A clean sweep was made of the medieval polity surviving in the somnolent local diets and corporations.
Alongside the new bureaucracy, the old estates survived in somnolent inactivity, and even in Hungary, though the ancient constitution was left untouched, the diet was only summoned four times during the reign, and reforms were carried out, without protest, by royal ordinance.
This option would also explain how I came to mistake Mr Drummond for a somnolent old codger.
The spirit of revolutionary France had not yet touched the heart of the Habsburg empire, and national rivalries were expressed, not so much in expansive ambitions, aš in a somnolent clinging to traditional privileges.
Why was the imagery of bodily reproduction at the core of the effort to revitalize what in Britain had become a somnolent art?