But it's the sad poetry of the title character's downfall, not the stern lessons in right rulership it may impart, that gives the play its haunting beauty.

This weary mess isn't all loss; any regiment of boots needs a stern lesson in the meaning of nine-oh-eight-oh, as we both know.

Moderation had to be learned ere long by the discipline of more than one stern lesson.

It's a rather stern lesson about financial prudence, but there is a reason this tale has survived through the ages - and still preoccupies many researchers who study the eccentricities of human economic behavior.

One of them still does, its perfect vacant tilth preaching a stern lesson about timeliness.

Episodes may unfold within a moral vacuum, yet the portrayal of European genocides carries stern and persuasive lessons.

It was necessary to teach the churl a stern lesson, and to discourage all others of like mind.

Better a stern lesson, a red rubber ball to stifle them, the sort of anonymous end that best generated ominous rumors, even the frozen river bent to an educational purpose.

A century of unspeakable tyranny ere they had gained their freedom had taught them the stern lesson of submitting to the inevitable.

The stern lesson of the day had done its work; her worldliness was gone.