in rags. Stan disputes that theory with her, when he isn't too lazy, and wants to bet he could so disguise himself that she would take him for a green grocer or a fishmonger, who have the air of being commoner than other men, I think—at least in our village at Battlemead—because they wear fat tufts of curls frothing out over their foreheads from under their caps, which are always plaid and ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... commoner families of the south of England, who have held the lands of their fore-fathers through every change of dynasty and religion, the Buckleys of Clere stand deservedly high among the brightest and the oldest. All down the stormy page of ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... not find it easy to describe my sensations when I was ushered into the presence of the Great Commoner, and saw before me that majestic figure, with the profile of a Roman conqueror, and a glance hardly less terrible to encounter than the full blaze of the sun. When I have stood before the Nabob of Bengal, throned ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... who was expected from Warsaw,' he said to himself, much amused; 'our squire chose a gracious little wife, and was not even very long about it; but he might have searched the length of the world for a brother-in-law like that! A bear would be a commoner sight in these parts than a man sitting a horse as he does! He looks as stupid as a cowherd—still, he ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... "if the Powhatan was a king and Pocahontas his daughter, when the Powhatan died Rolfe or his baby son might become King of Virginia. It was not meet or right that a commoner should thus lightly take upon himself to marry the daughter of ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... 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 ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... true, and one could not help continually making guesses about them. Yes, the feeling that Marco had was that his father's attraction for him was a sort of spell, and that others felt the same thing. When he stood and talked to commoner people, he held his tall body with singular quiet grace which was like power. He never stirred or moved himself as if he were nervous or uncertain. He could hold his hands (he had beautiful slender and strong hands) quite still; he could stand on his fine arched feet without shuffling them. He ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the e, as do, to, so, no, and the like, and nouns of more than one syllable, as potato, tomato, etc., omit the e. Monosyllables ending in oe usually retain the silent e in derivatives, and we have shoeing, toeing, etc. The commoner English nouns ending in o also have the peculiarity of forming the plural by adding es instead of s, and we have potatoes, tomatoes, heroes, echoes, cargoes, embargoes, mottoes; but nouns a trifle more foreign ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... admitted that the House of Lords does not at this moment contain many hereditary peers who are also poets. Lord Tennyson, of course, is an ennobled commoner, and the Bishop of Derry (Dr. Alexander), who has written so much excellent verse, both in the thoughtful and in the imaginative vein, is no longer one of the spiritual lords. But there is Lord Lytton, there is Lord Southesk, and there is Lord Rosslyn; and by all of these Lord de Tabley will be ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... earliest forms of treating difficult situations in delicate and inoffensive ways. In other words, symbols in art are a necessity and serve the same purpose as does the censor in the dreams. Even those of us who have not an artistic education, however, have become familiar with the commoner forms of symbolism through our acquaintance with literature. In the dream, when the more finely controlled physiological processes are in abeyance, there is a tendency to revert to the symbolic modes of expression. This has its use, because on awaking the dream does not shock us, since ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Britain such tall and beautiful natives of the fern tribe as may be found growing freely in tropical countries, but still we have some fine ferns belonging to our islands. These are much commoner in some parts than in others, and probably, many years ago, when a great part of the country was covered with damp forests or woods, there was a greater abundance of ferns generally than there is now. Indeed, even ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... He must, therefore, have had a firm reliance on the capacity of his son; for while he chided him for his want of steady application, he resolved on making so great an effort as to send him to the University; and, accompanying him thither, placed him, on the 31st of October, 1728, a commoner at Pembroke College, Oxford. Some assistance was, indeed, promised him from other quarters, but this assistance was never given; nor was his industry quickened by his necessities. He was sometimes to be seen lingering about the gates of his college; and, at others, sought for relief from the oppression ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... drinking of tea was little known in the parish, saving among a few of the heritors' houses on a Sabbath evening; but now it became very rife: yet the commoner sort did not like to let it be known that they were taking to the new luxury, especially the elderly women, who, for that reason, had their ploys in out-houses and by-places, just as the witches lang syne had their sinful possets and galravitchings; and they made ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... were the geraniums, some species of roses, violets, and forget-me-nots and pansies. The more exotic sorts she did not know, and, while she admired them greatly, she had not the same degree of affection for them as for the commoner, friendly varieties. ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... 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 ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... figure, swathed in flannels, passed by in its chair, and a livid face looked out from the window—great fierce eyes staring from under a bushy, powdered wig, a terrible frown, a terrible Roman nose—and we whisper to one another, "There he is! There's the great commoner! There is Mr. Pitt!" As we walk away, the abbey bells are set a-ringing; and we meet our testy friend Toby Smollett, on the arm of James Quin the actor, who tells us that the bells ring for Mr. Bullock, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 of the fact. He could and did tell ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... could never have known each other in the world; they had to withdraw themselves apart. He looked at her afresh, lying on the pillow by his side, her hair twining carelessly about the white arm. She was infinitely greater than he,—so undivided and complete a soul! She had left him for the commoner uses of life. And all the stains of their experience had been removed, washed out by the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... created a Knight of the Bath in 1724, when that order was revived. In 1726 he was installed Knight of the Order of the Garter, being the only commoner who had been so distinguished since the reign of James I., except Admiral Montague, afterwards Earl of Sandwich. He had been offered a peerage in 1723, but declined it for himself, accepting it for his son, who was created Baron Walpole ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... sudden termination astonished and mortified her. Had Lashmar turned away to make some brilliant alliance, her pique would have endured only for a moment; Lord Dymchurch's approach would have more than compensated the commoner's retirement. But that she should merely have amused his idle moments, whilst his serious thoughts were fixed on Constance Bride, was an injury not easy to pardon. For she disliked Miss Bride, and she knew ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... doctor corrected him. "But there is a far commoner moment than that, one that occurs constantly to us all, whereas dissolution comes ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... 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 ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... grief—proud of her very grief, of her very capacity for suffering, of all the delicate shades of thought and sorrow which furnished the matter of her secret life, lived without a sign beside the old father whose coarser and commoner pride took such small account ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... oh, I care terribly that I made such a fool of myself. Had it been any one else it wouldn't have mattered, but he will think I did it because I was an ignorant commoner who knew no better. That's what stings; but I'm not going to think any more of it. I'm going to give my life up to singing, and it doesn't matter. I suppose I'll never see him again, and he'll never know but that I did ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... 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, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin |
