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Updated: September 11, 2025
In some cases my colleagues listened to me and stared at me with amazement. They thought I "brought strange things to their ears." One, who is now dead, said I should be really an excellent fellow, he believed, if I could only get the cobwebs swept out of my upper stories. Everything beyond his own poor standing common-places was cobwebs to him, poor fellow.
Most of the learned men patronised by Lorenzo probably quarrelled with him on account of it, plaguing him in somewhat the same spirit, though in more friendly guise, as the Della Cruscans and others afterwards plagued Tasso; so he banters them in turn, and takes refuge from their critical rules and common-places in the larger indulgence of his friend Politian and the laughing wisdom of Lorenzo.
Meanwhile, everybody being seated save Colomba, who remained standing close to the kitchen door, the prefect took up his parable, and after a few common-places as to local prejudices, he recalled the fact that the most inveterate enmities generally have their root in some mere misunderstanding.
When the guests have all entered, and been presented to one another, if any delay occurs, the conversation should be of the lightest and least exciting kind; mere common-places about the weather and late arrivals.
They talked of many things, of the moonlight and the river and the scent of the flowers, but all the time Hugh felt diffident and tongue-tied. He had not the glib tongue of Gavan Blake, and he felt little at ease talking common-places. Mary Grant thought he must be worried over something, and, with her usual directness, went to the point. "You are worrying over something," she said. "What is it?"
The presence of Aurore restrains me; and I can ill give utterance to those common-places required in an ordinary conversation. When I regard her steadfastly, her fringed eyelids droop, and shut out all communion with her soul. Oh that I could make her understand me! July 15th. Scipio is confirmed in his dislike for the new overseer. His first impressions were correct.
Any liberal scheme for its universal cultivation is met by such a jealous parsimony toward the common people, such a ready imputation of wild theory, such protesting declamations against the mischief of practically applying abstract principles, such an undisguised or betrayed precedence given to mere interests of state, and those perhaps very sordid ones, before all others, and such whimsical prescriptions for making a salutary compound of a little knowledge and much ignorance, that it might seem to be doubtful, after all, whether the human nature, in the mass of mankind at least, be of any such consistence, or for any such purpose, as is affirmed in our common-places on the subject.
"It isn't as though she were the sort of girl who can't take care of herself," said Lady St. Craye to the Inward Monitor who was buzzing its indiscreet common-places in her ear. "I've really done her a good turn by sending her to Grez. No it's not in the least compromising for a girl to stay at the same hotel. And besides, there are lots of amusing people there, I expect.
I am talking mere textbook, mere everyday common-places, to you when I tell you that." "I had an idea. I had a hope...." "You've a stiff enough fight before you," said the doctor, "without such a handicap as that." "You won't help me?" The doctor walked up and down his hearthrug, and then delivered himself with an extended hand and waggling fingers. "I wouldn't if I could.
Quintilian applied to general literature the same principles by which he had been accustomed to judge of the declamations of his pupils. He looks for nothing but rhetoric, and rhetoric not of the highest order. He speaks coldly of the incomparable works of Aeschylus. He admires, beyond expression, those inexhaustible mines of common-places, the plays of Euripides.
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