having or showing an ignoble lack of honor or morality "that liberal obedience without which your army would be a base rabble"- Edmund Burke "taking a mean advantage" "chok'd with ambition of the meaner sort"- Shakespeare "something essentially vulgar and meanspirited in politics"
lacking in magnanimity "it seems ungenerous to end this review of a splendid work of scholarship on a critical note"- Times Litt. Sup. "a meanspirited man unwilling to forgive"
