The houses, the furniture, the clothing of the rich, in a little time, become useful to the inferior and middling ranks of people.

A ridiculous custom formerly prevailed at the public-houses of Highgate, to administer a ludicrous oath to all the men of the middling rank who stopped there.

In George's youth, the Washingtons were moderately prosperous members of the Virginia gentry, of "middling rank" rather than one of the leading planter families.

Of the middling rank, he said to himself.

It was the early Deists of the middling ranks, and not the educated elite, who initiated the kind of ridicule Paine would make famous.

Here in the palace, though, she was not the ruler, nor even of more than slightly above middling rank.

Thus a monarch's paramours have tended to come from the middling ranks of society, the sons and daughters of merchants and country gentry.

And as one of the "middling ranks" himself, he viewed with great concern the expenses of living in New York.

He holds a middling clerical rank, and it is improbable that he can fill the Ayatollah's shoes.

It falls heaviest upon the middling rank.