Shakespeare's casual allusions to our national characteristics are almost all of a kind; they are humorous and depreciatory.

So if our actions and qualities compel the highest respect from other people, and they have no option but to give this respect,as soon as anyone, no matter how wicked or foolish he may be, utters something depreciatory of us, our honor is offended, nay, gone for ever, unless we can manage to restore it.

Warburton afterwards reported in depreciatory terms of this region; but Delisser and Hardwicke, who also visited it, stated that it would make first-class pastoral country if only surface water could be obtained.

But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest.

Her smile was faintly depreciatory.

It is true that I have been thinking of proposing to Miss Harcourt and I do prefer her to any young lady I have ever known; but there is a depreciatory manner in which people speak of her, that sorely puzzles me.

No criticism is more common or more depreciatory than that "Such a one will not succeed, because he has surrounded himself with incompetent men.

I remember how indignant I felt, as a boy, at reading some depreciatory criticism of the "Waverley Novels."

The phrase seems a little depreciatory, but as Mr. LLOYD GEORGE, according to his candid colleague, is "constitutionally an optimist" he will no doubt make the best of it.

As she anticipated, the volume met in some quarters with anything but a cordial reception; the criticisms upon it were curt and depreciatory.

He preferred, we can plainly see, to think of himself, not as the great humourist, but as the great sentimentalist; and though the word "sentiment" had something even in his day of the depreciatory meaning which distinguishes it nowadays from "pathos," there can be little doubt that the thing appeared to Sterne to be, on the whole, and both in life and literature, rather admirable than the reverse.

Many were vexed with Matthew Arnold whom we thought depreciatory, but I find no fault with his summing up of Emerson, "as the friend of all those who seek to live in the spirit."