The incipient stoutness of limb contrasted strangely with the drawn meagreness of his body, which was contracted by want of food.

The meagreness of his record of Johnson's talk at this season may have been due, as seems to have happened before, to too much drinking.

Obvious as this is, it has not been sufficiently present to the mind of critics who have called for plain, familiar, and concrete diction, as if that alone could claim to be simple; who have demanded a style unadorned by the artifices of involution, cadence, imagery, and epigram, as if Simplicity were incompatible with these; and have praised meagreness, mistaking it for Simplicity.

" Its plainness is never meagreness, but unity.

For besides fear and sorrow, which is common to all melancholy, anxiety of mind, suspicion, aggravation, restless thoughts, paleness, meagreness, neglect of business, and the like, these men are farther yet misaffected, and in a higher strain.

On the contrary, the path, for leagues at a time, passes along tolerably even valleys, though of necessity the general direction is upward, and for most of the distance through a country that admits of cultivation, though the meagreness of the soil, and the shortness of the seasons, render but an indifferent return to the toil of the husbandman.

Now the essence of those instructions was comprised in that little sentence, which has been so much criticized for meagreness and insufficiency.

There is no pause, no meagreness, no inanimateness, but a flow, a redundance and volubility like that of a stream or of a rolling-stone.

FIFTH CHORISTER Thy cherished meagreness, whereon dost nourish that? PHORKYAS 'Tis not with blood, for which so keenly thou dost thirst.

His nose, mouth, and chin were symmetrically, if not elegantly formed, and came short of beauty only because of that meagreness which marked his whole person.

To this information Mr. Weber has added nothing; and he hopes that the meagreness of his biographical account will be readily excused by the reader who has examined the lives of his (Ford's) dramatical contemporaries, in which we are continually "led to lament that our knowledge respecting them amounts to little better than nothing."

Delay in such a moment served but to increase the evil; and when I fled, meagreness and penury were the ordinary attendants of my course.

Then he had apologised for the meagreness of the meal.

The dryness and primness and meagreness of the common Church preaching, correct as it was in its outlines of doctrine, and sober and temperate in tone, struck cold on a mind which had caught sight, in the New Testament, of the spirit and life of its words.

There seems to be good geological evidence that the land connection between Ireland and Scotland continued to a considerably later period than between it and England, to which, and as far as can be seen to no other possible cause is to be attributed two very striking characteristics of its fauna, namely, its excessive meagreness and its strikingly northern character.

What it failed in was the education and development of character; and this was the result of the increasing meagreness of its writing and preaching.

A lamentable increase of sectarianism has followed; being occasioned (in addition to other more obvious causes), first, by the cold aspect which the new Church doctrines have presented to the religious sensibilities of the mind, next to their meagreness in suggesting motives to restrain it from seeking out a more influential discipline.

We are not going to strip our lives bare of beauty, or to consign ourselves to the meagreness of the anchoretic regimen; we shall have beautiful homes and abundant pleasures; but we must learn to make our spiritual interests supreme, and not suffer our thought to be blurred and our faith enfeebled and our love stifled in the atmosphere of modern materialism.

Her mouth is very wide, that is perhaps why she so rarely laughs; her nose cannot say much for itself; her cheeks are thin, and I thinknay, let me tell truthI hope that in a low gown she would be scraggy, so slight even to meagreness is she!

There a younger friend, five years my junior, in his lonely struggle with life bore to live, in such a camp of pioneer civilization as made my heart fail at first sight, though not unused to the meagreness, crudity, and hardness of such a place; but there I had come to take the warm welcome of his hands and look once more into his face before time should part us.

No shed, no tree; He totters to his lair A den that sick hands dug in earth Ere famine wasted there, Or, dropping in his place, he swoons, Walled in by throngs that press, Till forth from the throngs they bear him dead Dead in his meagreness.

And what was really resentment against the meagreness of his own lot showed itself, as usual, in jealousy.