The common Reviews, before the appearance of the Edinburgh, had become extremely mawkish; and, unless when prompted by the malice of the bookseller or reviewer, gave a dawdling, maudlin sort of applause to everything that reached even mediocrity.

Let those who are serious in this objection enjoy moral mediocrity in the person of Lucy Monckton.

Sesellius, and Benedictus Justinianus in his comment on the first of the Romans, Mathias Ditmarsh the politician, with many others, hold a mediocrity, they may be salute non indigni but they will not absolutely decree it.

I can now give you positive assurances that you will be quite as safe in my drawing-room as in that smudgy place where you immortalize mediocrity.

No, I will never exchange them; take back the beauty and wit you bestow upon me, leave me my own mediocrity of agreeableness and genius, but leave me also my sincerity, my constancy and my plain dealing; 'tis all I have to recommend me to the esteem either of others or myself.

The necessity of concealing treasure has long ceased; no man now needs counterfeit mediocrity, and condemn his plate and jewels to caverns and darkness, or feast his mind with the consciousness of clouded splendour, of finery which is useless till it is shown, and which he dares not show.

Mason, noticing his mediocrity as a painter, pays this fine tribute to his excellence in the decoration of rural scenery: "He felt The pencil's powerbut fir'd by higher forms Of beauty than that pencil knew to paint, Work'd with the living hues that Nature lent, And realiz'd his landscapes.

The dabblers, whether in verse or in any other high sphere, should be every day unsparingly reminded that neither gods, nor men, nor booksellers have pardoned their mediocrity: mediocribus esse poetis Non homines, non Dî, non concessere columnae.

Beautiful and wonderful people die childless and bury their treasure in the grave, and we rest content with a system of matrimony that seems designed to perpetuate mediocrity.

They make no concessions to half-heartedness, incompetence, or plodding mediocrity.

The simplicity of our manners makes us easily contented in our material relations; we like rather to be free than to be rich; we look for an honourable profit, that we may have upon what to live; but we don't like to live for the sake of profit; augmentation of property and of wealth with us is not the aim of our lifewe prefer tranquil, independent mediocrity to the incessant excitement and incessant toil of cupidity and gain.

As Fielding was to do in "Tom Jones," Mrs. Haywood proclaims the mediocrity of her hero as his most remarkable quality.

It raises mediocrity near to a level with the highest talents, if those talents are in company with a disposition that allows the little prudences of the hour incessantly to obscure the persistent laws of things.

Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor moving wherever moves a man; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things.

" "Provincialisms, with their train of narrow prejudices, and a disposition to set up mediocrity as perfection, under the double influence of an ignorance that unavoidably arises from a want of models, and of the irresistible tendency to mediocrity, in a nation where the common mind so imperiously rules.

Yet it is certain that people can only admire intelligently what is good within their comprehension; and their highest flights of imagination may sometimes scarcely touch mediocrity.

But as to the novel, when it suddenly appeared, it is not surprising that "Waverley" should at once have attained an unexampled popularity when we consider the mediocrity of all works of fiction at that time, if we except the Irish tales of Maria Edgeworth.

When he applies himself to vulgar mediocrity of style, he descends without meanness; when he attempts the sublime, he is elevated without obscurity; and no man has ever had the art of blending all the different kinds of writing so equally together.