A more abject superstition could scarcely have made void the spirit, while grovelling before the letter of the commandment.
"The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Exodus"
G. A. Chadwick
Yet he knows that his swimming seems but a foolish compromise between the flight to which he cannot attain, and the more grovelling mode of being which he has no real wish to renounce; and he wonders whether she, the already released, who is upborne by those sunlit wings, does not look down with pity and wonder upon him.
"A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.)"
Mrs. Sutherland Orr
Then, as Johnson puts it, the 'effect of reality and truth became conspicuous, even when the intention was to show them grovelling and degraded.
"English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century"
Leslie Stephen