He sees through them, and all that he sees is their frailty, their
meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness.
He looked at them, and saw in them, without knowing it, the slow sure filing down of misery-worn face and figure, that was to make the
meagreness of Frenchmen an English superstition which should survive the truth through the best part of a hundred years.
Fanny's disposition was such that she could never even think of her aunt Norris in the
meagreness and cheerlessness of her own small house, without reproaching herself for some little want of attention to her when they had been last together; much less could her feelings acquit her of having done and said and thought everything by William that was due to him for a whole fortnight.
Hepzibah had no natural turn for cookery, and, to say the truth, had fairly incurred her present
meagreness by often choosing to go without her dinner rather than be attendant on the rotation of the spit, or ebullition of the pot.
She would perhaps be hardly characterized enough if it were omitted that she wore her brown hair flatly braided and coiled behind so as to expose the outline of her head in a daring manner at a time when public feeling required the
meagreness of nature to be dissimulated by tall barricades of frizzed curls and bows, never surpassed by any great race except the Feejeean.
I perceive, I said, that you are vastly amused at having plunged me into such a hopeless discussion; but now hear the parable, and then you will be still more amused at the
meagreness of my imagination: for the manner in which the best men are treated in their own States is so grievous that no single thing on earth is comparable to it; and therefore, if I am to plead their cause, I must have recourse to fiction, and put together a figure made up of many things, like the fabulous unions of goats and stags which are found in pictures.
We entertain ourselves with wonderful forms of men, of women, of animals, of gardens, of woods and of monsters, and the mystic pencil wherewith we then draw has no awkwardness or inexperience, no
meagreness or poverty; it can design well and group well; its composition is full of art, its colors are well laid on and the whole canvas which it paints is lifelike and apt to touch us with terror, with tenderness, with desire and with grief.
There is a fine line between elegant simplicity and mere
meagreness.
Ganyani et al., "Spatiotemporal evolution of Ebola virus disease at sub-national level during the 2014 West Africa epidemic: model scrutiny and data
meagreness," PLoS ONE, vol.
Now the former Northampton coach has been hailed for setting new standards of
meagreness among the All Blacks' gritty defence, as Steve Hansen's men gear up to face Australia in Saturday's World Cup final.
Although not comparable to the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Louvre's manuscript holdings are still important, but ill-represented in the
meagreness of the display.
meagreness - the quality of being meager; "an exiguity of cloth that would only allow of miniature capes"-George Eliot