He could, by every evidence he gave, perform no mere commonplaces of virtue or of vice.

Destroy or modify the roots, change the seed, and the buds will bloom, if at all, not orchids, but dull brown commonplaces.

His sanction for this high opinion of the persuasive power of example is the rhetorical commonplace of the renaissance that the way is long by precept and short by example.

The conversation among ordinary people, when it does not relate to any special matter of fact, but takes a more general character, mostly consists in hackneyed commonplaces, which they alternately repeat to each other with the utmost complacency.

Far too many people, though they admit it when it is expressly stated and dismiss it even as a tiresome commonplace, are apt to neglect it when the occasion for applying it arises.

He entirely lacked the keen insight and dialectic subtlety of such a writer as Bishop Butler; and, in his explanation of this Stoical shibboleth, any real meaning which it may possess is evaporated into a gorgeous mist of confused declamation and splendid commonplace.

Neither Dicky nor I spoke, except to exchange the veriest commonplaces.

No one would have suspected the author of those wild theories which startled the wise and shocked the prudent in the calm, gentlemanly person who rarely said anything above the most gentle commonplace, and took interest in little beyond the whist-table.

She was striving to get back to wholesome commonplace.

" Strange little commonplaces, how they take their due of all the wonderful hours of life!

So he yielded and lingered, proffering apologies and exchanging polite commonplaces.

Sometimes Chantel the handsome rode glowering beside them, sometimes Gilly, erect and solid in the saddle, laid upon their talk all the weight of his honest, tired commonplaces.

Then how small and poor and mean seems silvery Thames, gliding peacefully between his willowy bank, singing his lullaby to the whispering sedges; a poor little river, a flat commonplace landscape, says the traveller, fresh from moorland and tor, from the rocky shore of the Atlantic, the deep clefts of the great, red hills.

She did not try to make automatons to repeat religious commonplaces, but actual men and women, through whose very peculiarities the Holy Spirit revealed His presence and work.

But we get, without doubt, to a real mana man whose words have a meaning, and stand for real things; whose language no longer echoes the pale dreary commonplaces of a school, but reveals thoughts which he has thought for himself, and the power of being able "to speak as he will."

The brief revelation of majesty was quenched, and the customary commonplace, vacant, good-natured expression held sway once more.

Booth's Iago seemed deadly commonplace after Henry's.

With a quick eye for the weak point of an enemy, and a knack of so draping commonplaces with rhetoric that they shall have the momentary air of profound generalizations, he is also, like him, more cunning in expedients than capable of far-seeing policy.

A tired English statesman at a big reception is still allowed to spend his time rather in chaffing with a few friends in a distant corner of the room than in shaking hands and exchanging effusive commonplaces with innumerable unknown guests.

And it is clear that in spite of the ease and delight with which Gladstone's mind moved among 'the eternal commonplaces of liberty and self-government,' he is seeking throughout for a quantitative solution.

TokensHermia had realized itsymbols of her greatest happiness and his, with life reduced to the simplest elements, in which there had been no place for the extravagant commonplaces of the other life which they both had lived and endured.

He who says that does not try to understand; he merely contents himself with uttering facile commonplace.

On the Opposition benches he caught the ironic glitter of a pair of spectacles, the convulsions of a white chin quivering over two folded arms, as if a kindly, indulgent smile had greeted his parade of so many musty and faded commonplaces.

To those who despair of human improvement or the spread of light in the face of the huge mass of brute prejudice, we can only urge that the enormous weight and the firm hold of baseless prejudice and false commonplace are the very reasons which make it so important that those who are not of the night nor of the darkness should the more strenuously insist on living their own lives in the daylight.

To Churchmen now these "strange things" are such familiar commonplaces, that it is hard to realise how they should have made so much stir.