Of course I know all the ordinary commonplaces of life as well as any one,that if you build a house with your hand or your money, and let it, the rent of it is your just due; and must be paid.

There was more of the commonplace in his manner, and a certain jovial cosmopolitanism sat upon his features.

Things that to us are wonderful, children accept as commonplace, while others commonplace to us are marvels to the child.

And the vicar, though he did not give in to this, was overawed by the old lady, who knew everything that could be taught her, and to whom it seemed an impertinence to utter commonplaces about duty, or even to suggest subjects of thought.

Not only is there no longer an agreement of experts, and a consequent consensus of nations, touching the broad and fundamental truths of Christianity, but what is far more to the point, the knowledge of this Babylonian confusion has become a commonplace with the multitudes.

Each with a motion salutes the Captain; but they do not heed the little group of strangers who have braved so many dangers to behold the wonders which to them are as commonplace as the forge to a blacksmith, or to a carpenter his work-bench.

To invert a commonplace from Niobe, she never forgets herself to liquefaction.

So the tender fondness of a middle-aged man for an infant is elevated above the commonplace by assuming the tone of playful gallantry.

"I am far too dull and commonplace for that!" He smiled.

He was one of the three greatest poets this country has produced, and also an acute critic of poetry, yet he wrote more flat-footed commonplace than any man of his time.

Miss Warner told me to-night that she thought my Katy story commonplace at the beginning, but that she changed her mind afterward.

therewith they threw life into all the old commonplaces on the French Revolution; timid men of good intentions wavered.

Just as a knowledge of botany makes every step taken in the country an advance through thronging miracles, so his new knowledge was transforming surroundings he had thought commonplace into a garden of wonders.

I listened to him at the time with an indulgent smile, but now looking back from the point of vantage of my old age I can see that not all the warriors and statesmen in that roomno, not even the Emperor himselfhave had as great an effect upon the history of the world as that silent American who looked so drab and so commonplace among the gold-slashed uniforms and the Oriental dresses.

While Mr. Newman was correcting the proofs of No. 90, he was also writing to the Times the famous letters of Catholicus; a warning to eminent public men of the danger of declaiming on popular commonplaces without due examination of their worth.

He talked cheery commonplaces throughout dinner without effort, regardless of Sir Beverley's discouraging attitude, and it was not till dessert was placed upon the table that he allowed his conversational energies to flag.

For instance, in the otherwise very graceful examination which in the -Stichus- of Plautus the father and his daughters institute into the qualities of a good wife, the irrelevant questionwhether it is better to marry a virgin or a widowis inserted, merely in order that it may be answered by a no less irrelevant and, in the mouth of the interlocutrix, altogether absurd commonplace against women.

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

It is enough to remark that this charge is a commonplace between belligerent nations.