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Between them in many ways there was a marked contrast, but true to their New England instincts both were theologians. John was a conservative in politics, and at first had little sympathy with "those small-minded men who refused to pay a trivial tax on their tea; and who would plunge the country into war, and ruin all for a matter of stamps." John was born and lived at the village of Braintree.

Though they were, when I knew them, possessed of the usual human failings in an average degree, they were for the most part a splendid class of population honest, industrious producers, who, in Grandma Clay's words, "Keep the world going." There was only a small percentage of idlers and parasites among them, but they did duty with a very small-minded unprogressive set of ideas.

If the House were as free from small-minded jealousy and disloyalty as it is from bribery and idleness, it would be a very noble assembly. In character, the politicians have been at least equal to the average of their fellow-colonists. But party ties are much looser than in England.

To picture a man without some sort of poetry well, it goes near to prove my case, for it shows an author may have little enough. To see Dancer only as a dirty, old, small-minded, impotently fuming man, in a dirty house, besieged by Harrow boys, and probably beset by small attorneys, is to show myself as keen an observer as ... the Harrow boys.

"And why!" will exclaim certain good but small-minded people, whose horizon is limited to the tip of their nose, "why is it necessary to take so much pains in order to love, and why is it necessary to go to school beforehand, in order to be happy in your own home? Does the government intend to institute a professional chair of love, just as it has instituted a chair of law?"

What men call cleverness is only small-minded persons' skill in life; simplicity is peculiar to the truly great man, because petty affairs are too small for him, and his eye does not count the grains of dust, but looks upward, and has a share in the infinitude stretching before us.

Others were moving outside, and the murmur of voices reached the Grey Room. It was one of those tragic situations when everybody desires to be of service, and when well-meaning and small-minded people are often hurt unintentionally and never forget it, putting fancied affronts before the incidents that caused them. The man lay dead and his wife unconscious upon his body.

This then is my idea of the Great-minded man; and he who is in the defect is a Small-minded man, he who is in the excess a Vain man. However, as we observed in respect of the last character we discussed, these extremes are not thought to be vicious exactly, but only mistaken, for they do no harm.

I do not think, if Mr T.M. Healy had been a member of the Party then, that Mr Dillon would have been able so successfully to entrench himself in power as he did. Mr Healy knew Mr Dillon inside out and he had little respect for his qualities. He knew him to be vain, intractable, small-minded and abnormally ambitious of power.

"I know I'm small-minded, Bert. But seeing things I can't have does upset me, somehow!" Nevertheless, she accepted the invitation that came from Bert's cousin Dorothy, one autumn, for a week-end visit. Dorothy had married now, and had a baby. She was living in a rented "place," up near Rhinecliff, she wrote, and she wanted to see something of Cousin Bert.