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.

In the next year, 1767, occurred an incident upon which Boswell dwells with extreme complacency.

she's a perfect girl, but she's very young," and Dick eyed Rosa with ineffable complacency.

"Brothers," he began, with the smug complacency of a man about to relate the big things he has done, "it was late summer of many summers back, with much such weather as this promises to be, when I went away.

A number of grave-looking gentlemen were standing under the portico of the church, looking on with apparent complacency,not one attempting either to check these juvenile Sabbath-breakers, or to allure them to occupations more suitable to the day.

I watched his damned, self-satisfied complacency fade away.

" Oily Dave jerked out this last statement with a swift change of tone from mournful regret to cheerful business complacency, and Miles served him in silence, too saddened by the heavy tidings from the sea to break into resentful angry speech with this man, who appeared devoid of either heart or feeling.

" "Well, we'll have to take the risk," said Blake, with grim complacency.

If the French sometimes supply their want of kindness, or render disappointment less acute at the moment, by a sterile complacency, the English harshness is often only the alloy to an efficient benevolence, and a sympathizing mind.

The Eye-witness, having thus set the universe satisfactorily by the ears, got into his second-story front, and contemplated the campaign with serene complacency from the window.

This idea was strengthened when the gala evening arrived, and our heroine was introduced to her father's principal patron, a vain and weak-minded man, who listened to his host's extravagant adulation with evident complacency, though to every one else it was palpably insincere.

Though sentimental literature bore the seeds of revolution, its earliest effect upon its devotees was to create, through flattery of human character, a feeling of good-natured complacency.

He wrote against Moore's notion of her as "strait-laced," in a spirit of justice awakened by his new satisfactions and hopes: but there are in the narrative no signs of love on his part,nothing more than an amiable complacency in the discovery of her attachment to him.

It had left me with that gay complacency of disposition, and irrepressible propensity of elocution, which result from a satisfied appetite, and an undisturbed digestion.

And St. Joseph, leaning on his stick behind, contemplates the group with an air of dignified complacency.

" Now, all at once, the General felt the tremendous fatigues of the day; there was a wild, swimming, whirling sensation in his head that forced him to let his eyelids sink down; yet, just there, in the midst of his painful bewilderment, he realized with ecstatic complacency that the most martial-looking man in Louisiana was standing in his spurs with the hand of Louisiana's queenliest woman laid tenderly on his arm.

The sum, in fact, of the whole matter appears to be, that the sentiment on which Sterne so prided himselfthe acute sensibilities which he regarded with such extraordinary complacency, were, as has been before observed, the weakness, and not the strength, of his pathetic style.

But the danger is for those who have no such unselfish enthusiasm, and who are tempted, under the guise of religion, to yield themselves with a sense of fastidious complacency to what are, after all, mere sensuous delights.

I had proved myself equal to the emergency, and that always diffuses a glow of genial complacency through the soul.

Sir William Forbes came to breakfast, and brought with him Dr. Blacklock, whom he introduced to Dr. Johnson, who received him with a most humane complacency; 'Dear Dr. Blacklock, I am glad to see you!' Blacklock seemed to be much surprized, when Dr. Johnson said, 'it was easier to him to write poetry than to compose his Dictionary.

I shall manage it by Christmas,' and she added with humorous complacency, 'it does one good to be making

a man who discourses extemporaneously, positively without the power of constructing one grammatical sentence; but who is (ungrammatically) deep in Heaven's confidence on the abstrusest points, and discloses some of his private information with an idiotic complacency insupportable to behold.

Accordingly, in a short time our Saviour entered the room, and upon his casting himself at his feet, he graciously raised him up, and with a smile of inexpressible complacency, assured him of his favour, and kind acceptance of his faithful services, and as a token of his peculiar regard, and the intimate friendship with which he intended to honour him, he took the cup, and after drinking of it himself, gave it into the Doctor's hand.

It is somewhat wanting in dignity, and its air of over-inflated complacency is at times slightly ridiculous.

I can make moneyI know my little way about," he boasted, with insufferable complacency.