Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness.
Comte thought almost as meanly of Plato as he did of Saint-Simon, and he considered Aristotle the prince of all true thinkers; yet their vital difference about Ideas did not prevent Aristotle from calling Plato master.
When the country was in distress, the queen felt a womanly repugnance for festivities; and yet it was undesirable that the court should incur the The court reproach of living meanly to save money.
Certain it is that though the unprejudiced must admit that exclusion has not been at all an unmixed blessing, yet the consensus of opinion is that a large population, non-citizen and non-assimilable, sending - it is said - most of their earnings to China, living in the main meanly at best, and practically without wives, children or homes, is socially and economically a menace outweighing the undoubted convenience of cheaper (and frequently more trustworthy) menial labour than the other population affords.
It seemed for a space as if the new king would succeed in retaining the whole of his brothers inheritance, for King Philip very meanly allowed himself to be bought off by the cession of the county of Evreux, and, when his troops were withdrawn, the Angevin rebels were beaten down, and the duchess of Brittany had to ask for peace for her son.
