But the state of public opinion in the last years of the Republic is not to be gauged either by that of an earlier time, or by that existing during the stricter censorship of the Augustan regime.
It thus performed something of the same kind of public office as the political pamphlet of an earlier time, and the newspaper of the present day.
At an earlier time he would not have bothered with it at all, but any printed page had acquired a professional interest for him now.
And here let me remark, that the facts of Palæontological science compel us to blend, in some degree, with the classification of our modern botanists, that of the botanists of an earlier time.
Those localities where chipping was done reveal hundreds of tons of splinters and failures, and these are often counted as ruder implements of an earlier time.
Sometimes, as in the famous "I loath that I did love," both syntax and prosody hardly show the reform at all; they recall the ruder snatches of an earlier time.
It meant that thirty years of remarkable original production and of much study of models had made possible and common a standard of formal merit which was very rare at an earlier time.
The only way by which we can discover "what that being was at an earlier time" is to see what he IS at an earlier time, that is to say, what the conception of him is, among men in an earlier state of culture.
But it is impossible to judge what that being was at an earlier time; he may have been a nature god, or a spirit who has by degrees grown faint, and come to occupy this position.
They had weights and measure, stamped in an earlier time, a time surer of itself than ours, by which they rated the merit of all comers, and rejected such as did not bear the test.
The above list will hopefully provide you with a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "earlier time" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this group of words.
