He had never thought this about his wife People had said how extraordinarily Aylmer must have been in love to have married that uninteresting girl, no-one in particular, not pretty and a little second-rate.

Amedeo of Savoy, Duke of Aosta, was not a second-rate man.

Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more effectually than any poet.

A poor, sad, second-rate existence! Bring out your social remedies!

I shall take her to Cairo, where second-rate Englishmen and first-rate Americans abound.

Homer has been praised for making, in the Iliad, a first-rate poem out of a second-rate subject.

I make no doubt that we shall be able to come to terms; I like not the idea of applying to second-rate people.

It was pathetic that so capable a castMiss LILY LONG in particularshould have such second-rate stuff to say and sing.

Only first and second-rate men-of-war have three decks.

An attempt is therefore made to transfer a certain share of popularity to the second-rate Scotch novels, "the embryo fry, the little airy of ricketty children," issuing through Mr. Blackwood's shop-door.

Leslie, a second-rate man in all respects, but with a genuine talent rightly directed, an obscure American, with few friends, no influential patrons, and a modesty that would never let him obtrude his claims, worked steadily forward to competence, to reputation, and the Council of the Academy.

It was too second-rate.

They were regarded as second-rate persons belonging, according to Chinese notions, to an inferior social class.

Manufacture of high quality porcelain calls for considerable amounts of capital investment and working capital; small manufacturers produce too many second-rate pieces; thus we have here the first beginnings of an industry that developed industrial towns such as Ching-tê, in which the majority of the population were workers and merchants, with some 10,000 families alone producing porcelain.

I have watched a great deal of patriotic effort during the last decade, I have seen enormous expenditures of will, emotion and material for the sake of our future, and I am deeply impressed, not indeed by any effect of lethargy, but by the second-rate quality and the shortness and weakness of aim in very much that has been done.

Bethmann-Hollweg, immortalised by one fatal phrase, has been at last hunted from office by the extremists whom he sought to restrain, and Dr. Michaelis, a second-rate administrator, of negligible antecedents, succeeds to his uneasy chair, while the Kaiser maintains his pose as the friend of the people.

She had sent him from her, as one who had stood before her rooted among the second-rate.

He made peers of second-rate squires and fat graziers.

Moreover, as a rule, in the larger world, the greatest men are really apt to be among the most modest; and it is generally only the second-rate people who try to extort deference and admiration.

The French and Spanish plenipotentiaries, Sires de Boisy and de Chievres, were still holding meetings at Montpellier, trying to come to an understanding about the execution of this treaty, when the death of Emperor Maximilian at Wels, in Austria, on the 12th of January, 1519, occurred to add the vacant throne of a great power to the two second-rate thrones already in dispute between two powerful princes.

He is not of those second-rate sages who keep their own secrets, externally complying with all the conventions of speech and demeanour, while privately nourishing unbridled freedom of opinion in the inner sanctuary of the mind.

This was partly owing to his carelessness of those formulae, the familiarity with which gives even second-rate lecturers a position of superiority which is less visible in those who, like their pupils, are themselves always struggling with principlesand partly to an effort, perhaps sometimes overdone, not to put himself above the level of others.

"Because I take the aristocratic view," said Father Payne, "which is that you do more for the human race by having a few fine people, than by having an infinite number of second-rate people.

What the first-rate man thinks to-day, the second-rate people think to-morrowthat is how we make progress; and I would like to take infinite pains with the best material, if I could find it, and leave discipline for the second-rate.

There was not the least reason in the world why I should spend the night in that second-rate establishment.