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More "Precedent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Author has here endeavoured to execute has not, so far as he knows, the advantage of any near precedent in any literature, he hopes that a few explanatory words may be offered ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... so often heard the Marchioness de Fleury quoted as a precedent, and her taste cited as the most perfect in Paris, that I suppose she is a very ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... the interesting phase of precedent in energy release. Early success, unless it brings too high a self-valuation, which is its great danger, is remarkably valuable in releasing energy, and failure establishes a precedent that may bring doubt, fear and the attendant inhibition of energy. Of course, failure may bring ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... not treason. It would be treason to the cause to let me live. I failed. I let the secret out. I must die. That is the law. If they let me live, the next one who failed would quote the precedent, and within a century or so a new law of compromise would have crept in. Our secrets would be all out, and the world would use our knowledge to destroy itself. No. They show their mercy by making use of me, instead of merely throwing my dead carcass ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... formal renunciation of all right of succession to any part of her mother's dominions which might at any time devolve on her; though the number of her brothers and elder sisters rendered any such occurrence in the highest degree improbable, and though one conspicuous precedent in the history of both countries had, within the memory of persons still living, proved the worthlessness of such renunciations.[1] A few days were then devoted to appropriate festivities. That which ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... Irish army, obeying an Irish Executive and commanded by Irish officers, would be none the less formidable because it might in name be identified with an armed police, or, like the troops raised at the Cape or in Victoria, enjoy the ominous title of Volunteers. If the Colonial precedent were strictly carried out, British troops ought, from the time Ireland obtained an independent Parliament, to be withdrawn from the country. The acknowledged danger of foreign invasion, and the unavowed probability of Irish insurrection, would make the retirement of the English army impossible. ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... the worldly interests of the child would also be materially injured by the removal. Above all, the revealing of the child's locale would be a violation of a 'professional obligation,' and would be initiating a very dangerous precedent in matters of this kind; and so Mrs.——'s lips were sealed, and to this day the real mother knows naught of her own child; would not even be able to recognize her offspring, if they were to meet face to face in the streets ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... republicanism and racialism, in all parts of the world. The French Revolution opened a new era for nationalism, both directly and indirectly. The deposition of the Bourbons was a national act which might be a precedent for other oppressed peoples. And when the Revolution itself began to trample on the rights of other nations, an uprising took place, first in Spain and then in Prussia, which proved too strong for the tyrant. The apostasy of France from her own ideals ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... fellow-feeling. If it were so, she had got to a common plane of understanding with him on some difficulties of life which a woman is rarely able to judge of with any justice or generosity; for, according to precedent, Gwendolen's view of her position might easily have been no other than that her husband's marriage with her was his entrance on the path of virtue, while Mrs. Glasher represented his forsaken sin. And Deronda had ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... by no means improbable, however, that these hydrocarbons are, at least in part, products of the action of the sulphuric acid. Cahours and Kraemer's and Godzki's observations on the higher fractions of crude wood spirit, in fact, furnish a precedent for this view. Referring to the results obtained by Anderson, Tilden, and Renard, the author suggests that rosin spirit perhaps contains hydrides intermediate in composition between those of the CnH{2n-6} and CnH{2n} ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... hall-mark of hoary antiquity, so much the better. I entertain a reverence for precedent. And honestly, as common sense goes, I am not ashamed of that of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... commanded the respect of the people. Hemingway, the chief justice, was peculiarly a man for a crisis; strong, honest, and entirely fearless; a man who would not stop to haggle over nice questions of precedent and jurisdiction where the public welfare demanded prompt and ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... Macrinus, who reigned for a short time (217-218), but perished in consequence of his attempts to reform the discipline of the army. Heliogabalus (218-222) was not more cruel than others had been, but his gross and shameless debauchery was without a precedent. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of the unwillingness of the authorities to encourage the search for gold, and it is after all due to the fact that the search was ultimately successful beyond all precedent, that Australia has been for so many years relieved of the curse of convictism, and has ceased once and for all to be a depot for the scoundrelism of Britain—"Hurrah for ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... you come under the muzzle of the ordinance; you're a loafer.' One of these ''fishal functionaries' justifies extreme physical means in 'captivating obstropolous vagroms' both by reason and distinguished precedent: 'Wolloping is the only way; it's a panacea for differences of opinion. You'll find it in history books, that one nation teaches another what it didn't know before by wolloping it; that's the method of civilizing savages; the Romans put the whole world to rights ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... of Washington deserves particular notice, inasmuch as in its chief outlines it has served for the precedent to all succeeding inaugurations. Congress had determined that the ceremony of taking the oath of office should be performed in public and in the open air. It took place on the 30th of April, 1789. In the morning religious services were performed in all the churches of the city. At 12 ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... received as a recognition of his powers the titles of Prince of the Great Precious Law and Buddha of the Western Paradise.[693] His three principal disciples were styled Kuo Shih, and, agreeably to the precedent established under the Yuan dynasty, were made the chief prelates of the whole Buddhist Church. Since this time the Red or Tibetan Clergy have been recognized as having precedence over the Grey ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... inconvenience may be easily avoided by choosing a wider and longer course, which may be again enlarged and varied by going one way, and returning another. This is not without a precedent; for, not to inquire into the practice of remoter princes, the procession of Charles the second's coronation issued from the Tower, and passed through the whole length ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... established an excellent precedent for every other city and town in the Union. A few days ago the manager of a popular theatre there was fined $100 for advertising a spectacular exhibition by setting up indecent posters. It is high time ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... one) for this neglect is the curious fact, in itself adding to their interest, that these chansons, though a very important chapter in the histories both of poetry and of fiction, form one which is strangely marked off at both ends from all connection, save in point of subject, with literature precedent or subsequent. As to their own origin, the usual abundant, warm, and if it may be said without impertinence, rather futile controversies have prevailed. Practically speaking, we know nothing whatever about the matter. There used to be a theory that ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... out of jail, would he have difficulties over my being his candidate. He replied that I am very young, and after many circumlocutions he said flatly that he doesn't know if I would be accepted or not as a candidate by his followers; but in case I were, the conditions precedent would be: first, that I would not interfere in any way in the affairs of the district, which would be ventilated in the town, as previously; secondly, that I should bear the costs of the election, which would amount approximately ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... of his regiment? I hear, too, that to make the gift still sweeter, 55 The Duke has given him the very same In which he first saw service, and since then, Worked himself, step by step, through each preferment, From the ranks upwards. And verily, it gives A precedent of hope, a spur of action 60 To the whole corps, if once in their remembrance An old deserving ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... time for discussion on questions of precedent, so we began to climb together, reaching a great branch about twenty feet from the ground, no easy task for me, encumbered as I was ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... demands that our public schools shall not, by clinging to precedent and convention, fall notably behind industry and government in appropriating the fruits of modern scientific research. As the doctor varies the diet to the needs of each patient and each affliction, so must the school serve the intellectual and social needs of the pupils by such an organization ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... of international law has been brought up by the cutting of the cables by Admiral Dewey; it is claimed that by doing this he has established an international precedent, for his cutting of the cable connecting a country at war with another country is a forcible interference with communication which has not been practised in ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 23, June 9, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... the press, and will be ready for delivery to the Members by the end of the present month. The Council have followed the precedent of former years, in directing that there should be appended to the last-mentioned volume a list of the Members of the Society for the past year; and, if the General Meeting think proper, this Report and that of the Auditors ...
— The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee - And the Catalog of His Library of Manuscripts • John Dee
... virtue of which, in cases determined by himself, he provided in a discretionary way for all Catholic interests, of which he thus becomes the supreme judge, the sole interpreter and the court of last appeal. An indestructible precedent was set up; it was the great corner-stone in the support of the modern Church edifice; on this definitive foundation all other stones were to be superposed, one by one. In 1801, Pius VII., under the pressure of the reigning ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... to the letter k. The Maya sign for k is . This does not look much like our letter K; but let us examine it. Following the precedent established for us by the Mayas in the case of the letter m, let us see what is the distinguishing feature here; it is clearly the figure of a serpent standing erect, with its tail doubled around its middle, forming a circle. It has already been remarked by Savolini ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... Upon the analogy of any possible precedent, under which Rome could be said to have taken seven centuries in unfolding her power, our Britain has taken almost fourteen. So long is the space between the first germination of Anglo-Saxon institutions ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... said Jock, "wasn't it in Hungarie that the beggar of low degree married the king's daughter? There's precedent ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... record of any case of disciplining heretofore," she said, troubled. "There is no precedent by which ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... the ranchers immediately around Bonneville who would be plundered by this move on the part of the Railroad. The "alternate section" system applied throughout all the San Joaquin. By striking at the Bonneville ranchers a terrible precedent was established. Of the crowd of guests in the harness room alone, nearly every man was affected, every man menaced with ruin. All of a ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... an absolute majority in the Junior class, only to have a snap meeting called on us over in Browning Hall, in which three middle-aged young ladies who had never danced a step were named. The roar we raised was terrific, but the president sweetly informed us that they had only followed precedent—we'd had to do the same thing the year before to keep out the Mu Kow Moos. We appealed to the Faculty, and it laughed at us. Unfortunately, we didn't stand any too well there anyway, while most of the Blanks were the pride ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... begin laughing about it. A man never ought to have to write such letters twice in his life. If he has, why, he may get a good enough precedent for the second out of ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... of the Church, that the assertion will not be denied that the restrictions as to contracting matrimonial alliances did not extend to clerks not in holy orders or below the grade of subdiaconus. The Registrum Brevium furnishes a precedent of a writ, "De clerico infra sacros ordines constituto non eligendo in officium." This distinction alone would prove that other clerks were not ineligible to office. The various decrees of the Church may be cited to show that the prohibition to marry did not ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.22 • Various
... person; and the cloudy indignation with which she entered at first, again overspread her features. Ought wrath, Dr. Bartlett, to be so ready to attend a female will?—Surely, thought I, my lady's present airs, after what has passed between her and me, can be only owing to the fear of making a precedent, and being ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... Irish Bulls is said to have found its way into a catalogue of works upon natural history; with which precedent in my favour, and pending the inquiries of naturalists, ratcatchers, and farmers into the history of the above-named formidable invader, I hope MR. HIBBERD will have no objection to my intruding a bibliographical curiosity under the convenient ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various
... and I was obstinate: there is hardly any occasion on which I should be otherwise, if the printing any poem of mine in a magazine were purely for my own sake: so, any liberality you exercise will not be drawn into a precedent against you. I fancy this is a case in which one may handsomely puff one's own ware, and I venture to call my verses good for once. I send them to you directly, because expedition will render whatever I contribute more valuable: for when you make up your mind as to how liberally I shall ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... think that your eminence would do that. It is a grand enterprise, and almost without precedent in point both of daring and in the great advantages to ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... Sandeau then went on to explain to me how the theatrical newspapers, which contain the lists of performers and of pieces in all the theatres of Paris, (play-bills being unknown,) enter into a contract, which is the condition precedent of their sale in the theatres, stipulating that they will never speak otherwise than in praise of the pieces brought out. The report of the new piece is often written and set up before the performance ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... could procure that; his rank relatively to others was finally fixed. The practical difficulty of getting at a captain of conspicuous ability, to make of him a flag-officer, was met by one of those clumsy yet adequate expedients by which the practical English mind contrives to reconcile respect for precedent with the demands of emergency. There being then no legal limit to the number of admirals, a promotion was in such case made of all captains down to and including the one wanted; and Lord St. Vincent, one of the most thorough-going of naval statesmen, is credited with the declaration ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... function more honourable, more sacred, or more beneficial. An upright judge, with his own passions and prejudices subdued, attentive to the principles of justice by which alone the happiness of the world can be promoted, and by the rectitude of his decisions affording precedent and example to future generations, he considered as a character that must command the reverence and love ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... the testimony of the Past, and the witness of the Dead is this. Thus it has arisen, this ideal, the ideal of Britain as distinct from the ideal of Rome, of Islam, or of Persia—thus it has arisen, this Empire, unexampled in present and without a precedent in former times; for Athens under Pericles was but a masked despotism, and the republic-empire of Islam passed swifter than a dream. Thus it has arisen, this Imperial Britain, from the dark Unconscious emerging ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... hoped that the Peers would not endorse such methods, but would be guided by the example of "Clemency" CANNING. The Lords however, by 129 to 86, passed Lord FINLAY'S motion, to the effect that General DYER had been unjustly treated and that a dangerous precedent had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... the tomb of Khuithotpu at Saqqara; the Great Sphinx of Gizeh; a short inscription on the rocks of the Wady Maghara, which represents Zosiri (the same king of whom the priests of Khnumu in the Greek period made a precedent) working the turquoise or copper mines of Sinai; and finally the Step-Pyramid where this same ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... making head against the flood. The next instant he could have pitched himself upon the floor and bellowed. For, a soul of chicken and wine, lightly elated, is easily dashed; and if he had but said to Lord Suckling that, it might as well be deferred, the thing would have become a precedent, and his own debt might have been held back. He went on saying, as he rushed forward alone: "Never mind, Suckling. Oh, hang it! put it in your pocket;" and the imperative necessity for talking, and fancying what was adverse ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Mr. Hinxman, perfectly satisfied with the result of my journey of three days to serve my friend. Mr. Hinxman sent his address to London, as proposed; but the parties applied to immediately put a negative on the proposition, assigning as a reason, that it would be establishing a very bad precedent, to raise a subscription amongst the Reformers to pay the debts of a man who had deserted the cause of the people, by flying from the country at a moment of peril and difficulty; and thus at once was a stop put to the laudable intentions of Mr. Hinxman. There was, indeed, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... Lords and Masters in our happy land, How with this woman will you make account, How answer her shrill question in that hour When whirlwinds of such women shake the polls, Heedless of every precedent and creed, Straight in hysteric haste to right all wrongs? How will it be with cant of politics, With king of trade and legislative boss, With cobwebs of hypocrisy and greed, When she shall take the ballot for her broom And sweep away the ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... was diplomatically and tactfully, yet very firmly, bent upon saving the meeting from any possibility of scandalising itself and the Wesleyan community. Bishop Colenso must not be approved beneath those roofs. Evidently Edwin had been more persuasive than he dreamt of; and daring beyond precedent. He had meant to carry his resolution if he could, whereas, it appeared, he ought to have meant to be defeated, in the true interests of revealed religion. The chairman kept referring to his young friend the proposer's brilliant brains, and to the grave ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Bragg, "My troops can break the lines, if you care to have them broken." What sublime confidence did Lee's old commander of the First Corps have in the powers of his faithful troops! But General Bragg, it seems, against all military rules or precedent, and in violation of the first principles of army ethics, had already sent orders to Longstreet's subalterns, directly and not through the Lieutenant General's headquarters, as it should have been done, to commence the attack. General Stewart, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... around. He also issued some stringent regulations, affecting the privileges and liberties of persons residing outside the town's barriers. These good people were thenceforward obliged to submit to the indignity of being searched, as a condition precedent to permission to come or go like ordinary mortals. The right to read their newspaper across the breakfast cup was also denied them; the duty had to be performed In town, lest the wind should blow the local journal into the hands of the enemy and ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... book argument, Which glibly glides from every tongue; When any dare a new light to present, "If you are right, then everybody's wrong"! Suppose the converse of this precedent So often urged, so loudly and so long; "If you are wrong, then everybody's right"! Was ever ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... even joyously, of the thousand and one little matters that supplied their daily lives with interest, and nothing must have been further from their thoughts than what actually occurred. The bank that had sent them had departed from all precedent in parcelling out the gold amongst the messengers. It was certainly against the rather strict regulations of the bank, but the man who had instructed them had that contempt for rules and regulations which is the mark of a man destined ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... old chap," said Shepler. "I had occasion not long since to tell him that a certain business plan he proposed was entirely without precedent. His answer was characteristic. He said, 'We make precedents in the West when we can't find one to suit us.' It seemed so typical of the people to me. You never can tell what they may do. You see they were started out of old ruts by some form of necessity, ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... supremacy on the sea and who had already subjugated one great Asiatic empire. But it may at least be said that he did nothing to make the ultimate solution of the question more difficult, and his flattering reception of Lord Macartney's embassy was an important and encouraging a precedent ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... punished in consequence. Fitzjames gives the actual facts to show how Reade had allowed himself, as a writer of fiction, to exaggerate and distort them, and had at the same time taken the airs of an historian of facts and bragged of his resolution to brand all judges who should dare to follow the precedent which he denounced. This article, I may notice, included an injudicious reference to the case of the Post Office and Rowland Hill, which was not, I believe, due to Fitzjames himself, and which enabled Dickens to reply with some effect in 'Household Words.' Dickens's ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... of the unjustifiable largess to the demands of the Count de Grasse, I will certainly not propose to rivet it by a second example on behalf of M. de Chastellux's son. It will only be done in the event of such a repetition of the precedent, as will give every one a right to share in the plunder. It is, indeed, surprising you have not yet received the British treaty in form. I presume you would never receive it were not your cooperation on it necessary. But this will oblige the formal ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... was, however, sufficient to prevent the storm from breaking while he was President. It was reserved for his successor. In 1797 his second term expired. He had refused a third, thereby setting an important precedent which every subsequent President has followed, and bade farewell to politics in an address which is among the great historical documents of the Republic. The two points especially emphasized were long the acknowledged keynotes of American policy: the avoidance at home ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... Lorenzius Medici, and Ludovicus Sforza, potentates, the one of Florence, the other of Milan. Neither is the opinion of some of the Schoolmen, to be received, that a war cannot justly be made, but upon a precedent injury or provocation. For there is no question, but a just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... to this boat; but what time had intervened, or where I was, I knew no better than the dead. Only this was sure, that I was in the hands of one of the greatest scoundrels living, and that, if his past were any precedent, my hours of life would ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... contained authentic copies of documents which were most important in explaining the policy pursued at different periods of the negotiations; the House of Commons, however, possessed not a tittle of information on the subject. This course was according to precedent, because the negotiations were pending; but it was equally in conformity with precedent that, under these circumstances, the House ought not to be called upon to pledge itself to the payment of the ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... example, in the grim intensity of her political method, in her maritime and commercial ascendancy. But she repeated no previous state at all in the lax disorder of her internal administration, a laxity that made vast sections of her area lawless beyond precedent, so that it was possible for whole districts to be impassable, while civil war raged between street and street, and for Alsatias to exist in her midst in which the official police never set foot. She was an ethnic whirlpool. The flags of all ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... upon the proposition that achievement is the sole test of capacity or, in other words, that achievement must necessarily follow capacity, and this is a proposition by no means free from doubt. It is plain that a desire to achieve is a condition precedent to achievement but it is equally plain that there may well be ability without ambition. The question why civilisation has not followed apparent capacity may with equal propriety be asked about races whose mental ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... "Yet he was kind", etc. For the rhyme of 'fault' and 'aught' in this couplet Prior cites the precedent ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... border of the web, so that its upper portion was only a confused array of irregular lines, which it was impossible to secure to the frame. For any accurate observation my web was of no value. But perhaps this was best; for had I then learned what I have since, that our spider utterly ignores every precedent, not only in the position and shape of her web, but also in its minute arrangement, I might have been so affected by her evident bad character and radical proclivities, as to have feared paying her any further attentions,—much more, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... as to whether the rat should go in or not. Harris said that he thought it would be all right, mixed up with the other things, and that every little helped; but George stood up for precedent. He said he had never heard of water-rats in Irish stew, and he would rather be on the safe side, and ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... happiness he has not yet found in freedom, our fathers left their sons a saving and excellent heritage. In the storm of war this institution was lost. I thank God as heartily as you do that human slavery is gone forever from American soil. But the freedman remains. With him, a problem without precedent or parallel. Note its appalling conditions. Two utterly dissimilar races on the same soil—with equal political and civil rights—almost equal in numbers, but terribly unequal in intelligence and responsibility—each pledged against ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... great Rajput bard, sang of the marriage of Prithwi Raj, king of Delhi, that the bride's father emptied his coffers in gifts, but he filled them with the praises of mankind. A lakh of rupees [291] was given to the chief bard, and this became a precedent for similar occasions. "Until vanity suffers itself to be controlled," Colonel Tod wrote, [292] "and the aristocratic Rajputs submit to republican simplicity, the evils arising from nuptial profusion will ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... cause of their exhaustion, he found that they had been worked entirely in perpendicular shafts instead of following the direction of the veins. He perfected a plan for working them in this simple and reasonable way, and no earthly power could make the Spanish miners obey his orders. There was no precedent for this new process, and they would not touch it. They preferred starvation rather than offend the memory of their fathers by a change. At last they had to be dismissed and a full force imported from Germany, under whose hands the ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... the rebellion McClellan was simply a captain, but was regarded as one of the most able and accomplished officers of the army. His promotion was rapid beyond precedent; but his head was turned by his elevation, and he became arrogant and opinionated, and before long even insulted the President, and assumed the airs of a national liberator on whose shoulders was laid the burden of the war. He consequently ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... Wordsworth much later, an author to reckon with; particularly when we remember that many of Jonson's notions came for a time definitely to prevail and to modify the whole trend of English poetry. First of all Jonson was a classicist, that is, he believed in restraint and precedent in art in opposition to the prevalent ungoverned and irresponsible Renaissance spirit. Jonson believed that there was a professional way of doing things which might be reached by a study of the best examples, and he found these examples for the most part among the ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... as in Cyprus, where I think, the Mahomedans vote by themselves. They have nine votes and the non-Mahomedans have three, or the other way about. So in Bohemia, where the Germans vote alone and have their own register. Therefore we are not without a precedent and a parallel, for the idea of a separate register. Secondly, they want a number of seats somewhat in excess of their numerical strength. Those two demands we are quite ready and intend to meet in full. There is a third demand that, if there is a Hindu on the Viceroy's Executive ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... temper, which is supposed to be compatible with shining virtues, that it is apt to determine a man's sudden adhesion to an opinion, whether on a personal or impersonal matter, without leaving him time to consider his grounds. The adhesion is sudden and momentary, but it either forms a precedent for his line of thought and action, or it is presently seen to have been inconsistent with his true mind. This determination of partisanship by temper has its worst effects in the career of the public man, who is always in danger of getting so enthralled by his ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... those which closed the sixteenth century. But Spenser remained un-imitated and Shakspeare was inimitable; the drama, however, which in this as in the last generation monopolized the best minds, received new developments, poetry was enriched beyond precedent, and prose writing blossomed into a harvest of unexampled eloquence. But although, under the rule of James, learning did good service in theology and the classics, English writing began to be infected with pedantic affectations. The chivalrous temper of the preceding ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... out, and of the greatest value to the scientific world, and every one who had made that memorable voyage on the Dipscy had stories to tell for which editors in every civilized land would have paid gold beyond all former precedent. ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... at him with eagle-like intentness and a puzzled frown. His face said plainly that Kenny's mood was without precedent and therefore strategical. It behooved him to get to the bottom of it at once ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... of the Church. A Hebrew Old Testament, in 1546, was followed in 1550 by the Greek New Testament. The next year he published a new edition of the Testament in which for the first time it was divided into verses, a precedent followed in Bible printing ever since. It was not merely the fact of his printing the scriptures at all that angered the heresy-hunters, but much more Estienne's notes and comments, in which, like Luther in Germany and ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... the whole, the bill is dangerous in itself, as being the first step towards the total invasion of the company's territories in Bengal; and should we admit the motives which lead to it to be good, yet such a step is dangerous as a precedent. I do not, however, deny that the house has power to pass it, but you have not the right. There is a perpetual confusion in gentlemen's ideas from inattention to this material distinction, from which, properly considered, it will ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Niagara, but Perry was here detached from the lake service, and returned to the seaboard, leaving Elliott to command on Erie. In acknowledging the order for Perry's removal, Chauncey regretted the granting of his application as a bad precedent; and further took occasion to remark that when he himself was sent to the lakes the only vessel on them owned by the United States was the brig "Oneida." "Since then two fleets have been created, one of ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... this intelligence was any thing but satisfactory; I could not help conjuring up visions of a long and wearisome captivity—of hope deferred and expectations disappointed—with Stoddart's melancholy situation as a near precedent. I managed to make myself for a short time as thoroughly uncomfortable as if I were already a prisoner, but soon a sense of the great foolishness of indulging in this tone of thought came over me, and making a strong effort ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... BUT NOT A PRECEDENT.—It is a gracious act on the part of a Cabman, when, at a dinner-party, he gives the pas to an Omnibus-driver, at the same time courteously explaining this waiver of rights by saying that "at the present moment he is ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... Punic cause was a counsel and a precedent. Hopes of deliverance revived. Populations hitherto uncertain hesitated no longer. Everywhere there was a stir. The Suffet learnt this, and he had no assistance to look for! He was now ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... against all precedent to burn One who recants; they mean to pardon me. To give the poor—they give the poor who die. Well, burn me or not burn me I am fixt; It is but a communion, not a mass: A holy supper, not a sacrifice; No man can make his ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... the flash in her eyes, and he smiled. "Your Royal Highness, my lords, ladies and gentlemen," said he, while all the company were racking their brains to recall a precedent for such proceedings at a more than formal London dinner party; "the Princess and myself thank you from our hearts. For me this might almost seem the end of the fairy-tale of my life, in which—when I was eleven ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... this country naturally sympathized with England, and the Jeffersonian Democracy with France. The Federalists, who distrusted the sweeping abstractions of the French Revolution, and clung to the conservative notions of a checked and balanced freedom, inherited from English precedent, were accused of monarchical and aristocratic leanings. On their side they were not slow to accuse their adversaries of French atheism and French Jacobinism. By a singular reversal of the natural order of things the strength of the Federalist ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... war, and would be satisfied with any concessions he would recommend. That the politicians had had their say, now let the soldiers terminate the strife which politicians had begun. That Napoleon while in Italy, against all precedent and without the knowledge of the civil department, had entered into negotiations with the enemy, made peace, and while distasteful to the authorities, they were too polite to refuse the terms. But General Lee was too much a soldier to consider ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... business without precedent, and all growing beyond human thought. To meet the issues as they arise the men at the head must ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... is a thing that grows on one," continued Mr. Tredgold, with the air of making a concession. "It is the first smoke that does the mischief; it is a fatal precedent. Unless, perhaps—How pretty that field is ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... morning last the quiet little village of Cardiff, which lies in the valley about twelve miles south of Syracuse, was thrown into an excitement without precedent, by the report that a human body had been exhumed in a petrified state, the colossal dimensions of which had never been the fortune of the inhabitants of the little village to behold, and the magnitude of which ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... recollections may perhaps go back as far as the Restoration, will be surprised at the size of the frame required for the picture we are about to bring before him, embracing as it does two centuries and a half; but as everything, has its precedent, every river its source, every volcano its central fire, so it is that the spot of earth on which we are going to fix our eyes has been the scene of action and reaction, revenge and retaliation, till the religious annals of the South resemble an account-book ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... be glad to ask how they suppose kings came at first? The question admits but of three answers, viz. either by lot, by election, or by usurpation. If the first king was taken by lot, it establishes a precedent for the next, which excludes hereditary succession. Saul was by lot, yet the succession was not hereditary, neither does it appear from that transaction there was any intention it ever should be. If the first king of any country was by election, that likewise establishes a precedent for the ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine
... On the way he crossed the tracks of two other deer, but they had no temptations for him. He wanted to solve the mystery of that spreading hoof-print, and to make sure that his shot had not been a clean miss. And now began a day which was without precedent in the Buck's whole history. Those woods are not the best in the world for a deer who has to play hide-and-seek with a man, for there are few bare ridges or half-wooded slopes from which he can look back to see if anyone ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... the vegetative apparatus, with our muscles, especially the involuntary, with our viscera, and particularly with our internal secretions. Whenever there is thought and feeling, there is movement, commotion, precedent and concomitant, among these. They are the oldest seats of feeling, thought and will and continue ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... note ascendeth a little higher than the precedent. For as the proficience of learning consisteth much in the orders and institutions of universities in the same states and kingdoms, so it would be yet more advanced, if there were more intelligence mutual between the universities of ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... time in a small village in Bruce County, Province of Ontario, Dominion of Canada, there lived a man who was destined to establish a precedent. He was to prove to the world that a rolling stone is capable at times of gathering as much moss as a stationary one, and how it is possible for the rock with St. Vitus dance to become more coated than the one that is confined to perpetual isolation. Like ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... 'silence,' he would be more careful after this. I think he has been chastened enough. If I could find any reason whatever for refusing to vote for the end of the Coventry, it would come from the question as to whether any one class has the right to upset the traditions and establish a new precedent for ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... shrinkage of their income was a remarkable phenomenon, without explanation or precedent—that it could happen at all within the space of five years seemed almost an intended cruelty, conceived and executed by a sardonic God. When they were married seventy-five hundred a year had seemed ample for a young ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Westminster Hall. When Lord Campbell argued the great Privilege case, he obtained permission to appear without a wig; but this concession to a counsel—who, on that occasion, spoke for sixteen hours—was accompanied with an intimation that "it was not to be drawn into precedent." ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... domiciliary catastrophe the author of "Margaret Mayfield" has formed a melodrama, which in every other respect is founded, like a chancellor's decree, upon precedent; it being a good old-fashioned, cut-throat piece, of the leather-breeches-and-gaiter, plough-and-pitchfork school. A country-inn parlour of course commences the story, where certain characters assemble, who reveal enough of themselves and of the characters assumed by their fellows (at that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... "according to all fiction precedent, the rest of us ought to get together immediately, if not a little sooner, and murder ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... and merits of Christ; this is that for the sake of which grace is given unto us, as is intimated by the text, Rev. 22:1. It proceeds from the throne of God, who is Christ. Christ then having obtained grace for us, must needs be precedent as to his merit, to that grace he hath so obtained. Besides, it is clear that the Spirit and grace come from God through him. Therefore, as to the communication of grace to us, it is the fruit of ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... precedent to show that an action of this sort will lie, without proof of malice in the defendants, or that the act of disfranchisement was done on purpose to deprive the plaintiff of the particular advantage which resulted to him from his corporate character? ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... exasperated Betty beyond measure. She scolded him vigorously. Charley accepted the scolding with humility, but his resolution was unshaken; he did not propose to vacate the public roads at any man's behest; that would be an unwise precedent to establish. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... Proudie sitting on the old bishop's chair, looking very nice in his new apron; they found, too, Mr. Slope standing on the hearth-rug, persuasive and eager, just as the archdeacon used to stand; but on the sofa they also found Mrs. Proudie, an innovation for which a precedent might in vain be sought in all the ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... last age of the world (or likely neuer) the time is compleat of receiuing also these Gentiles into his mercy, and that God will raise him an instrument to effect the same: it seeming probable by euent or precedent attempts made by the Spanyards and French sundry times, that the countreys lying North of Florida, God hath reserued the same to be reduced vnto Christian ciuility by the English nation. For not long after that ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... who wore it more than three thousand years ago. The gold coins with the head of Alexander the Great are some of them so fresh one might think they were newer than much of the silver currency we were lately handling. As we have been quoting from the poets this morning, I will follow the precedent, and give some lines from an epistle of Pope to Addison after the latter had written, but not yet published, his Dialogue on Medals. Some of these lines have been lingering in my memory for a great many years, but I looked at the original the other day and was so pleased with them that ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... since learned that this quarter of the mansion consists of a labyrinth of rooms, shut up because devoid of interest, and containing only some old lumber. To have conducted us through them would have been to disobey orders, and, worse still, establish a precedent, from which the child might well shrink. It would have doubled her arduous round of duty. It was policy, no less than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... one. unir (s'), to unite. univers, m., universe, the whole universe. usage, m., use, custom, precedent. usure, f., usury, usurious interest; payer avec —, ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... and law-abiding persons such a proceeding appeared to be no better than judicial murder, constituting a hideous precedent; a committee was formed to present a formal indictment against Governor Eyre and obtain a judicial pronouncement on the question, quite apart from the two other questions persistently confused with it—namely, was Gordon a Jamaica Hampden or ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... fate, and mine too, depended on the eccentricities of a jury, the chartered libertinism of an ermined judge, the humour of the law, on a series of points without precedent concerning which no monograph had as yet been written; and, as a last desperate resource, on the letters of a sympathetic British public in the penny papers. The penny papers, the criminal's latest broadsheet ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... him, and being a man who already saw what large consequences sometimes flow from small causes he must have been buoyed up by the thought that any of the cases which came before him might set a very important precedent. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... comment. "Lover" is not generally applied by bards to adored members of the gentler sex, "love" being the conventional term. Likewise, the phrase "heart which always softly does its beating" might well be revised with greater attention to poetical precedent. Yet the whole is of really promising quality, and exhibits a metrical correctness much above the average. "The Operation" is a very witty sketch by Miss Clara I. Stalker, with a sudden turn toward the end which arouses the complete ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... copied.] Prototype. — N. prototype, original, model, pattern, precedent, standard, ideal, reference, scantling, type; archetype, antitype[obs3]; protoplast, module, exemplar, example, ensample[obs3], paradigm; lay-figure. text, copy, design; fugleman[obs3], keynote. die, mold; matrix, last, plasm[obs3]; proplasm[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... extraordinary honours. This, indeed, may be justly inferred from the speeches which he made upon both those occasions; as when he says, "I shall ever be the same, and shall never change my conduct, so long as I retain my senses; but to avoid giving a bad precedent to posterity, the senate ought to beware of binding themselves to the acts of (234) any person whatever, who might by some accident or other be induced to alter them." And again: "If ye should at any time entertain a jealousy of my conduct, and ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... rights as well as honorary degrees. He is the author of A Creative Tension—The Foreign Policy Roles of the President and Congress (2002) and How Congress Works and Why You Should Care (2004), and the coauthor of Without Precedent: The Inside Story ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... proper equipment, but nearly all his men were handy on a ship as well as on land. In Louisbourg were about two thousand defenders, of whom only five or six hundred were French regulars. These professional soldiers watched with contempt not untouched with apprehension the breaches of military precedent in the operations of the besiegers. Men harnessed like horses dragged guns through morasses into position, exposed themselves recklessly, and showed the skill, initiative, and resolution which we have now come to consider the dominant qualities of the Yankee. In time Warren arrived ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... so nearly nude as greatly to scandalize the daughter of Saul. By the way, this incident has been always a stock argument for the extinction and decent interment of the unhappy anti dancer. Conceding the necessity of his extinction, I am yet indisposed to attach much weight to the Davidian precedent, for it does not appear that he was acting under divine command, directly or indirectly imparted, and whenever he followed the hest of his own sweet will David had a notable knack at going wrong. Perhaps the best value of the incident consists ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... I could scarcely contain. I had seen favour after favour heaped upon them by the late King, until he crowned all by elevating them to the rank of Princes of the Blood in defiance of all law, of all precedent, of all decency, if I must say the word. What I felt at this accumulation of honours I have more than once expressed; what I did to oppose such monstrous innovations has also been said. No man could be more against M. du Maine than I, and yet I opposed this proposition ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... orders of Colonel Munro. The reason assigned for conduct so absurd that in real life it would have gone far to prove the parties having a hand in it not to be possessed of that sound and disposing mind and memory which the law requires as a condition precedent to making a will is, that hostile Indians, in search of chance scalps, would be hovering about the column of troops, and so leave the by-path unmolested. But the servants of the party follow the route of the column: a measure, we are told, dictated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... excellent speech, that the country should repay to the aged Jackson the fine which had been imposed upon him for contempt of court during the defense of New Orleans. An experienced opponent found him ready with a taking retort to every interruption. It being objected that there was absolutely no precedent for refunding the fine, "I presume," he replied, "that no case can be found on record, or traced by tradition, where a fine, imposed upon a general for saving his country, at the peril of his life and reputation, has ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... promised, and she intended to perform. By dint of smiles, pleasant words, kindly interests in "friends," and ceaseless doles of finery and physic, Cornelia had established such a hold upon the affections of the staff, that her wish already took precedent of her aunt's law. Mary mentally condemned half the contents of the silver cupboard to neglect, the while she ironed out foaming frills and ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... upon one point only in their numberless and wearisome discussions of the matter: Mrs. Prettyman had no legal claim upon Stoke Revel. To give her compensation for the plum tree would be to allow that she had; to create a precedent highly dangerous under the circumstances. How could one refuse to other old women or old men leaving their cottages what one had weakly granted to her? The demands would be unceasing, the trouble endless. So arguing, Mrs. de Tracy soon brought ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... that came from the White House on July 9, 1917, disclosed an exercise of presidential authority without precedent in American history in that it contemplated, with British cooperation, the virtual domination of the country's trade with the whole world. It provided for the absolute governmental control, by license, of the exports of essential war commodities to fifty-six nations ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... especially in its relation to mental disease, a profound metaphysician, and of great experience and insight in politics,—all these, while they may very well form the staple of separate treatises, and prove, that, whatever the extent of his learning, the range and accuracy of his knowledge were beyond precedent or later parallel, are really outside the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... did something against received opinion, against precedent, and for aught I know against even the prejudices of those I wish to serve, however lofty my intention was and however great the benefit to them in the end, it would still be a sacrifice in the present." He saw his own miserable logic and affected didactics, but he went on lightly, "But ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... to be taken into consideration besides personal and family improvement. Do you not know, Mr. James, that the most worthless and careless part of my congregation quote your example as a respectable precedent for allowing their families to violate the order of the Sabbath? You and your children sail about on the lake, with minds and hearts, I doubt not, elevated and tranquillized by its quiet repose; but Ben Dakes, and his idle, profane army of children, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Alexander Selkirk, as I am aware, commences his entertaining history with his birth and parentage, and as I am also a Crusoe, although a very minor adventurer, I may as well follow the precedent and declare my nativity. ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... serious form; from threats, public meetings were called, resolutions were passed, vengeance and destruction were threatned, and affairs again assumed a fearful attitude, Jackson county was a sufficient precedent, and as the authorities in that county did not interfere, they boasted that they would not in this, which on application to the authorities we found to be too true, and after much violence, privation and loss of property we were ...
— The Wentworth Letter • Joseph Smith
... it won't ever do for me, a brigadier in the regular army, to preside over that infant court-martial—there isn't any precedent for it, don't you see. Very well. I will go on examining authorities and reporting progress until she is well enough to get me out of this scrape by presiding herself. Do you get ...
— A Horse's Tale • Mark Twain
... the party strife that was still distracting the churches. In order to avoid a conflict over the matter, he refused to ask the consent of the Assembly, claiming the right of an incorporated college and the precedent of the English universities, since, in 1745, the Assembly had formally incorporated "The President and Fellows of Yale College," vesting in them all the usual powers appertaining to colleges. In the same ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... the O'Hara Family," Colman had forbidden certain lines to be chanted by monks and nuns in a scene of a foreign cathedral. It was too profane. What about the singing of "God save the King" upon the stage? That had been sanctioned by custom, Colman maintained; but he could not regard it as a precedent. Was he prepared to mutilate Portia's great speech in the "Merchant of Venice?" Certainly he was; but then custom had sanctioned it, and playgoers were not prepared for any meddling with the text of Shakespeare. He admitted, however, that he did not trouble himself ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... not acting after any precedent, or obeying any adopted maxims. The grand severity of the stoical philosophy in which her father had taken care to instruct her, was familiar enough to her ears and lips, and its lofty spirit had raised certain echoes within her; but she had never used it, never needed it as a rule of life. She ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... people under the age of eighteen, let us say, he would have to take his chance, and it would be a good one, of a prosecution. This latter expedient is less novel than the former, and it finds a sort of precedent in the legislative restriction of the sale of drink to children and the protection of children's morals ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... not eating her meals or asleep in her bed, absolute silence on Mrs. Presty's part was a circumstance without precedent in the experience of her daughter. Mrs. Presty was absolutely silent ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... to Borne, merely entered upon a transient agreement, by which Rome was bound to no concessions. The war openly declared by Rome was now attempted to be turned aside by means of petty and secret artifices. Several bishops, in imitation of the precedent given by Count von Spiegel, the peace-loving archbishop of Cologne, secretly bound themselves to interpret the brief in the sense of the government and to adhere to the ordinance of 1803. On Spiegel's decease ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... impression is evident from the gradually increasing brutality of his conduct, always most severe, but never so outrageous as in the case of the British captives. The savage, barbarous treatment he inflicted on Messrs. Stern, Cameron, Rosenthal, and their followers, is without precedent in modern history. Theodore at last took no trouble to hide his contempt ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... for remuneration of their services, but were at length contented. This was the signal for the others to take their advantage. They wanted toll to be paid for crossing part of the desert on which they thought the Jehaleen had no right or precedent for bringing strangers. So, on our preparing to leave the ground, they rushed up the bank, secured commanding points for their guns, and thus exacted their fee. The screams and hubbub were at length terminated by some small backsheesh, (to our surprise, how little was required,) and we all ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... hypothesis is that the present state of things has had only a limited duration; and that, at some period in the past, a condition of the world, essentially similar to that which we now know, came into existence, without any precedent condition from which it could have naturally proceeded. The assumption that successive states of Nature have arisen, each without any relation of natural causation to an antecedent state, is a mere modification ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of the old French navy, cited by Mathieu-Dumas, explains exactly how Villeneuve might have turned the tables on Nelson by forming two lines himself. 'There is,' he concludes, 'no known precedent of a defensive formation in two lines; but I will venture to assert that if Admiral Villeneuve had doubled his line at the moment he saw Nelson meant to attack him in two lines, that admiral would never have had the imprudence of making such an ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... ill in the house: this latter circumstance, much to their honour, being considered in all cases as a protection. The chiefs agreed to confiscate the land of the aggressor to the King of England. The whole proceeding, however, in thus trying and punishing a chief was entirely without precedent. The aggressor, moreover, lost caste in the estimation of his equals; and this was considered by the British as of more consequence than the ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... nothing in this, Tom, without a precedent; but instead of riveting your eyes to a beauty, try to fix 'em upon a fortune; ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar
... then eager in every way for me to meet punishment; but do not, I beg you, be swayed by their slanders and condemn me, nor set aside those who came to a better and juster decision. For these have acted both in accord with custom and precedent, and evidently have done no wrong, caring most for justice. 20. So if these (the prosecutors) act illegally, I would be somewhat disturbed, considering it is established to treat enemies ill and friends ...
— The Orations of Lysias • Lysias
... and in accordance with the precedent of the edition of 1832, a third poem, Stanzas to Augusta, has ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... whether that need be a precedent for you. I am answerable for her, and you could hardly keep out of it without making a ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be very nearly the same to the parties in either form of judgment, would not justify this court in sanctioning an error in the judgment which is patent on the record, and which, if sanctioned, might be drawn into precedent, and lead to serious mischief and injustice in ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... at Christ Church was significant. Men felt that the days of monasteries were past, and the Church was ready to welcome and to extend the New Learning. But his changes were a dangerous precedent; as Fuller says with his usual quaintness: "All the forest of religious foundations in England did shake, justly fearing the King would finish to fell the oaks, seeing the Cardinal began to cut the underwood." Henry, however, when he swept away the ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... isn't it?" said his father. "It is an interesting fact, however, that Latin and the Latin text continued to be the language of the printed book for some time; this was not only because of an established precedent, but because the Renaissance in Italy revived an interest in classic literature. But by and by people demanded books in their native tongue. They wished to read something besides the classics—literature that was alive and a part ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... person for the landed interest. I gained some eclat on the road trusteeship, by opening a road which was a great public convenience, but I lost more than I gained there, by my allotments, which are looked on as a dangerous precedent. The cottages make me popular with those who have no votes, and with the more enlightened class of farmers, but the old school of tenants object to them, and almost all the landlords fear that they may be asked to lay out money in the same way. ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... derogatorie of their priviledges, he being a member of their house. While the 2 houses are thus contending he judges it safest for him to retire till this storme blow over, and this was also thought to have bein the King's advice to him, who was very sorrie at their procedor, thinking it a bad precedent for the house of commons to medle with persones so eminently neir to himselfe; yet in the breach he durst not stand but was forced to give them way, so much was Hyde hated in England, so that his Maj., rather then he will in the least endanger the disturbance of his oune peace and ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... father's face was apoplectic; he was leaning forward, trying to speak, but he was too choked for utterance. Nathaniel Puntz looked as though a wet sponge had been dashed upon his sleek countenance. The other directors stared, dumfounded. This case had no precedent in their experience. They were at a loss how ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... the slowness of this letter a precedent for delay, or imagine that I approved the incivility that I have committed; for I have known you enough to love you, and sincerely to wish a further knowledge; and I assure you once more, that to live in a house that contains such a father and such a son, will be accounted a very ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... It is difficult to question these two postulates, at least in the abstract. Only when we come to the application is there opportunity for difference. The third postulate, demanded alike by justice and humanity, is the establishment of some rule or precedent by which the recurrence of such a barbarous duel shall be prevented. It will not be enough to obtain a guaranty for Germany; there must be a guaranty ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... mentioned morning and evening and noon as fitting hours of prayer, and one psalmist, in his enthusiasm, had even gone so far as to declare seven times a day to be not too often for giving God thanks. There was also the precedent of Daniel opening his windows toward Jerusalem three times a day. As the love for order and system grew year by year stronger in the Christian Church, the laws that govern ritual would be likely to become more stringent, and so very probably it came to pass. For aught ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... battlefield. If the object of education is the cultivation of the power of thought and observation, the kindling of imagination, and the extension of knowledge; then "over there" is a University set in full array, with ghostly as well as human tutors, a curriculum without precedent, and such a body of undergraduates as Cambridge or ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... he replied:—"Why, it would not do to hang men limply for being guilty of a little piracy. Some of our leading chiefs might object to the precedent. But I will gladly aid you in looking for Signor Zappa; and if you catch him, of course you will be at liberty to treat him as you think fit. To be frank with you, I do not think you will find him unprepared in his strong-hold, and he ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... under the muzzle of the ordinance; you're a loafer.' One of these ''fishal functionaries' justifies extreme physical means in 'captivating obstropolous vagroms' both by reason and distinguished precedent: 'Wolloping is the only way; it's a panacea for differences of opinion. You'll find it in history books, that one nation teaches another what it didn't know before by wolloping it; that's the method of civilizing savages; the Romans put the whole world to rights that way; and what's right on the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... said: "Sire, may it please your Majesty, whose eyes can see so far, to appreciate this innovation in all its terrible consequences. By striking to-day dissolution and death into the first abbey of your kingdom, do you not fear to leave behind you a great and sinister precedent? . . . What Louis the Great has looked upon as possible will seem righteous and necessary to your successors; and it will happen, maybe, before long, that the thirst for conquests and the needs of the State (those constant and familiar ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... before, the pole-star toward which this earnest and clever woman aimed. With such a mind as hers the topic under consideration becomes for the time supreme. Solemnly insisting on a renunciation of all possibility of merit as a condition precedent to faith, she proceeded to exalt belief itself into the most meritorious of acts. This sort of paradox is common ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... sensational fiction, a too promiscuous "clearing the ground" by syncope and suicide. Another is the juvenility of Mildred:—a serious infraction of dramatic law, where the mere tampering with history, as in the circumstances of King Victor's death in the earlier play, is at least excusable by high precedent. More disastrous, poetically, is the ruinous banality of Mildred's anticlimax when, after her brother reveals himself as her lover's murderer, she, like the typical young Miss Anglaise of certain French novelists, betrays her incapacity for ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... one day during a hunt for a wounded rabbit. Investigation proved the mine to be of no great depth, and, thanks to the pumps of the Silver Stream, as dry as a bone. A company of reliable small boys was formed with exceeding caution and a fine observance of rule and precedent; for Dick Haddon did nothing by halves, and forgot nothing that might give an air of reality to the creations of his ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... fighting for the Faith and abstinence from what is forbidden.' (Q.) 'Why dost thou stand up to pray?' (A.) 'To express the devout intent of the slave submitting himself to [or acknowledging] the Divinity.' (Q.) 'What are the conditions precedent of standing up to pray?' (A.) 'Purification, covering the privy parts, the avoidance of soiled clothes, standing on a clean place, fronting [the Kaabeh,] a standing posture, the intent[FN212] and the magnification of prohibition.'[FN213] (Q.) 'With what shouldest thou go forth thy house ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... the people who are the soundest directors of a nation's policy," Furley pronounced. "High politics becomes too much like a game of chess, hedged all around with etiquette and precedent. It's human life we want to save, Julian. People don't stop to realise the horrible tragedy of even one man's death—one man with his little circle of relatives and friends. In the game of war one forgets. Human beings—men from the toiler's bench, ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... this be copied out And keep it safe for our remembrance: Return the precedent to these lords again; That, having our fair order written down, Both they and we, perusing o'er these notes, May know wherefore we took the sacrament, And keep our faiths ...
— King John • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... but he preferred to shield himself behind the judgment of the Lords. The Lords, he said, had decided that the matter was too frivolous for their own consideration; and without their permission, he might not set a precedent of responsibility to the Commons by answering ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... determined followers of precedent, every one keeps his nose close by the heels of his predecessor. The delicate point, therefore, of the whole operation is keeping the first mule straight. The first mule in our party, who rejoiced ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... however, on the other hand, have anticipated, that in proportion to the strength of character required for the effort, and to the absence of distracting sentiments, whether respect for precedent, or affection for ideal beauty, would be the energy exhibited in the pursuit of the special objects which the youths proposed to themselves, and their success ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... laughed, as he replied:—"Why, it would not do to hang men limply for being guilty of a little piracy. Some of our leading chiefs might object to the precedent. But I will gladly aid you in looking for Signor Zappa; and if you catch him, of course you will be at liberty to treat him as you think fit. To be frank with you, I do not think you will find him unprepared in his strong-hold, and he will not yield up his ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... from her bed and took her seat by the open window, according to precedent. She had seen herself, during the evening, sitting there looking out on to the moonlit garden, asking herself quietly, "What am I going to do?" weighing the pros and cons, stiffening her mind, and her courage. And she tried now to come ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... wide-flung enterprises imply of commercial push and audacity, Boston, at the time Addicks discovered gas there, was one of the most trusting wealth-investing communities in the world. She had her simple rules of business conduct which years of usage had consecrated into all-powerful precedent, but her brokers and capitalists, however fearful of all things quick or tricky, had never previously figured as candidates for what in Western parlance are ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... said his friend philosophically, as he handed him a glass; "there, take this. I wonder if Mrs. Trap—Trapper, or whatever her name is, thinks we are going to dress for dinner. Neither my sister nor Miss Carolan will, and I'm sure I'm not going to establish a bad precedent." ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... Following the precedent of the first and second books in the matter of local colour, the scene of this third book, relating to villas and the "small deer," which were there reared, is laid in the villa publica at Rome, and the characters of the dialogue are selected for ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... say why, but that creature fascinated her. The longer she looked at him the more intensely he interested her. Not that she was one bit afraid of him, as she might reasonably have expected to be, according to all womanly precedent. On the contrary, she felt an overwhelming desire to take him up in her own hands and stroke and fondle him. He was so lithe and beautiful; his scales so glistened! At last she stretched out one dainty gloved hand ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... reported, is probably owing to the fact that the judges gave no reasons; and the omission is the more to be regretted, as a report of it would have put the question at rest, and prevented much unpleasant excitement. Still, the judgment is not the less authoritative as a precedent. Standing as the court of last resort, that tribunal bore the name relation to this court that the Supreme Court does to the Common Pleas; and as its authority could not be questioned then, it cannot be questioned ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... should be glad to ask how they suppose kings came at first? The question admits but of three answers, viz. either by lot, by election, or by usurpation. If the first king was taken by lot, it establishes a precedent for the next, which excludes hereditary succession. Saul was by lot, yet the succession was not hereditary, neither does it appear from that transaction there was any intention it ever should be. If the first king of any country was by election, ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine
... little as possible of isolation and mystery. In Byron's time it was an inn, and it is rather a curious reflection that "Cain" and the "Vision of Judgment" should have been written at an hotel. The fact supplies a commanding precedent for self-abstraction to tourists at once sentimental and literary. I must declare indeed that my acquaintance with Ravenna considerably increased my esteem for Byron and helped to renew my faith in the sincerity of ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... or precedent in Mr. Hayne's case would he not practically be saying that he endorsed the views of the court-martial as opposed to those of the department commander, General Sherman, the Secretary of War, ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... vessels of the skin are very active during the lavoratory process; such soap must not, therefore, be used except by the special advice of a medical man. Probably these soaps will be found useful for internal application. The precedent of the use of Castile soap (containing oxide of iron) renders it likely that when prejudice has passed away, such soaps will find a place in the pharmacopoeias. The discovery of the solubility, under certain conditions, of the active alkaloids, quinine, ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... brilliant beyond precedent this career had been. He entered the diplomatic service of the Czar, and for several years was attached to the legations at Vienna, London, and Paris. Created a Baron before his twenty-fifth birthday for the wonderful ability ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... session Wilson broke the precedent established by Jefferson in 1801, and read his message personally to Congress, instead of sending it in written form to be read by a clerk. In substance the message expressed the President's conviction that the appearance of the ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... the venerable priests, "but that was so long ago, and bears so little resemblance to our case, that it will not serve as a precedent. Heading a band of vagrants in pursuit of plunder, you have overrun our country, caused the death of our good king, and made the priesthood to be scoffed at, which is a crime meriting death. Having set yourself up for a ruler adds no small injury to the insults you have ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... heard from my wife only two days before this. At that time she was quite sick, but was thought to be improving. With a heart filled with sadness I now prepared for my journey home. The warden was absent, and the deputy warden said, "There was no precedent for permitting a prisoner to go home on a visit, as such a thing had never occurred before in the history of the State, but," continued he, "if you will give me your word that you will return to the prison I will let you go." I told him to set the time for my return and ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... began improving the minds of her girls to the extent of three full annual subscriptions for Josephine, Adelaide, and Madeline respectively; and that triplet of fair students, who, separately or conjointly, were at all times competent to the establishment of a precedent for the graceful charities of Hendrik good society, handsomely led off with a ten-dollar investment in "fountain" pens, "cream-laid assembly note," motto-wafers, Blessington envelopes "with crest and initial," ivory tablets, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... then in the Christmas holidays with one year just closing and the other opening, each with its unclaimed appropriation. I suggested that to the powers that were, but they threw up their hands: that would have been irregular and quite without precedent. Oh, for irregularity enough to throttle precedent finally and for good! It has made more mischief in the world, I verily believe, than all the other lawbreakers together. At the very outset it had wrecked my hopes of getting the first school playground in New York planted in the ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... easy, before we invite our Prince to resume the sceptre of his ancestors, as it would prevent the mistakes into which his father fell, from a misconception of the bounds of sovereign power, derived from the arbitrary precedent set by the House of Tudor. But our divisions prevent us from claiming those advantages which would result from wisdom, moderation, and unanimity. We fly to the King as to a healer of our dissensions. A keen feeling of our sorrows and offences has raised the ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... explains the difference I have pointed out between the Biblical and the Talmudic commentaries. For the Biblical commentaries there had been no precedent, and if they possess the merit of originality, they also illustrate the errors of a man who tries his powers in a field of work devoid of all tradition. For the Talmudic commentaries, on the contrary, ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... with a sudden apprehension in his throat, "yesterday our labours dissolved in air through the very doubtful precedent of allowing one to testify what he had had the intention to relate. Now we are asked to allow a tomb-haunter to call a parricide to disclose that which he himself is ignorant of. ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... extravagant, but which I do see rather frequently quoted as if there were grains of truth at the bottom of it." It may nevertheless be suspected, with some confidence, that the construction of his real meaning was not far wrong which assumed it as the condition precedent to his illimitable faith, that the people, even with the big P, should be "governed." It was his constant complaint that, being much in want of government, they had only sham governors; and he had returned from his second American visit, as he came back from his first, indisposed to ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... blame for this and how they first got in I do not know. But I understand that they first of all built a private college of their own close to Oxford, and then edged themselves in foot by foot. If this is so they only followed up the precedent of the recognised method in use in America. When an American college is established, the women go and build a college of their own overlooking the grounds. Then they put on becoming caps and gowns and stand and look over the fence at the college athletics. The ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... constitutional ground for the exclusion of women from the ballot-box in the State of New York. No barriers whatever stand today between women and the exercise of their right to vote save those of precedent and prejudice, which refuse to expunge the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... of the year,' said the young gentleman, 'I lunch at two, and dine at eight. This gives me two long divisions of the morning, for any in-door and out-door purposes. I hope you will partake with me. You will not find a precedent in ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... the great Rajput bard, sang of the marriage of Prithwi Raj, king of Delhi, that the bride's father emptied his coffers in gifts, but he filled them with the praises of mankind. A lakh of rupees [291] was given to the chief bard, and this became a precedent for similar occasions. "Until vanity suffers itself to be controlled," Colonel Tod wrote, [292] "and the aristocratic Rajputs submit to republican simplicity, the evils arising from nuptial profusion will not cease. Unfortunately those who should check it find their interest in stimulating it, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... ring arrived as we were at tea a few days later, and I had a sudden overwhelming fear that Celia would not be pleased. I saw that I must explain it to her. After all, there was a distinguished precedent. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... genius of Paganism. The true gospels were taught by sensible images, and many of the ceremonies employed in celebrating the heathen mysteries were observed in the institutions of Christ, which soon in their turn obtained the name of mysteries, and served as a melancholy precedent for future innovations, and as a foundation for that structure of absurdity and superstition which deformed and disgraced the church." Rutter's History of the ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... same time giving her subjects an example of unjustifiable partiality. A week had not elapsed, since six men had been executed in the Plaza de Bivarrambla, on account of the same offence for which Don Lope stood condemned. With this melancholy precedent, even the most sanguine in their expectations began to droop, and the death of Gomez Arias was looked upon ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... Show me a single precedent." Bradshaw rose up in a passion: "Sir, we do not sit here to reply to your questions. Plead to the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 277, October 13, 1827 • Various
... five-year term; election last held 14 April 2002 (next to be held in April 2007); after the first legislative elections, the leader of the majority party was appointed prime minister by the president, suggesting a precedent for the future election results: Kay Rala Xanana GUSMAO elected president; percent of vote - Kay Rala Xanana GUSMAO 82.7%, ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... weather, but I only caught fragments of it. All the signs were propitious, and as it had been a fine harvest under similar conditions before, people said it would be fine this time. But, unlike the law, the weather acknowledged no precedent, and nobody could tell, though folk now thought they knew everything. How all things had changed since the Queen ascended the throne! Not long since Hilary was talking with a labourer, an elderly man, who went to the feast in Overboro' town on the day of the coronation. The feast was held ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... to all the inconveniences I have just now stated; and the act itself was esteemed so highly detrimental and injurious to the royal prerogative, that it was repealed by statute 16 Car. II. c. 1. From thence therefore no precedent can be drawn. ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... haughtiness for dignity: his study is his toilet, and his mind, like his face, is a vacuity neither sensible, intelligent, nor agreeable. He has few associates, for few will accept him for a companion. With his superiors in rank, his precedent honorary distinction yields him no consideration; with his equals, it places him upon too familiar a footing; while with his inferiors, it renders him tyrannical and unbearable. His mornings, between school hours, are spent in frequent change of dress, and his afternoons ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... seems to have an undeniable freshness of outlook on the Roman alphabet. He treats it with a freedom and variety and a certain disregard of precedent—induced, perhaps, by his schooling in Blackletter—that often produces delightful, though sometimes, be it added, direful results. But if the extreme and bizarre forms be thrown aside the designer may obtain suggestions of great benefit and value from ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... the burden of villain tenure. This fact makes emphasis upon the payment of money as the distinguishing feature of the changed relations between landlord and tenant in this period misleading. There was every precedent for requiring a money payment in the place of services not wanted. When, therefore, a great many services were simply allowed to lapse, it is an indication that it was impossible to exact the payment. It makes little difference whether the services were commuted ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... answer. Here was a problem for the solution of which he found no precedent in all ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... proclaiming a fast, to promote reformation, and implore the blessing of Heaven on our undertaking. They embrac'd the motion; but, as it was the first fast ever thought of in the province, the secretary had no precedent from which to draw the proclamation. My education in New England, where a fast is proclaimed every year, was here of some advantage: I drew it in the accustomed stile, it was translated into German, printed in both languages, and divulg'd ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... that the man is as dangerous as you say," he remarked, "it is certainly creating a new precedent for you to bring him into the bosom of your family. Is it conversion, bribery, or poison that you ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... nevertheless very great when she told me that you had offered her your hand, and that she, young and inexperienced as she is, had, without consulting me, ventured to accept you. Such a thing, my dear sir, is against all precedent. The whole of society would be subverted, and all parental authority destroyed, were I as a father to allow what you do me the honour of proposing to take place. I am, I repeat, deeply grateful to you for the inestimable service you have rendered me, but I must ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... economy on the other, but observing that juste milieu which good sense dictated, and the spirit of our republican institutions demanded, succeeded in overcoming all prejudice against the new form of municipal government, and in establishing a precedent, which, followed by succeeding mayors, has saved the city millions of dollars of needless expense, and has served as a worthy example to many other cities ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... an old rule. Nobody knew when it first came into vogue. Mr. Eames, bibliographer of Nepenthe, had traced it down to the second Phoenician period, but saw no reason why the Phoenicians, more than anybody else, should have established the precedent. On the contrary, he was inclined to think that it dated from yet earlier days; days when the Troglodytes, Manigones, Septocardes, Merdones, Anthropophagoi and other hairy aboriginals used to paddle across, in crazy canoes, to barter the produce of their savage African glens-serpent-skins, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Tientsin, and told never to do such rash and indiscreet things again. That means the end of any attempts to control. For the Boxer partisans in Peking allege that the soldiers actually hit and killed a good many men, which is quite without precedent, and is upsetting all plans. On such occasions it is always understood that you fire a little in the air, warwhoop a good deal, and then come back quietly to camp with captured flags and banners as undeniable evidences of your victory. This has been the old method of making ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... experiments in tragi-comedy, but, in general, classical comedy was pure comedy—the prose comedy of manners—and classical tragedy admitted no comic intermixture. Whether tragedy should be in rhyme, after the French manner, or in blank verse, after the precedent of the old English stage, was a moot point. Dryden at first argued for rhyme and used it in his "heroic plays"; and it is significant that he defended its use on the ground that it would act as a check upon the poet's fancy. But afterward ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the tale runs, the Governor looked——He certainly did establish a precedent at that dinner. Mockers say that Judge Pat McCarran ran a close second, because his Excellency is lean and lank, while Judge McCarran would make two of him one way, and almost half of him the other, and because what happened to Governor ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... beneath the superficialness and mock-mystery of the medical science of those days, like a miner sinking his shaft and running a hideous peril of the earth caving in above him. Especially did he devote himself to these plants; and under his care they had thriven beyond all former precedent, bursting into luxuriance of bloom, and most of them bearing beautiful flowers, which, however, in two or three instances, had the sort of natural repulsiveness that the serpent has in its beauty, compelled against its will, as it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... too, in a great age, when Rome had nearly conquered the world; when Roman senators and generals had more power than kings; when Grecian arts and literature were copied by the imperial Romans; when the rich and fortunate were luxurious and ostentatious beyond all precedent; when life had reached the highest point of material splendor, and yet when luxury had not destroyed military virtues or undermined the strength of the empire. The "eternal city" then numbered millions of people, and was the grandest capital ever ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... with Seor Posada, who observes that the vice-queens alone had the privilege of the entree, and seems to hesitate a good deal as to the advisableness of granting a permission which might be considered a precedent for others. However, I think he is too amiable to resist our united entreaties. I hold out as an argument, that C—-n, being the duplicado of the queen herself, my visit is equal to that of the vice-queen, which argument ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... forms, reproduced from old models, which the artist was bound to follow. It would seem, indeed, that while in the representation of animals and of men of inferior rank, Assyrian artists were untrammelled by precedent, and might aim at the highest possible perfection, in religious subjects, and in the representation of kings and nobles, they were limited, by law or custom, to certain ancient forms and modes of expression, which we find repeated ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... intention to study law, what a raising of hands there was, what a loud regretting that she had not a mother. But since she had not settled in Westville, and since she had not been actively practising in New York, the town had become partially reconciled. But this step of hers was new, without a precedent. ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... precipice. 160 But though the ancients thus their rules invade, (As kings dispense with laws themselves have made) Moderns, beware! or if you must offend Against the precept, ne'er transgress its end; Let it be seldom, and compell'd by need, And have at least their precedent to plead. The critic else proceeds without remorse, Seizes your fame, and puts ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... you have been uniformly successful with the cases he's put you on. I hope," the young father entreated, "that you'll follow your usual precedent." ...
— Old Mr. Wiley • Fanny Greye La Spina
... for example, what follows: 'I will give the inhabitants ten guineas for the head of every deserter belonging to the volunteers of Ireland; and five guineas only if they bring him in alive.' No amount of provocation or of precedent in his enemies, no degree of youthful ardour in himself, are at all adequate to excuse these most blamable words. When, however, he was called upon to vindicate them, Lord Rawdon declared that many of his threats ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... believed to be unique: but many precedents for plunging the reader in medias res, as does the surviving text, might be found in the modern short story of the artist in style. As M. Boissier points out Varro might have cited the beginning of the Odyssey as a precedent ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... Gloucester and the antient nobility with a jealousy, that the queen intended to exclude them from the administration, and to govern in concert with her own family. It is not improper to observe that no precedent authorized her to assume such power. Joan, princess dowager of Wales, and widow of the Black Prince, had no share in the government during the minority of her son Richard the Second. Catherine of Valois, widow of Henry the Fifth Was alike excluded from the regency, ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... of Russia, or cost the Grand Seignior of Constantinople his head. Can it be possible, therefore, that it has been reserved for a republican Government, in a land boasting of its free institutions, to set the first precedent of this kind? Our city councils, our courts of justice, every department of Government are approached by petition, however unanswerable, or absurd, so that its terms are respectful. None go away unread, or unheard. The life of every individual is a perfect ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the council: "We have found a precedent. We find that one hundred and ninety years ago a like case confused the council of that day. They finally agreed that she must submit to two ordeals with wild beasts of the jungle. If she survived she was ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... then, that the Columbiad must be cast on the soil of either Texas or Florida. The result, however, of this decision was to create a rivalry entirely without precedent between the different towns of ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... In Cyrene, they massacred 220,000 Greeks; in Cyprus, 240,000; in Egypt, a very great multitude. Many of these unhappy victims were sawn asunder, according to a precedent to which David had given the sanction of his example. The victorious Jews devoured the flesh, licked up the blood, and twisted the entrails like a girdle round their bodies. See Dion Cassius, l. lxviii. p. 1145. * Note: Some commentators, among them Reimar, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... sufficient for an author of sixteen, not only to be able to copy the poems of antiquity with judicious selection, but to have obtained sufficient power of language, and skill in metre, to exhibit a series of versification which had in English poetry no precedent, nor has since had ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... figure by drawing the others much smaller. On a scroll which St. John holds are the words, "Hic est discipulis qui testimonii perhibet." The arrangement of Pilate's superscription—"Hic est Nazaren IHC rex judaeor"—is unusual but not without precedent. ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... and sharp, merciless and logical veracity with which he discriminates between the solemn judgment of a tribunal and a stump speech from the bench,—the startling narration of decisions and statutes, practice and precedent, condensed into a few of the closing pages of the Oration, with which the discussion read by Chief Justice Taney in the famous case of Dred Scott is confronted and exposed,—are among the greater merits of this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... tortured. That night had little sleep for him, and the marvels of Carlin—face and voice, laugh, heart, hand—grew upon him contrary to all precedent. This was a battle against all the wild animals rolled into one; most terribly, a battle because there seemed such a beauty about the yearning which the girl awoke ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... equipment for initiating the career of the human race was that peculiar faculty which made them human—the capacity of man for binding time; we know that they actually did that work of initiation, without any guidance or example, maxim or precedent; and we know that they were able to do it just because the power of initiation—the power to originate—is a ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... be almost broken by parting with it, while the worldly interests of the child would also be materially injured by the removal. Above all, the revealing of the child's locale would be a violation of a 'professional obligation,' and would be initiating a very dangerous precedent in matters of this kind; and so Mrs.——'s lips were sealed, and to this day the real mother knows naught of her own child; would not even be able to recognize her offspring, if they were to meet face to face in the streets of ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... happiness my station is new, and, if I may use the expression, I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely an action the motive of which may not be subject to a double interpretation. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent. If, after all my humble but faithful endeavors to advance the felicity of my country and mankind, I may indulge a hope that my labors have not been altogether without success, it will be the only real compensation ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... of settled government, A land of just and old renown, Where Freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent: ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... opinion of contemporaries, including Lord John's own closest political allies. That a Minister should run away from a hostile motion upon affairs for which responsibility was collective, and this without a word of consultation with a single colleague, is a transaction happily without precedent in the history of modern ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... past, that the problem becomes very involved); in the case of an innocent man sacrificed to the preponderating interests of his country; and in the iniquitous war of the Transvaal. It is true that the phenomenon is not altogether without precedent. Man has always endeavoured to justify his injustice; and when human justice offered him no excuse or pretext, he found in the will of the gods a law superior to the justice of man. But our excuse or pretext of to-day ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... authoritative in the eyes of the whole nation, and charged with the duty of ascertaining the actual state of things in Ireland and the wisest line of economic development. Such an undertaking will amount to a unification of Irish life altogether without precedent. It will draw the great personalities of industry for the first time into the central current of public affairs. It will furnish them with a platform upon which they will have to talk in terms of the plough, the loom, and the ledger, and ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... of this new era to England: a man of might, of judgment, and of forecast; the first truly English monarch in sympathy and purpose who had occupied the throne since the Conquest: liberal beyond all former precedent in religion, he sheltered Wiclif in his bold invectives, and paved the way for the later encroachments upon the papal supremacy. With the aid of his accomplished son, Edward the Black Prince, he rendered England illustrious by his foreign wars, and removed what remained ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... whole, and in connection with notorious facts, these statements are fair examples of manifest tendencies, which certainly are not on the decline. And if a great and spreading popular cultus, encouraged and urged on beyond all former precedent, is in danger of being developed by its warmest and most confident advocates into something of which unreason is the lightest fault, is there not ground for interfering? Doubtless Roman writers maybe quoted by Dr. Newman, who felt that there was a danger, ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... always in public, could not fail to be very much affected by any rash or unjust decision. In doubtful cases such courts, from their anxiety to avoid blame, would naturally endeavour to shelter themselves under the example or precedent of the judges who had sat before them, either in the same or in some other court. This attention to practice and precedent, necessarily formed the Roman law into that regular and orderly system in which it has been delivered down to us; and the like attention has had the like effects upon ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... arbitration. The refusal prevents such degradation of a noble reform to an ignoble end as would make arbitration the refuge, not of those who wish to avoid war, but only of those who have preferred war and been beaten at it. The American precedent should thus become a powerful influence for promoting the cause of genuine international arbitration, and so for the preservation ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... sixth hour." Long before this David had mentioned morning and evening and noon as fitting hours of prayer, and one psalmist, in his enthusiasm, had even gone so far as to declare seven times a day to be not too often for giving God thanks. There was also the precedent of Daniel opening his windows toward Jerusalem three times a day. As the love for order and system grew year by year stronger in the Christian Church, the laws that govern ritual would be likely to become more stringent, and so very probably it came to pass. For aught we know to the contrary, ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... are right. But it would be as well to turn up Shaw and Dunlop for a precedent before you make any row about it. Besides, it may be rather difficult to establish that you ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... of their income was a remarkable phenomenon, without explanation or precedent—that it could happen at all within the space of five years seemed almost an intended cruelty, conceived and executed by a sardonic God. When they were married seventy-five hundred a year had seemed ample for a young couple, especially ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of classification and subdivide the parts of speech. The inflection of words, being distinct from their classification, makes a separate division of the work. If the chief end of grammar were to enable one to parse, we should not here depart from long-established precedent. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... whatever things are related to one another as precedent and consequent, are distinct. But command naturally precedes the commanded act. Therefore they ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... very seriously of the lack of precedent for the step which we were considering and of what my people in Derby, Conn., would say when they learned that a Traprock had married a Filbert. Swank replied with some heat that he didn't believe that anything could be said in Derby that hadn't been said already and Whinney was much ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... testimonial to the Wenuses was also started by the same journal, in accordance with the precedent furnished by the similar treatment of the Graces, and an animated controversy raged in its correspondence columns with reference to mixed bathing at Margate, and its effect on ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... work of the Supreme Court in constitutional interpretation has, for all but special students, fallen into something like obscurity owing to the luster of Marshall's achievements and to his habit of deciding cases without much reference to precedent. But these early labors are by no means insignificant, especially since they pointed the way to some of Marshall's most striking decisions. In Chisholm vs. Georgia, * which was decided in 1793, the Court ruled, in the face of an assurance in the "Federalist" to the ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... ascended the throne. His father was evidently a difficult person to live with; not only his extravagance and erratic habits, but also a thoroughly unjustified suspicion of his elder son, must have caused the latter a great deal of misery. Instead of following the precedent of the P[vr]emysls in dynastic disputes, Charles wisely abstained from open opposition to John, although the people's affection had been transferred from father to son. Added to this there were the usual troubles caused by the ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... the only result was that Jerusalem refused communion with the other Eastern patriarchate. Justinian himself,—at a time when there was at Constantinople an envoy from Rome, Pelagius,—issued a long declaration condemning Origen. A synod was summoned, which formally condemned Origen in person—a precedent for the later anathemas of the Fifth General Council—and fifteen propositions from his writings, ten of them being those which Justinian's edict had denounced. The decisions were sent for subscription to the patriarchs ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... his hand, the fact struck him that the relative was of precisely the same shade of complexion as himself. Could he set him down as he had many a mere red-blooded person and thereby perhaps establish a precedent that might result in his own mortification? Yet could he stretch a shade—or several shades—and set him down as "white"? No, there was the oath of office, and the government that administered it had been found long-armed and Argus-eyed. Long ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... and not be influenced by sentimental nonsense. She listened as a parent, really very fond of this beautiful creature for which she was responsible, and painfully conscious of a bias towards sentimental nonsense, which taxed her respect for her official adviser. She referred to her historical precedent—her own early experience—with a confidence akin to that of the passenger in sight of Calais, who dares to walk about the deck because he knows how soon it will be safe to say he was always a ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... and ideas, 11-12; the mind can only compound the materials derived from outward or inward sentiment, 13 (cf. 53); all ideas resolvable into simple ideas copied from precedent feelings, 14; deficiency in an organ of sensation produces deficiency in corresponding idea, 15-16; suspected ideas to be tested by asking for the impression from which it is derived, 17 (cf. 49); idea of reflection, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... human laws were equally confused, so that at the time the laity rashly attempted to administer sacred things, to use filth instead of holy oil, to baptize, and to do much else foreign to the Christian religion. The clergy likewise went beyond their sphere—a precedent which cannot be cited as law. Neither was it regarded unjust to dissolve sacrilegious marriages which had been contracted to no effect in opposition to vows and the sanction of fathers and councils; as even today the marriages ...
— The Confutatio Pontificia • Anonymous
... only be maintained by the observance of laws; and if no account were made of the rights of the sovereign, it could less be expected that any regard would be paid to the property and freedom of the subject: that it was never too late to correct any pernicious precedent; an unjust establishment, the longer it stood, acquired the greater sanction and validity; it could, with more appearance of reason, be pleaded as an authority for a like injustice; and the maintenance of it, instead of favoring public tranquillity, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... higher? In the first place, we must frankly acknowledge the hard facts of the case, and, as far as possible, put to one side theories. We are confronted by a condition, as far as I read and study, absolutely new in the history of mankind, where we have no exact precedent to guide us. The underlying practical fact is this: there must be separation not from but in the Church between the two races, for the growth of the Church among white men and black men, and ...
— Church work among the Negroes in the South - The Hale Memorial Sermon No. 2 • Robert Strange
... Slave law, which made us a nation of kidnappers, derived its authority from the New Testament. Paul had established a precedent by returning a ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... he said. "The precedent once established, all must perish by its edict—even those which may not be grotesque or bestial—even this perfect one," and he touched again the vat, "and thus you would rid yourself of rival suitors. But no!" he went on in a high, trembling voice. "I shall not be led to thus compromise myself, ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... classic orders, they varied it considerably to suit their purposes, using familiar motives in new ways, securing classic effects with detail of their own conception, and at times departing far from all precedent. For the most part their achievements displayed that good taste and restraint combined with a novelty and an ingenuity which have given our best Colonial architecture its principal ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... is the more interesting to us now, because it is the precedent to which Titian himself refers, when he first offers his services to ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... of Lombardy from the democratic republicans that follow Mazzini. In truth, the Government of Vienna needs their estates; and, imitating the example of the French Convention, and furnishing another precedent for Socialism when it shall come into power, it seized them without any colour of right or form of law. Another branch of the scourging tyranny of Austria is the system of forced loans. Some of the ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... to call into being this nation, they undertook a task for which there was but little encouraging precedent. The development of civilization from the earliest period seemed to show the truth of two propositions: In the first place, it had always proved exceedingly difficult to secure both freedom and strength in any Government; and in the ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... goodness. Upon this is founded that saying, That the reigns of good princes have been always most dangerous to the liberties of their people: for when their successors, managing the government with different thoughts, would draw the actions of those good rulers into precedent, and make them the standard of their prerogative, as if what had been done only for the good of the people was a right in them to do, for the harm of the people, if they so pleased; it has often occasioned contest, and sometimes public disorders, before the people could ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... manners," said Jones, when Murdoch had left the room. "They may seem unnecessary, or even absurd, but they are sanctioned by custom, and, you know, civilization is built on custom. The poet speaks of a freedom which 'slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent.' Precedent is custom. Never defy custom, or you will find her your master. Humor her, and she will be your slave. Now I think I shall leave, while you try and tune yourself to the atmosphere of these surroundings. I need hardly warn you that ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... farmyard under my windows is the barn where my Catholic men are having High Mass, and where in half an hour, if alive, we shall have our service too. There was a good precedent for stables, I believe, 1915 years ago, so we do not view it as incongruous, but I understand that High Mass is unusual, and no doubt a great honour to the Regiment. I hear that our leave does not come off till January 6th. That puts me into the trenches ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... drawne Less he finds of difference between them and other men Lord! in the dullest insipid manner that ever lover did Nan at Moreclacke, very much pleased and merry with her Not had the confidence to take his lady once by the hand Out of my purse I dare not for fear of a precedent Plague, forty last night, the bell always going Pretty to see the young pretty ladies dressed like men So to bed, to be up betimes by the helpe of a larum watch This absence makes us a little strange instead of more fond What silly discourse we had by ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Diary of Samuel Pepys • David Widger
... profitable posts in every department of industry, literature, science, and art. In the church, too, behold the spirit of freedom at work. Within the past year, the very altar has been the scene of well-fought battles; women claiming and exercising their right to vote in church matters, in defiance of precedent, priest, or Paul. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... was finally agreed that Tito should be supported in a Greek chair, as Demetrio Calcondila had been by Lorenzo himself, who, being at the same time the affectionate patron of Politian, had shown by precedent that there was nothing invidious in such a measure, but only a zeal for true learning and for the instruction of the ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... long the Salvation Army, the Volunteers of America, hundreds of every nationality and creed, labored strenuously in making preparations to feed the hungry, clothe the shivering, and care for the sick. When the morning dawned fair and balmy beyond all precedent for this season of the year, the scene in the vast amphitheatre baffled description, over which the heavenly host rejoiced as never before. The united bands of the city discoursed sweet music from the balcony, from steaming cauldrons the multitudes were fed to repletion with ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... libraries, especially if they have courage to meddle with big volumes, sometimes find curious things—for all gems are not collected in caskets. In searching through the solid pages of Hatsell's Precedents in Parliament for something one doesn't find, it is some consolation to alight on such a precedent as the following, set forth as likely to throw light on the mysterious process called "naming a member." "A story used to be told of Mr Onslow, which those who ridiculed his strict observance of forms ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... contorted in every muscle by his excess of rage. His features grew livid,—his eyes became almost blood-red, and his teeth met on his drawn-in under-lip in a smile of intense malignity. Baffled again!—and by this 'king,'—the crowned Dummy,—who had cast aside all former precedent, and instead of amusing himself with card-playing and sensual intrigue, after the accepted fashion of most modern sovereigns, had presumed to interfere, not only with the Church, but with the Government, and now, as it seemed, had acted as a spy on the very secrets of a so-called prison 'confession'! ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... of La Louve increased the influence of La Goualeuse; and at present, a thing almost without a precedent, hardly any of the prisoners address her familiarly; the greater part respect her, and even offer to render her any little service that can be rendered among prisoners. I asked some of the prisoners who slept in the same ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... mind was deeply moved. The perils of such a precedent were evident enough to any thinking man. Although the unwearied exertions of Bright, Roebuck, and other leading Radicals, could not arouse the people to that state of unreasoning excitement in which these demagogues delight, yet the tone of the press and the spirit of the public meetings gave ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... a most extraordinary case. In some respects it has hardly a precedent anywhere; certainly none in our New England history. This bloody drama exhibited no suddenly excited, ungovernable rage. The actors in it were not surprised by any lionlike temptation springing ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... on-rush of winter, then it is that the rangeland takes on a certain intoxicating unreality, and range-wild blood leaps with desire to do something—anything, so it is different and irresponsible and not measured by precedent ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... him just as Bud bad yielded, would have seemed to Alpine still more unlikely; because no Indian had ever kidnapped a white child in that neighborhood. So much for the habit of thinking along grooves established by precedent ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... a traveller said a good thing, he would give him back his purse again. It is true that he took people's money more by force than fraud; and the law (being used to the inverse method) was bitterly moved against him, although he could quote precedent. These things I do not understand; having seen so much of robbery (some legal, some illegal), that I scarcely know, as here we say, one crow's foot from the other. It is beyond me and above me, to discuss these subjects; and ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... great dedication of the new building, in April, 1907, the celebration of Founder's Day surpassed all previous efforts, being marked by the assembling of an illustrious group of men, and the delivery of a series of addresses, which made the festival altogether beyond precedent. On that occasion there came to Pittsburgh, as the guests of the Institute, from France, Dr. Leonce Benedite, Director Musee du Luxembourg; Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, Member of the French Senate and of the ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... of precedent," said Law, "let me see. Well, then, I will take one gem, only one. Here, Henri, is the diamond which I brought with me when I came to Paris years ago. It was the sole jewel owned then by my brother and myself, though we had somewhat ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... possibility of scandalising itself and the Wesleyan community. Bishop Colenso must not be approved beneath those roofs. Evidently Edwin had been more persuasive than he dreamt of; and daring beyond precedent. He had meant to carry his resolution if he could, whereas, it appeared, he ought to have meant to be defeated, in the true interests of revealed religion. The chairman kept referring to his young friend the proposer's brilliant ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... endeavoured to swallow the information suavely by the help of a classical precedent, and said, with a gracious smile, "Then I perceive we must have played the part of AEneas and Anchises—" But before he had got so far, the idea had been quite too much for Dermot, who cried out, "Pick-a-back! With ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that a nurse of a century ago would have been familiar with a vastly more extensive array of duties and cautions. As we go back in time and culture, action becomes more restricted. Where the effects of any line of conduct are unknown, adherence to precedent is all-important; every part of the life must be administered according to a complicated system of rules, while common prudence is considered ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... which usually characterized such prayers, and most of all those which had been written for the days of fasting during the war.[1045] They were, too commonly, examples of the bad custom, scarcely to be extenuated by long established precedent, of clothing in the outward form of adulation of powers that be, what was ordinarily meant for nothing worse than expressions of patriotic loyalty. Another frequent fault of these special prayers was uncharitableness. Gilbert ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... danger was not so near as that of loneliness—of a pervading silence without precedent in her experience, as if its master's soul in flitting had, whatever Scripture may say, taken something out of the house with it. 'Lizabeth had known this kitchen for a score of years now; nevertheless, to-night it was unfamiliar, with emptier corners and wider intervals ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... shall have no mercy. A flood of Rabelaisian banter was poured upon the head of the unhappy nobleman. He was attacked in his pride, his tenderest place. It is impossible not to wish that Howe had shown more moderation. He had, of course, precedent on his side. Nothing which he wrote was so bad as the language of Queen Elizabeth to her councillors, or of Frederick the Great to Voltaire. He was neither more savage than Junius, nor more indecent than Sir Charles Hanbury Williams in his attacks on King ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... the memory of those who were privileged to witness it. The wedding ceremony, which was performed in the temple, was immediately followed by the crowning of Dick as King, in strict accordance with Uluan precedent and usage; and thereupon Dick entered upon his new duties as a practically despotic monarch with the zest and thoroughness which had always characterised his actions, yet with a discretion and moderation which speedily lifted him to the zenith of ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... it might have survived, for the hill people had "the habit of standing." They had set a precedent of fertility and hardihood and the will to live for a matter of centuries.... But there had come influences over which not even the carefully nurtured stubbornness of 300 years could prevail.... The railroad and the concrete highway and ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... approaching in its favor, he apparently found himself without standing for opposition. At any rate, the papers won instant appreciation from his editor and publisher, and from the readers of their periodical, which they expected to prosper beyond precedent in its circulation. But those were days of simpler acceptance of the popular rights of newspapers than these are, when magazines strictly guard their vested interests against them. 'The New York Times' and the 'St. Louis Democrat' profited by the advance copies of the magazine sent them to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to be asked for the whole he decides, following precedent, is to be the present market-value of the wine; as to the second question, he ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... hand impatiently. "Let's drop him," he said. "Dropping one's biographer isn't without precedent. As soon as any man ever got to know Napoleon well enough to write him up he sent him to the front, where he could get a little lead ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... thing being done. In the first place, by what name it is proper that that which has been done should be called. In the next place, who have been the chief agents in, or originators of that action; and last of all, who have been the approvers and the imitators of that precedent and of that discovery. In the next place, whether there is any regular usage established with regard to that case, or whether there is any regular rule bearing on that case, or any regular course of ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... one another's heels. Though Penton had gone on frequent walks with Darrie, after his day's work,—chiefly because Hildreth had not wanted to go on walks with him herself, or had not wanted to accompany them both—yet she and I seized on the precedent Penton and Darrie had set, and we were abroad most of the time ... roaming idyllically in the fields, the woods ... passionate ... mad with the new love that had come to us ... unseeing, in our absorption in each ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... the Rigsraad stepped into the king's place. Moreover, an elective monarchy implied that, at every fresh succession, the king was liable to be bound by a new Haandfaestning, or charter. The election itself might, and did, become a mere formality; but the condition precedent of election, the acceptance of the charter, invariably limiting the royal authority, remained a reality. This period of aristocratic rule, which dates practically from the accession of Frederick I. (1523), and lasted for nearly a century and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... instrument to be cancelled in his presence, had torn off the seal with his own hand, and had, both by message under his sign manual, and with his own lips from his throne in full Parliament, distinctly promised the two Houses that the step which had given so much offence should never be drawn into precedent. The two Houses had then, without one dissentient voice, joined in thanking him for this compliance with their wishes. No constitutional question had ever been decided more deliberately, more clearly, or ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... calls of my country." He referred to the "kind of power, the exercise of which cost one king of England his head and another his throne." Such language, publicly spoken, was new. His argument was, to Englishmen, irrefutable. No precedent, no English statute, could stand against the Constitution. "This writ, if declared legal, totally annihilates" the privacy of the home. "Custom-house officers might enter our houses when they please, and we could not resist them. Upon bare suspicion they could exercise this wanton power.... Both ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... advocate, after having occupied the court for an hour, during which time he had shown a most minute and accurate knowledge of the matter in dispute, gave the whole question a new aspect. During the second hour that his argument was continued, in which precedent after precedent, not before introduced, were brought forward, bearing a direct application to the case under review, the court exhibited the most marked attention. When he concluded, all present saw hope ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... to await instructions. And Edward Henry was placed in a new quandary. He knew not whether the small bedroom in the suite was for a child, or for his wife's maid, or for his valet. Quite probably it would be a sacrilegious defiance of precedent to put a valet in the small bedroom. Quite probably Wilkins's had a floor for private valets in the roof. Again, quite probably, the small bedroom might be, after all, specially destined for valets! He could not decide, and the most precious thing in the universe to him in that ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... thing, and you are the whole thing. He counts us partakers of His nature. "Apart from Me ye can do nothing." The husband and the wife, and many more figures contribute to this marvelous Christ teaching, which has no parallel, no precedent in any other teaching under the sun; that Christ is the life of His people, and that we are absolutely linked with and dependent upon Him. All other systems teach how much man is and may become. Christianity shows how a man must lose all he is if he would come into ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... certain lines within the suburbs of the city of Manila, to which you promise to retire your troops, and name as conditions precedent: First, protection to your shipping by the United States Navy, and the free navigation of your vessels within the waters in United States occupation; second, restitution to your forces of all positions which are now occupied by your troops, in the event that treaty stipulations between the United ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... and the simile of the chain comprehends the revolutions of the heavens in the number and rank of those things which happen conditionally. But concerning these things I will not much contend, to wit, whether they should be called conditional, or rather conjoined with Fate, the precedent cause and commander of Fate being ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... King's dispensing with it; which Sir Robert Howard and others did expressly repeat often: viz., "that no King ever could do any thing which was hurtful to his people." Now the Lords did argue that it was an ill precedent, and that which will ever hereafter be used as a way of preventing the King's dispensation with acts; and therefore rather advise to pass the Bill without that word, and let it go accompanied with a petition to the King that he will not dispense with it; this being a more civil way to the ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... Appeal is deduced, in the Historical Introduction, as a natural and logical consequence, from Henry VIII.'s Supremacy. Undoubtedly it is scarcely possible to overstate the all-grasping despotism of Henry VIII., and if a precedent for anything reckless of all separate rights and independence should be wanted, it would never be sought in vain if looked for in the policy and legislation of that reign. So far the editors are right; the power over religion ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... wife has become rather foolishly fond of me. So she is not, as one might say, quite reasonable about me. No, sir; it is the fashion of women to discard civility toward those for whom they suffer most willingly; and whom a woman loveth she chasteneth, after a good precedent." ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... bestirred themselves to throw off the Mexican yoke. On July 1,1823, a Congress declared the region an independent republic under the name of the "United Provinces of Central America." In November of the next year, following the precedent established in Mexico, and obedient also to local demand, the new republic issued a constitution, in accordance with which the five little divisions of Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador, Nicaragua, and ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... classic precedent and romantic freedom[132]" that constitutes his supreme importance, not only in Elizabethan literature, but even in the history of subsequent English drama. From Lyly we may trace the current of romanticism, through Shakespeare, to ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... obnoxious finery, came up and joined them. She was scarcely sated—I blush to the very point of my pen during the manuscription—when the confabulation assumed a character directly antipodial to that which marked the precedent dialogue. ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... disgusted with those very flavours in the productions of their own country which have yielded infinite delectation to their faculties, when imported from another clime; and d—n an author in despite of all precedent and prescription;—who extol the writings of Petronius Arbiter, read with rapture the amorous sallies of Ovid's pen, and chuckle over the story of Lucian's ass; yet, if a modern author presumes to relate the progress of a ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... lost skill!" replied Ebert. "We never fired a torpedo at all last trip, and it looks as if we are following that precedent this time." ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... almost every ancient tyrant. We find that they almost all come at last to some terrible end. The man who usurps a throne by violence seems, in all ages and among all nations, very sure to be expelled from it by greater violence, after a brief period of power; and he who poisons or assassinates a precedent rival whom he wishes to supplant, is almost invariably cut off by the poison or the dagger of a following one, ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... victory of Pinkey, he formed partisans among the discontented nobles, won from his brother the affections of the young king, and believing every thing ripe for an attack on his usurped authority, he designed to bring forward in the ensuing parliament a proposal for separating, according to ancient precedent, the office of guardian of the king's person from that of protector of the realm, and for conferring upon himself the former. But he discovered too late that he had greatly miscalculated his forces; his proposal was not even ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... for the lady of the Manor. The clergyman of her own parish,—a man, who by all accepted rule and precedent ought to have been after her at once, asking for subscriptions to this fund and that fund, toadying her for her position, and begging for her name and support, had not even noticed her absence from divine service on Sundays! She did not know whether to be relieved or dissatisfied. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... they were not sea-proof, to wish wearily that the first half of it were over. Rosalie was not weary, but she began to be bewildered. As she had never been a clever girl or quick to perceive, and had spent her life among women-indulging American men, she was not prepared with any precedent which made her situation clear. The first time Sir Nigel showed his temper to her she simply stared at him, her eyes looking like those of a puzzled, questioning child. Then she broke into her nervous little ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... photoplay terminology is, even yet, only in process of formation. The terms given and defined in Chapter III are the terms in common daily use in the majority of studios, but there is no ancient precedent to compel any writer to adhere to any of these terms if he is in the habit of using others. There is too great a disposition on the part of amateur writers to split hairs over the correct ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... of smiles, pleasant words, kindly interests in "friends," and ceaseless doles of finery and physic, Cornelia had established such a hold upon the affections of the staff, that her wish already took precedent of her aunt's law. Mary mentally condemned half the contents of the silver cupboard to neglect, the while she ironed out foaming ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... great men who strove to convert others to their ideas and to dictate belief and conduct. But there was a breathing spell in which, comparatively speaking, men were not alike, but individual, and in which their motives and ideas revelled in a freedom from ancient precedent. In this era of flux the modern drama found its panorama of novel and varied experience making and ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... blindfold, she knew not whither. Never to her, whose spiritual sense was ever so clear and strong, had come the possibility of such a mind as Harold's, a mind whose very eagerness for truth had led it into scepticism. His doubts must be wrestled with, not with the religion of precedent—not even with the religion of feeling—but by means of that clear demonstration of reason ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... to please, her armies being accustomed to prosperity, and the Irish prosecution not answering her expectation, and her wonted success; for it was a good while an unthrifty and inauspicious war, which did much disturb and mislead her judgment; and the more for that it was a precedent taken out of her ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... when everybody knew at once that he was guilty of stealing the chickens in question, or would have been if he had known of their accessibility? What rapture was there in insisting that a case in an Alabama court eight years before furnished an exact precedent in the matter of a mechanic's lien ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... bishop's chair, looking very nice in his new apron; they found, too, Mr Slope standing on the hearthrug, persuasive and eager, just as the archdeacon used to stand; but on the sofa they also found Mrs Proudie, an innovation for which a precedent might be in vain be sought in all the annals ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... This being the exact number called to surrender by the terms of the armistice, it would appear the allied conference was fully informed to that effect, and thereby was enabled to strip Germany of the last of these vessels, whose record of murder and piracy at sea is without any precedent whatever ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... him with eagle-like intentness and a puzzled frown. His face said plainly that Kenny's mood was without precedent and therefore strategical. It behooved him to get to the bottom of it at once and be ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... and superintend our games with the strictness that some parents do the studies of their children. He was very particular that we should play the old English games according to their original form; and consulted old books for precedent and authority for every 'merrie disport;' yet I assure you there never was pedantry so delightful. It was the policy of the good old gentleman to make his children feel that home was the happiest place in the world; and I value this delicious home-feeling as one of the choicest gifts ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... street, with as little as possible of isolation and mystery. In Byron's time it was an inn, and it is rather a curious reflection that "Cain" and the "Vision of Judgment" should have been written at an hotel. The fact supplies a commanding precedent for self-abstraction to tourists at once sentimental and literary. I must declare indeed that my acquaintance with Ravenna considerably increased my esteem for Byron and helped to renew my faith in the ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... other passages of the foregoing report, declares that the record made abroad by the United States Navy, in co-operation with the navies of Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, is without precedent in allied warfare. He pays a high tribute to the efficiency of Admiral Sims, Commander-in-Chief of American naval forces in European waters; of Rear-Admiral Rodman, in command of the American battleships ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... obliged to resign. By this, the country was undoubtedly robbed of the services of a man capable of making one of the best officers for that position our country has ever known. However, it was right that it should be so; it would have been very unwise to have established such a precedent. ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... the couch, the message of love and protection on one side, of love and confidence on the other—that message and the tone, wondrous gentle, in which the girl, so curt and abrupt below, named him—these revealed a bond and an affection for which the life of his own family furnished him with no precedent. ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... suggests the Star and Crescent of Mohammed. The architecture shows a free interpretation of early Roman forms. It is, in fact, a purely romantic conception by Architect Maybeck, entirely free from traditional worship or obedience to scholastic precedent. Its greatest charm has been established through successful composition; the architectural elements have been arranged into a colossal theme of exceptional harmony, into which the interwoven planting and the mirror lake have been incorporated ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... history of Aerius, Jovinian, and Vigilantius,—men who may be called, by some sort of analogy, the Luther, Calvin, and Zwingle, of the fourth century. And they have been so considered both by Protestants and by their opponents, so covetous, after all, of precedent are innovators, so prepared are Catholics to believe that there is nothing new under the sun. Let me, then, briefly state the history and ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... the motion, Mr. Moore, making it a fifty-dollar fine for any taxpayer, or tenant, who puts rubbish out on the curb on any other day save the two mentioned in the main ordinance," Janice whispered to the selectman; "otherwise you will set a bad precedent with your Clean-Up Day, ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... night had little sleep for him, and the marvels of Carlin—face and voice, laugh, heart, hand—grew upon him contrary to all precedent. This was a battle against all the wild animals rolled into one; most terribly, a battle because there seemed such a beauty about the yearning which the girl ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... should entertain a design so broad and bold implies singular intellectual intrepidity. He had neither model nor precedent. The vastness and novelty of the undertaking increase admiration for the remarkable ability with ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... attitude of the frontiersmen towards Spain that was novel, and based upon a situation for which there was little precedent. Their relations with one another, with their brethren of the seaboard, and with the Federal Government, likewise had to be adjusted without much chance of profiting by antecedent experience. Many phases of these relations between the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... This precedent-breaking appointment of a Southern Democrat by a Republican President, made primarily on the recommendation of Booker Washington and Grover Cleveland, was acclaimed with enthusiastic approval by all Democrats everywhere, and in fact there was no dissenting ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... under circumstances very different from any which could as yet be said to have arisen. The magistrates held office for a year only, and the power of veto had been allowed them expressly to secure time for deliberation and to prevent passionate legislation. But Gracchus was young and enthusiastic. Precedent or no precedent, the citizens were omnipotent, he invited them to declare his colleague deposed. They had warmed to the fight, and complied. A more experienced statesman would have known that established ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... piety, well contemplated the bad precedent," said the other, with much consternation in his countenance at seeing so elastic a spring in a heel by no means bearing any resemblance to a stag's.... "I have, I have," replied the other, interrupting him; ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... revolt have a way of defying military precedent. The ragged armies of the French Revolution are not forgotten-Valmy and the Lines of Weissembourg. Massed against the Soviet forces were yunkers, Cossacks, land-owners, nobility, Black Hundreds-the Tsar come again, ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... and haughtiness for dignity: his study is his toilet, and his mind, like his face, is a vacuity neither sensible, intelligent, nor agreeable. He has few associates, for few will accept him for a companion. With his superiors in rank, his precedent honorary distinction yields him no consideration; with his equals, it places him upon too familiar a footing; while with his inferiors, it renders him tyrannical and unbearable. His mornings, between school hours, are spent in frequent ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Lydia Languish, And fret with self-created anguish? Or doom the lover you have chosen, On winter nights to sigh half frozen; In leafless shades, to sue for pardon, Only because the scene's a garden? For gardens seem, by one consent, (Since Shakespeare set the precedent; Since Juliet first declar'd her passion) To form the place of assignation. Oh! would some modern muse inspire, And seat her by a sea-coal fire; Or had the bard at Christmas written, And laid the scene of love in Britain; He surely, in commiseration, ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... soul goes out in sympathy to the lonely figure who steps out of obscurity and poverty to-day to do this impossible thing. No such responsibility was ever before laid on the shoulders of one man. In all the history of the world he has no precedent, no guide——" ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... though with indifferent hopes of success. A few days ago he sent me his correspondence with Senor Posada, who observes that the vice-queens alone had the privilege of the entree, and seems to hesitate a good deal as to the advisableness of granting a permission which might be considered a precedent for others. However, I think he is too amiable to resist our united entreaties. I hold out as an argument, that C—-n, being the duplicado of the queen herself, my visit is equal to that of the vice-queen, which argument has at least amused ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... Wednesday, the 27th, I was again summoned below. I found Percy Anderson waiting there: he had obtained from the War Office an order to see me alone, without limitation of time. I understood that there was no precedent for such a concession; the general rule being that prisoners should only receive their friends in the presence of an officer, who is bound to watch and listen jealously, while no interview can be extended beyond fifteen minutes. Never, surely, was a call better timed. I was at my very worst, just ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... nice in his new apron; they found, too, Mr. Slope standing on the hearth-rug, persuasive and eager, just as the archdeacon used to stand; but on the sofa they also found Mrs. Proudie, an innovation for which a precedent might in vain be sought in all the ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... but think, distinguishes the literary period of Shelley from our own. It distinguishes even the unquestionable treasures and masterpieces of to-day from similar treasures and masterpieces of the precedent day; even the Lotus-Eaters from Kubla-Khan; even Rossetti's ballads from Christabel. It is present in the restraint of Matthew Arnold no less than in the exuberance of Swinburne, and affects our writers who aim ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... Louis meeting was notable in violating association precedent by unanimously electing Carl W. Brand president for the third consecutive term. Other officers were: J.A. Folger, San Francisco, first vice-president, R.O. Miller, Chicago, second vice-president; ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... themselves Bulls, though thus degenerate, And everything relating to a Bull Is popular and respectable in Thebes. Their arms are seven Bulls in a field gules; They think their strength consists in eating beef,— 145 Now there were danger in the precedent ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... establishment and an allowance of plate and kitchen utensils; he (p. 062) was to dine in Hall only on some twenty great Feasts of the Church, and to sit at a separate table on these occasions. Henry VI. followed this precedent at King's, and elsewhere we find that the Head of a College is to have "principalem mansionem" with garden and stabling for the horses, without which it was not becoming that he should travel on College business. It was generally the duty of the Head to apportion the rooms among other ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... Revolution, or any part or phase of it, and our affairs in Ireland are moonshine. For the practical politician his problem is always individual. For his purposes history never repeats itself. Human nature, doubtless, has a weakness for a precedent; it is a weakness to be respected. But there is no such thing as an essential reproduction of social and political combinations of circumstance. To talk about Robespierre in connection with Ireland is just as idle as it was in Robespierre to harangue ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... the affections of the young king, and believing every thing ripe for an attack on his usurped authority, he designed to bring forward in the ensuing parliament a proposal for separating, according to ancient precedent, the office of guardian of the king's person from that of protector of the realm, and for conferring upon himself the former. But he discovered too late that he had greatly miscalculated his forces; his proposal was not even permitted to come to a hearing. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... place, we must frankly acknowledge the hard facts of the case, and, as far as possible, put to one side theories. We are confronted by a condition, as far as I read and study, absolutely new in the history of mankind, where we have no exact precedent to guide us. The underlying practical fact is this: there must be separation not from but in the Church between the two races, for the growth of the Church among white men and black men, and for the development ...
— Church work among the Negroes in the South - The Hale Memorial Sermon No. 2 • Robert Strange
... peoples that the laws are at first the unwritten ones of custom and precedent. The laws at Rome, thus far, had been interpreted according to the wishes and traditions of the patricians only. A change was demanded. This was obtained by the TERENTILIAN ROGATION, a proposal made in 461 by Gaius Terentilius Harsa, a Tribune, to the effect that the laws thereafter ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... arguments and charges made thirty-five years ago by voices now forever still; finding things to say that an assailed boy could not have found, simply because of the mysteriousness of his impulses to himself. I understood no more than the people who called upon me to explain myself. There was no precedent. I verily believe mine was the only case of a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking a, so to speak, standing jump out of his racial surroundings and associations. For you must understand that there was no idea of any sort of "career" in my call. Of Russia ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... of the two great schools which the God of Western theology is supposed to have opened for the education of Man. And it is in that special development of the Legal School which is known as Pharisaism that we shall look for a precedent for the conventional teaching of arithmetic in our elementary schools. The ultra-legalism of the Pharisee in the days of Christ finds its exact counterpart in the ultra-legalism of the child who has been ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... her traits do not change much from the summary of them made fifty years ago, "Impatience with wrong, quarrel with precedent, love of education, and faith ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... different directions, carrying off his mangled body on each carriage, where the limbs had remained hanging to the cords. All turned away their eyes from so shocking a spectacle. That was the first and last instance among the Romans of a punishment which established a precedent that showed but little regard for the laws of humanity. In other cases we may boast that no other nation has approved of milder ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... days—but, for the present, I was thrown upon my own resources. 'I am extremely sorry to hear this, Copperfield,' said Mr. Spenlow. 'Extremely sorry. It is not usual to cancel articles for any such reason. It is not a professional course of proceeding. It is not a convenient precedent at all. Far from it. At the ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... young princess executed a formal renunciation of all right of succession to any part of her mother's dominions which might at any time devolve on her; though the number of her brothers and elder sisters rendered any such occurrence in the highest degree improbable, and though one conspicuous precedent in the history of both countries had, within the memory of persons still living, proved the worthlessness of such renunciations.[1] A few days were then devoted to appropriate festivities. That which is most ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... that portions of it be appropriated to local objects in the States wherein it may happen to lie, as would be done by any prudent proprietor to enhance the sale value of his private domain. All such grants of land are in fact a disposal of it for value received, but they afford no precedent or constitutional reason for giving away the public lands. Still less do they give sanction to appropriations for objects which have not been intrusted to the Federal Government, and therefore belong exclusively ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... fast.' By a false analogy, many adjectives that never formed adverbs in -e were freely used as adverbs in the age of Elizabeth: 'Thou didst it excellent,' 'equal (for equally) good,' 'excellent well.' This gives precedent for such errors ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... she was sixteen," he replied, partly because he could think of nothing else to say at the moment, partly because he honestly entertained the masculine conviction that the precedent in ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... from Rome! What was their import? That was soon told—briefly that Nero was adjudged to be a public enemy by the senate, and that official orders were issued for apprehending him, in order that he might be brought to condign punishment according to the method of ancient precedent. Ancient precedent! more majorum! And how was that? eagerly demanded the emperor. He was answered—that the state criminal in such cases was first stripped naked, then impaled as it were between the prongs of a pitchfork, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... as decided as that of Mr. Cobden, urged the house to fulfil its constitutional obligations, and compel the government of the minority to give suitable assurances of an early dissolution. Lord John Bussell declared that the government had taken a course for which there was no precedent in the constitutional history of England. He followed Mr. Cobden and Mr. Cardwell in insisting upon the government adopting such a course as to a dissolution, as would remove from the house the necessity of taking measures to assert its own high prerogatives. Mr. Disraeli ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... found my predecessor (General Hovey) had issued an order permitting the departure south of all persons subject to the conscript law of the Southern Confederacy. Many applications have been made to me to modify this order, but I regarded it as a condition precedent by which I was bound in honor, and therefore I have made no changes or modifications; nor shall I determine what action I shall adopt in relation to persons unfriendly to our cause who remain after the time limited ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... according to the size of your bank account and the number of your horses and servants. In the one the teachers were educators, free to develop superior methods along their own original lines; in the other they were mere machines to carry out the ironclad rules of the opinionated precedent-hunting school board. ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... The comparison did not hold. Master Betty's acting was so far wonderful, and drew crowds to see it as a mere singularity, because he was a boy. Mr. Kean was a grown man, and there was no rule or precedent established in the ordinary course of nature why some other man should not appear in tragedy as great as John Kemble. Farther, Master Betty's acting was a singular phenomenon, but it was also as beautiful as it was ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... as yet no precedent in Church history for a bastard's donning the scarlet, the pope hunted up four false witnesses who declared that Caesar was the son of Count Ferdinand of Castile; who was, as we know, that valuable person Don Manuel Melchior, and who played the father's part with ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... utterly in vain that Brother Simmons and his whole following pointed out unitedly and successively the utter impossibility and absurdity of the proposal which was unconstitutional and without precedent. The hockey team had the company with them and with the bit in their teeth swept ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... the flat surface of a transparent body in which they should spread in this manner. I took AB for the exposed region of the surface. And, since a ray perpendicular to a plane, and coming from a very distant source of light, is nothing else, according to the precedent Theory, than the incidence of a portion of the wave parallel to that plane, I supposed the straight line RC, parallel and equal to AB, to be a portion of a wave of light, in which an infinitude of points such ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... says, "Submit yourselves to every ordinance of men for the Lord's sake; whether to the king as supreme; or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evil doers." There is neither precept nor precedent in the Bible, which will countenance opposition to the laws of our country. No, not one word in the sacred volume, that can be thus construed. Opposition and resistance to the civil authorities, is ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... the Austrian Government I decided that I, as a British subject, should steer clear of them, more especially as one could not tell to what lengths they would go. I had been on the brink of the plot for the destruction of Alexander Obrenovitch, a sufficiently alarming precedent, so I declined to become a member of the Slovenski Jug, preferring a front seat at the drama to being possibly dragged onto ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... is,' resumed the young man, 'my governor, who's the head of the firm, is all for doing things according to precedent. He loves red tape—wears it wrapped round him in winter instead of flannel. He's all for doing things in the proper legal way, which, as I dare say you know, takes months. And, meanwhile, everybody's wondering ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... Nazarenes. His opening sentence broke the silence and greatly startled and disturbed the congregation. "This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears," were his opening words. And then He began a statement of His conception of His ministry and His Message. Thrusting aside all precedent and musty authority, He boldly proclaimed that He had come to establish a new conception of the Truth—a conception that would overturn the priestly policy of formalism and lack of spirituality—a conception that would ignore forms and ceremonies, and cleave close to ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... cannot pin its faith on insecure deductions. The heaviest burden which religion can have to bear is the burden of tradition, and humour is the determined foe of everything that is conventional and traditional. The Pharisaical spirit loves precedent and authority; the humorous spirit loves all that is swift and shifting and subversive and fresh. One of the reasons why the orthodox heaven is so depressing a place is that there seems to be no room in it for laughter; it is all harmony and meekness, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... si monsieur le consultant ne passe les nuits bien calmes, il prendra chaque soir a l'heure de sommeil six grains des pilules de cynoglosse, dent il augmentera la dose d'un grain de plus toutes les fois que la dose du jour precedent, n'aura pas ete suffisante pour lui faire ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Zumpt, S 349. [264] Caesar means to say that the present senate, which, as he flatteringly says, consists of worthy men, will not abuse the power of putting Roman citizens to death; but that a subsequent senate, taking such an example as a precedent, might abuse its power. It must be observed that the Roman senate possessed the power over the life and death of citizens, not by virtue of legal enactments, but only by ancient custom. This power legally belonged only to the people assembled in the ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... Mr. Dennis Farraday unprepared by any precedent established in the two foregoing hours, for between the artists and Mr. Vandeford there had been alone the matter of salary to be settled and not one of them had inquired whether they were being engaged to play a ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... boundary of the State. Congress, deeming these claims unreasonable, provided by the act of May 4, 1858, to which I have just referred, for the admission of the State on an equal footing with the original States, but "upon the fundamental condition precedent" that a majority of the people thereof, at an election to be held for that purpose, should, in place of the very large grants of public lands which they had demanded under the ordinance, accept such grants as had been made to Minnesota and other new States. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... in the world dearer to me than it, and secondly since such a year, I have never lain down to sleep upon assured provision; withal hath He never let me lack aught. As for the third prayer, I trust that He will vouchsafe me that also, even as He hath granted the two precedent, for right Bountiful and Beneficent is His Godhead, and Allah have ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... the quiet little village of Cardiff, which lies in the valley about twelve miles south of Syracuse, was thrown into an excitement without precedent, by the report that a human body had been exhumed in a petrified state, the colossal dimensions of which had never been the fortune of the inhabitants of the little village to behold, and the magnitude of which was positively beyond ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... upon hearing this remark, lowered his head and gave himself to protracted reflection. "You're indeed grown dull!" he cried; "why you've a precedent ready at hand to suit your case! Cousin Lin's birthday affords a precedent, and what you did in former years for cousin Lin, you can in this instance likewise do for cousin Hseh, and it will ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Although black WAVES were restricted somewhat in specialty assignments and a certain amount of separate quartering within integrated barracks prevailed at some duty stations, the Special Programs Unit came to consider the WAVE program, which established a forceful precedent for the integration of male recruit training, its most important wartime breakthrough, crediting Captain McAfee and her unbending insistence on equal ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... stand made at Gaeta could only result in what Lord John Russell called a useless effusion of blood; nevertheless it seems to have been prompted by a real belief that Francis would still recover his kingdom. The precedent of his father's return from Gaeta may have strengthened the King's illusion; every day he received highly-coloured reports of a gathering reaction, and as the French fleet in the bay prevented Admiral Persano from attacking from the sea, he believed that the time which ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... good society, and the general exhilaration that prevailed in our party, I was far from being perfectly happy. To own the truth, I had left my heart in Picardie. I do not say I was in love; I am far from certain that there is any precedent for a pocket-handkerchief's being in love at all, and I am quite sure that the sensations I experienced were different from those I have since had frequent occasion to hear described. The circumstances which called them forth ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... forget the misery of a whole year; preaching to them not to steal and at the same time stripping them of everything; and saying to them: "It seems to me that if I were the people I should be virtuous"? It is from England that we obtain the precedent which husbands should adopt in their houses. Those who have eyes ought to see that when the government is running smoothly the Whigs are rarely in power. A long Tory ministry has always succeeded an ephemeral Liberal cabinet. The orators of a national party resemble ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... experiences of disappointments and failures and frustrated plans that are common to all humanity, and an essential part of its discipline, because I am a Christian man? Eliphaz may have meant that, but we know something far nobler. Again, I say, remember the conditions precedent. First of all, there must be the delight in God, and the desire towards Him, the submission of the will to Him, and the waiting before Him for guidance. I decree a thing—if I am a true Christian, and in the measure in which I am—only ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... renders it proof against the poison of the serpent. It remains for future investigation to determine how far this conjecture is founded in truth; and whether in the blood of the mongoos there exists any element or quality which acts as a prophylactic. Such exceptional provisions are not without precedent in the animal oeconomy: the hornbill feeds with impunity on the deadly fruit of the strychnos; the milky juice of some species of euphorbia, which is harmless to oxen, is invariably fatal to the zebra; and the tsetse fly, the pest of ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... all his splendid intellectual faculties developed, with his independence of judgment, and his acquired habit of thinking for himself instead of leaning on precedent and borrowed wisdom, rides the dummy Government class with whip and spur. He lays on the lash here and digs in the rowels there, goading on his steed in any direction that chances to suit his purpose. He naturally places personal ambition in front ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... her fate, and mine too, depended on the eccentricities of a jury, the chartered libertinism of an ermined judge, the humour of the law, on a series of points without precedent concerning which no monograph had as yet been written; and, as a last desperate resource, on the letters of a sympathetic British public in the penny papers. The penny papers, the criminal's latest ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... from Hell to punish Perjury! —Where's this perfidious Fair? this blushless Maid, That has by my Example broke her Vows? A Precedent that Fiends wou'd shame ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... it, but he'll learn. If, following precedent, I become your successor, he will be of great help ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... them are mere goody-goodies. Goodness, in its popular British sense of self-denial, implies that man is vicious by nature, and that supreme goodness is supreme martyrdom. Not sharing that pious opinion, I have not given countenance to it in any of my plays. In this I follow the precedent of the ancient myths, which represent the hero as vanquishing his enemies, not in fair fight, but with enchanted sword, superequine horse and magical invulnerability, the possession of which, from the vulgar ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... indignant Chapterhouse were only prevailed upon to overlook the crime of insulting their released prisoner by the full repentance of this woman. But "the Law" had heard her too, and it laid its hand promptly on the two accomplices. The canons instantly objected, and a valuable precedent was created by the decision of the King, before whom the final appeal of the case was laid. By the royal charter, signed in February 1395, the full privileges of the canons were upheld. The proces-verbal ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... any thing of the gestation of an elephant."] took the wrong, the pedantic, and the unstatesmanlike side of the question,—while in all these indications of the spirit of that profession, and of its propensity to tie down the giant Truth, with its small threads of technicality and precedent, we perceive the danger to be apprehended from the interference of such a spirit in politics, on the other side, arrayed against these petty tactics of the Forum, we see the broad banner of Constitutional ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... national and party politics whenever practicable. To bind oneself to follow the political dictation of Leo the Thirteenth, and to consider such obedience to the Pope as indispensable to salvation, would be to create a precedent. Pius the Ninth was no statesman at all, and there are plenty of instances in history of Popes whose political advice would have been ruinous, if followed, though it was often formulated more authoritatively and more dictatorially than the injunctions from time to time imparted to Catholics ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... address was moved by the Duke of Somerset, and seconded by Lord Seaford. The Duke of Wellington fully concurred in the expression of congratulation to her majesty upon the alliance which had been announced to the country. But, his grace continued, every precedent of the reign of George III. had been followed in this matter except one, and that was the declaration that this prince was a Protestant. He knew the prince was a Protestant; but as this was a Protestant state, the fact that the prince was a Protestant ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... wise with the brooding, mystical wisdom of the Canyon in the starlight. You have intimated to me several times that law was not my end. You are right, as usual. Law has its face forever turned backward. It is searching always for precedent rather than justice. A man who is going into politics should be ever facing the future. He should use the past only in helping him to avoid mistakes in going forward. And, perhaps I am wrong. I am willing to admit that my unfortunate boyhood may have made me over inclined to brood, ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... these we meet sometimes in history, scandalous unto Christianity, and even unto humanity; whose verities not only, but whose relations, honest minds do deprecate. For of sins heteroclital, and such as want either name or precedent, there is ofttimes a sin even in their histories. We desire no records of such enormities; sins should be accounted new, that so they may be esteemed monstrous. They amit of monstrosity as they fall from their rarity; for men count it venial to err with their forefathers, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... respect. It is only when they preach or teach these preliminaries, these accessories, to be more important than Literature itself—it is only when they, owing all their excuse in life to the established daylight, din upon us that the precedent darkness claims precedence in honour, that one is driven to utter upon ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... young feller," objected Pap, as Shade turned away. It was against all reasonable mountain precedent to trade so quickly; but indeed Shade had merely done so with a view to forcing through what he well knew to be a ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... the withal hath He never let third prayer, I trust that me lack aught. As for the He will vouchsafe me that third prayer, I trust that also, even as He hath he will vouchsafe me that granted the two others, also, even as He hath for He is bountiful and granted the two precedent, excellently beneficient. And for right Bountiful and may God have mercy on Beneficient is His Godhead, him who saith: and Allah have ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... with England, and the Jeffersonian Democracy with France. The Federalists, who distrusted the sweeping abstractions of the French Revolution, and clung to the conservative notions of a checked and balanced freedom, inherited from English precedent, were accused of monarchical and aristocratic leanings. On their side they were not slow to accuse their adversaries of French atheism and French Jacobinism. By a singular reversal of the natural order of things the strength of the Federalist ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... this. You see, it won't ever do for me, a brigadier in the regular army, to preside over that infant court-martial—there isn't any precedent for it, don't you see. Very well. I will go on examining authorities and reporting progress until she is well enough to get me out of this scrape by presiding herself. Do you ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... manoeuvres of which I was the victim, held the ministers in execration, clearly perceiving they were obedient to a foreign impulse, and the vile agents of people, who, in making them act, kept themselves concealed; they were moreover afraid my case would have dangerous consequences, and be made a precedent for the purpose of establishing ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... was clear. Umluana was defying world law. If he got away with it, some larger and more dangerous nation might follow his precedent. And the ...
— The Green Beret • Thomas Edward Purdom
... Furthermore, no two of the canvases would meet exactly the same conditions and, as a result of the changes in light and atmospheric effects, the conditions would be subject to continual change. Finally, they were obliged to work without precedent. It was true that the early Italians had done murals for the open air, but no ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... on the other hand, have anticipated, that in proportion to the strength of character required for the effort, and to the absence of distracting sentiments, whether respect for precedent, or affection for ideal beauty, would be the energy exhibited in the pursuit of the special objects which the youths proposed to themselves, and their ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... at least in the abstract. Only when we come to the application is there opportunity for difference. The third postulate, demanded alike by justice and humanity, is the establishment of some rule or precedent by which the recurrence of such a barbarous duel shall be prevented. It will not be enough to obtain a guaranty for Germany; there must be ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... the requirements would bring the same gift to the obedient as the disciples had received; for it would make them disciples also. But, while repentance and baptism which presupposed faith were the normal, precedent conditions of the Spirit's bestowal, the case of Cornelius, where the Spirit was given before baptism, forbids the attempt to link the rite and the divine ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... was the indisputable fact that the Prince's mother had married an American, thereby establishing a precedent behind which no constitutional obstacle could thrive, and had lived very happily with the gentleman in spite of the critics. Moreover, she had met him while sojourning on American soil, and that was certainly an excellent augury for the success of the present enterprise. What could be ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... laws of God. It has supplied Joseph Smith with a warrant for polygamy in the social usages of the Arab sheiks three thousand years ago. It has opened a sacred refuge for every lie and wrong; no wildest form of which could fail to find some precedent within these Hebrew histories, which tell the story of a people's upward growth from savagery. It has furnished an arsenal stocked with proof texts, from which, through many generations, priests and doctors have armed themselves ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... is said to have found its way into a catalogue of works upon natural history; with which precedent in my favour, and pending the inquiries of naturalists, ratcatchers, and farmers into the history of the above-named formidable invader, I hope MR. HIBBERD will have no objection to my intruding a bibliographical curiosity under the convenient head he has ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various
... to-day can hardly imagine it, that their sole equipment for initiating the career of the human race was that peculiar faculty which made them human—the capacity of man for binding time; we know that they actually did that work of initiation, without any guidance or example, maxim or precedent; and we know that they were able to do it just because the power of initiation—the power to originate—is ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... with all my gifts and glories, And even preach to unconverted Tories, That the fixed system that our land inherits, Viewed from a certain standpoint, has its merits. I'd guard the laws like any Radical, And keep each precedent, however small, However subtle, misty, dusty, dreamy, Lest man by chance should look at me and see me; Lest men should ask what madman made me lord Of English ploughshares and the English sword; Lest ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... mistakes," replied Jim, "and some of them have been expensive ones in lives and money. Many of our engineering problems are entirely new and we have to solve them without precedent. The punishment for a bad guess in engineering is always sure and hard. One can make a bad political ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... forthwith began "Yet in my mortal swathing, I ascend To higher regions, and am hither come Through the fearful agony of hell. And, if so largely God hath doled his grace, That, clean beside all modern precedent, He wills me to behold his kingly state, From me conceal not who thou wast, ere death Had loos'd thee; but instruct me: and instruct If rightly to the pass I tend; thy words The way ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... had now descended the terrace, and were every moment expecting to find themselves once more face to face with British troops, when something occurred which is always occurring when a civilised force, with its time-honoured precedent, is dealing with a savage race that acts on its own initiative—the unexpected happened—the inevitable slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. The British, thinking that their work was over, left their cover and rushed towards the various inlets ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... Church of Rome send her priests to the altar in habiliments that were fashionable before the fall of the Roman Empire, in token of her immovable conservatism? And, lastly, does not the Law, lumbering on in the wake of progress, symbolise its subjection to precedent by head-gear reminiscent of the days ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... rule, apparently an invention of Collado's, has no precedent in Rodriguez or in linguistic derivation. The n in this construction is the contracted form of the classical mu, the source for what Collado calls ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... and the supremacy of justice, in its methods of procedure, in the grounds and reasons of its conclusion. That his authority was greatly influential in fixing the true constitutional relations of the Chief-Justice to the Senate, and establishing a precedent of procedure not easily to be subverted; that it was felt, throughout the trial, with persuasive force, in the maintenance of the judicial nature of the transaction; and that it never went a step beyond the office which belonged to him—of presiding ...
— Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase - Delivered by William M. Evarts before the Alumni of - Dartmouth College, at Hanover • William M. Evarts
... extreme agony. The Soubervies confessed, and indeed, exulted in their act. At their trials they obtained the highest possible characters. It was shown that they had been actuated solely by superstition, and it was urged that they only followed the highest ecclesiastical precedent. The jury recommended them to mercy, and they were only sentenced to pay twenty-five francs a year to the husband of the victim, and to be imprisoned for ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... the authority of English statutes. The pleas against them advanced by Otis took cognizance of the fact that the Writs were irreconcilable with the charter of the Massachusetts Colony, that English precedent for their enforcement had no application in America, and that taxation by the Motherland and compulsory acts of the nature of the Writs did open violence to the rights and liberties of the people and were inherently arbitrary and despotic, being imposed without the consent ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... man who has a tear for the many miseries incident to humanity feel for a family illustrious as any in Europe, and unfortunate beyond historic precedent; and let every Briton (and particularly every Scotsman) who ever looked with reverential pity on the dotage of a parent, cast a veil over the fatal mistakes of the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... passing of such an act is not consistent with the really extraordinary and tender conscience of a true modern politician. But in answer to this, I think I can plead the strongest plea in nature, and that is called precedent, I think; which I take thus from the South-Sea: One man, by the very nature of that subscription, must naturally pray for the temporal damnation of another man in his fortune, in order for gaining his own salvation in it; yea, even though he ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... displayed by Governor Cleveland in thus vetoing a measure in which so large a number of his political supporters might be supposed to feel so deep an interest, this is not the place to speak. But it is creditable to him as a lawyer that alone without a single precedent to guide him, relying upon his own judicial sense, and rejecting the opinion of a former Attorney-General, he challenged "the validity of this appropriation under that section of the Constitution." The Protectory, he says, "appears ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... which affected Charleston, S.C., in 1886 had no corresponding precedent in that section, nor has it been followed by a similar disturbance. Regardless of the terrible experience of 1886, the government has now in course of construction at Charleston a navy-yard, and a great dry-dock, costing many millions of ...
— The American Type of Isthmian Canal - Speech by Hon. John Fairfield Dryden in the Senate of the - United States, June 14, 1906 • John Fairfield Dryden
... business with the Duke of York, which was very little, only here I do hear the Duke of York tell how Sir W. Pen's impeachment was brought into the House of Lords to-day; and spoke with great kindness of him: and that the Lords would not commit him till they could find precedent for it, and did incline to favour him. Thence to the King's playhouse, and there saw a piece of "Beggar's Bush," which I have not seen some years, and thence home, and there to Sir W. Pen's and supped and sat talking there late, having no where else to go, and ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... title of The Passionate Pilgrim." On the other hand, Mr. Humphreys maintains that "Jaggard, at any rate, had very good taste. This is partly seen in the choice of a title. Few books have so charming a name as The Passionate Pilgrim. It is a perfect title. Jaggard also set up a good precedent, for this collection was published a year before England's Helicon, and, of course, very many years before any authorized collection of Shakespeare's 'Poems' was issued. We see in The Passionate Pilgrim a forerunner of The ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... possess also the German answer, signed by Major-General Hopfer. It is a necessary supplement to von Bissing's unctuous literature. Major-General Hopfer calls the resolution "an act of arrogance without precedent." According to him, "the state of affairs, clearly and simply, is this: the military authority commands, the municipality has to obey. If it fails to do so it will have to support the heavy consequences." A fine of 200,000 marks is exacted from the town for its refusal, ...
— Through the Iron Bars • Emile Cammaerts
... writer on the strength of this document. Now this judge was justly punished by his superior, because confession is so sacred that even that which is destined to constitute the confession should be wrapped in eternal silence. In accordance with this precedent, the following judgment, reported in the 'Traite des Confesseurs', was given by Roderic Acugno. A Catalonian, native of Barcelona, who was condemned to death for homicide and owned his guilt, refused to confess when the hour of punishment arrived. However strongly pressed, he resisted, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... honor! Not being yet remunerated on account of ring and verbal message duly delivered, commercial precedent was all on my side that I should retain further article of value pending ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... Excellent, and Most Potent Prince, our dear and well-beloved Brother and Cousin! At the same Time that we have been told of your Majesty's great Goodness towards your Subjects, and the Precedent you have given of an extraordinary Clemency, in granting them your general Amnesty (some few only excepted, of those whom the Blood of their King, and that of his People, cry aloud to Heaven for Revenge against). We could not but let your Majesty know, that we ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... The second condition precedent to the application of the sanctions is the determination of the aggressor.[2] And in any case the determination by the Council as to which State is the aggressor must have taken place before the sanctions ...
— The Geneva Protocol • David Hunter Miller
... anomalous and the most vulgar. Why he is anomalous need not be explained, but the essence of his vulgarity lies in his entire absence of a sanctioning background. It is not, when all is said, so strange a matter that anyone reared in an atmosphere of historic ceremonial and precedent should betray an inherent leaning toward shams and vanities. But if there is anything that we Americans, as a race, are forever volubly extolling, it is our immunity from all such drawbacks. And yet I will venture ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... believe, if such perfect happiness is once felt by good people (to the wicked it never comes), its sweet effect is never wholly lost. Whatever trials follow, whatever pains of sickness or shades of death, the glory precedent still shines through, cheering the keen anguish, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... pleasant things merely, or such as the audience will assent to; and I resolve, accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself. They have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am determined that they shall have me, though I bore them beyond all precedent. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... small settlement, dispatched a fellow being, and left my heroine alone in the company of an escaped convict who has just developed insanity as a new social quality. My object in thus digressing is to confer with the reader in regard to the evolution of this story,—a familiarity not without precedent, as I might prove from most of the old Greek comedies, whose parabasis permits the poet to mingle freely with the dramatis personae, to address the audience and descant at length in regard to himself, his play, and ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... convoy any articles subject to capture, was sufficient; and that the belligerent would in that case have no right to search. Great Britain replied that the right of search rested upon longstanding common consent, and precedent, and that it could not be taken from her against her will by any process instituted by another state. The Danish ships of war being instructed to use force against search, two hostile collisions followed, in one of which several men were killed and wounded, and the Danish frigate was taken into ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... beaming sardonically down at you. What are you to do? If you go out you may be seen. Half a dozen of your men may be mown down by a machine gun. You will be blamed and will blame yourself for not having decided to remain behind the parapet. If you do not go out you may set a precedent, and night after night the work will be postponed, till at last it is too late, and the Hun has got through, and raided the trench. If you hesitate or ask advice you are lost. You have to make up your mind in an instant, and to stand by it. If you waver ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for, though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free Governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... made it an express stipulation, contrary to all precedent, that she was to accompany the happy pair on their bridal tour. Miss Oleander's ante-nuptial objections had been faint; Mrs. Walraven, less scrupulous, turned upon her husband at the eleventh hour, just previous to starting, and insisted ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... knows all of the finer points. Lord knows," he went on, "if the law were a simple matter of behaving as it states, we'd not have this tremendous burden. But the law is subject to interpretation and change and argument and precedent—Precedent? Um, here we may have an interesting angle, Brennan. I must look ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... demesne. The burgesses, however, did not sit with the knights of shires, but apart by themselves, and, through loyalty or obsequiousness, assessed themselves in a contribution nearly one third greater than that granted by the barons and knights. The convenient precedent was not overlooked, and it became henceforth customary to expect the like liberality from subsequent parliaments. At this period, also, the principal divisions of the city were first denominated wards; these wards were presided over by an alderman, assisted by a ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... transcends us [in natural science, as he explains elsewhere]. This is the method of defining everything and proving everything. . . A fine method, but impossible; since it is evident that the first terms that we wish to define, suppose precedent terms necessary for their explanation—and that the first propositions that we wish to prove, suppose others which precede them; and so it is clear we can never arrive at absolutely first principles. In pushing ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... lines, Ovid's note began and ended. Mrs. Gallilee's maid—deeply interested in an appointment which was not without precedent in her own experience—ventured on an expression of sympathy, before she returned to the servants' hall. "Please to excuse me, Miss; I hope Mr. Ovid isn't ill? He looked sadly pale, I thought. Allow me to give you your hat." Carmina thanked her, ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... House just now. BONNER LAW leads off with demand for judicial inquiry into "the Plot." Fact that its appointment would establish novel precedent in constitutional procedure adds interest to situation. PREMIER, with emphatic thump of the table that reminds it of GLADSTONE in his prime, stands by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... others who, though not unacquainted with the principles which should guide them in their conduct, are yet often at fault upon questions of detail, and sometimes commit errors, which are the more excusable that absolute rules, deduced from precedent and established by practice alone could set them right, that this code of Modern Etiquette has been prepared. To them it is offered as supplying a need which it is their misfortune, rather than their fault, to experience, ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... of situations where law and fact are at variance, replied by hanging a hostage. The regent was now forced to risk a battle in the hope of saving Berwick, and he marched southwards, towards Berwick, with a large army. Edward, following the precedent of Dupplin, occupied a favourable position at Halidon Hill, with his front protected by a marsh. He drew up his line in the order that had been so successful at Dupplin, and the same result followed. Each successive body of Scottish pikemen was cut down by a shower of English arrows, ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... Materiality and Death encourages in mankind the Hope of an existence beyond the impenetrable veil of physical limitation. And this at any rate may be admitted, namely, that that dynamic condition in which materiality arises is also the condition-precedent of Tridimensionality, of Force, of Time, and of Mutation. But we cannot thus account for ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... of the remaining terms. The exemption from duties was wise, if inconsistent in a protectionist government, and the exemption from regulation of rates until ten per cent was earned had a precedent in a clause in the General Railway Act, not repealed until 1888, exempting all roads from such regulation until fifteen per cent on the capital invested had been earned. The exemption from taxation, ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... sacred calls of my country." He referred to the "kind of power, the exercise of which cost one king of England his head and another his throne." Such language, publicly spoken, was new. His argument was, to Englishmen, irrefutable. No precedent, no English statute, could stand against the Constitution. "This writ, if declared legal, totally annihilates" the privacy of the home. "Custom-house officers might enter our houses when they please, and we could not resist them. Upon bare suspicion ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... to this lonely prairie wilderness, and the red man its child. In a hazy way came the question whether after all it were not foolhardy to remain here now, to dare that invisible, intangible something before which, almost in panic, the others had fled. To be sure, precedent was with him, logic; but—of a sudden—but a minute had passed—his arms tightened; involuntarily he held his breath. Hans Mueller had been moving on and on; another half minute and he would have been behind the base of the hill out of sight; when, as from the turf at one's feet there springs ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... sharply pointed roofs. To relieve the monotony of the horizontalism, a simple arcading has been inserted in the wall spaces above the central window, and above the aisle windows (plain lancets) on the right and left. Independently of the question of precedent, the absence of a doorway in this front is quite intelligible at the present day, when the church wall almost touches the narrow public pavement, and the close street of lofty business houses allows no room for perspective, or ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... the seizure of the Boy-Joneses, or remaining portion of the population ambitious of Court Favour, will be in itself sufficient to defend our Island from foreign invasion. But I tell those jackanapeses, sir, that while I admit the wisdom of the Boy Jones precedent, of kidnapping such youths after the expiration of their several terms of imprisonment as vagabonds; hurrying them on board ship; and packing them off to sea again whenever they venture to take the air on shore; ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... enormously unusual; a deed assuredly without precedent in the annals of the Five Towns. And he, Denry, had done it. The cost was prodigious, ridiculously and dangerously beyond his means. He could find no rational excuse for the deed. But he had done it. And men again wondered. Men had wondered when he led the Countess out to waltz. ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... U-53 were intended as a demonstration to test American feeling as to whether Germany could attack on this side of the water munition and other vessels bound for Allied ports. It appeared a bold attempt to create a new precedent by overriding one laid down in 1870 by President Grant, who ruled that American waters must not be used by other nations for belligerent purposes. Outside the three-mile limit, however, German submarines could operate ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... advice in national and party politics whenever practicable. To bind oneself to follow the political dictation of Leo the Thirteenth, and to consider such obedience to the Pope as indispensable to salvation, would be to create a precedent. Pius the Ninth was no statesman at all, and there are plenty of instances in history of Popes whose political advice would have been ruinous, if followed, though it was often formulated more authoritatively and more dictatorially than the injunctions ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... doubtful morality, religion came forward with a sweet but serious smile, and said to her companion, "My dear friend, or sister, in this case I permit you." And on the contrary, if religion felt over sensitive or scrupulous, law had fifty arguments of safety, and precedent, and high authority to justify her. But, indeed, we may observe, that in a religious attorney these illiberal scruples do not often occur. Mr. M'Slime knew the advantages of religion too well, to feel that contraction ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... indifferent hopes of success. A few days ago he sent me his correspondence with Senor Posada, who observes that the vice-queens alone had the privilege of the entree, and seems to hesitate a good deal as to the advisableness of granting a permission which might be considered a precedent for others. However, I think he is too amiable to resist our united entreaties. I hold out as an argument, that C—-n, being the duplicado of the queen herself, my visit is equal to that of the vice-queen, which ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... established in the Duchy of Milan. All his subsequent troubles arose from this transaction. Charles came, conquered, and returned to France, disturbing the political equilibrium of the Italian States, and founding a disastrous precedent for future foreign interference. His successor in the French kingdom, Louis XII., believed he had a title to the Duchy of Milan through his grandmother Valentina, daughter of Gian Galeazzo Visconti. The claim was not ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... me know?" Mr. Longdon reflected. "I'm sure I can't say—it's a sort of thing for which I haven't a measure or a precedent. In my time women didn't declare their passion. I'm thinking of what the meaning is of Mrs. Brookenham's wanting you—as I've heard ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... the best. Several answers have also been sent to the second part of the question, and all agree that the gentleman on the left had no shadow of excuse for causing the lady's nose to rest in the jelly. Such a proceeding is totally without precedent in ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... clearly enough that there must be some covert motive for such deep and unaccountable anxiety: he dexterously set forth the various arguments that might be urged by government against a man of Dalton's character; the ill example, the dangerous precedent of one so circumstanced taking his place amongst honourable men, and so forth; mooting a variety of points, in order that he might judge of Sir Robert's object by his ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... more advantage, upon a very obvious account. It is a pity this admirable invention has not been better cultivated, so as to grow by this time into general imitation, when such an authority serves it for a precedent. Nor have my endeavours been wanting to second so useful an example, but it seems there is an unhappy expense usually annexed to the calling of a godfather, which was clearly out of my head, as it is very ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... branch, the seed Of evil, scattered long ago, will sprout And bloom carnation thoughts that dull the soul With subtle sweetness! Oh! coward that I am! Bound down, as to a rock, to form and place, By iron chains of worldly precedent, While my desires like eagles tear my breast, And make of me a base Prometheus. O, God! I married all the family of sins, When I espoused the pleasantest; I am Become a liar through my lechery, A thief of reputation through my cowardice, And—puh! the rest but follow in the train ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... church's duty not to consist only in bearing witness unto the truth, and justifying Christ's confessors and martyrs, in their faithful adherence unto it, but also in testifying against sin, and condemning the wicked for their wickedness; for which, also, we have the precedent of the reformed and covenanted church of Scotland, both before and during the defection and wickedness of the forementioned period. Likeas, the presbytery did, and hereby do declare and ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... oftentimes had said— Write what thou seest in letters large of gold, That livid are my votaries to behold, And in a moment made alive and dead. Once in thy heart my sovran influence spread A public precedent to lovers told; Though other duties drew thee from my fold, I soon reclaim'd thee as thy footsteps fled. And if the bright eyes which I show'd thee first, If the fair face where most I loved to stay, Thy young heart's icy hardness when I burst, Restore ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... of the rules of Plato, Aristotle, Phalereus, Cicero, Hermogenes, Longinus. To which poetry would be made subsequent, or, indeed, rather precedent, as being less subtile and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate. I mean not here the prosody of a verse, which they could not but have hit on before among the rudiments of grammar; but that sublime art which in Aristotle's Poetics, in ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... like Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina were also in debt for similar amounts. Everybody thought the resources of the United States were inexhaustible; and everybody seemed willing to tax future generations beyond all precedent in order to develop ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... which he turned to the Judge. "My Lord, we that are of counsel for the crown desire to do nothing that is hard where a person's life is at stake. We yield to the prisoner any indulgence for which your Lordship can find a precedent in your reading; but no more: and so we leave the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... extremely sorry to hear this, Copperfield,' said Mr. Spenlow. 'Extremely sorry. It is not usual to cancel articles for any such reason. It is not a professional course of proceeding. It is not a convenient precedent at all. Far from it. At ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... revision of the commercial treaties. The Tsung-Li-Yamen was to be reformed and the ceremonial for the reception of foreign ministers modified as the powers should demand. Compliance with these terms was declared to be a condition precedent to the arrangement of a time limit to the occupation of Peking and of the provinces by ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... surprise for the lady of the Manor. The clergyman of her own parish,—a man, who by all accepted rule and precedent ought to have been after her at once, asking for subscriptions to this fund and that fund, toadying her for her position, and begging for her name and support, had not even noticed her absence from divine service on Sundays! She did not know whether to be relieved or dissatisfied. Such ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... you have drunk about two gallons of unwholesome liquids, and eaten a pound or two of unwholesome solids. These medicines have co-operated with the malady. The disorder lies, not in the hemorrhage, but in the precedent extravasation that is a drain on the system; and how is the loss to be supplied? Why, by taking a little more nourishment than before; there is no other way; and probably Nature, left to herself, might have increased your appetite to meet the occasion. But those two worthies ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... for there were among the Justices several of the supporters of the Sons of Liberty; and their refusal, under their own hands, to quarter the soldiers in town would justify a removal. He recommended that this reform should be by Act of Parliament, and that by beginning in the County of Suffolk a precedent might be established for a like exercise of authority as to other places. Such an act, with a royal instruction to the Governor as to appointments, was looked upon as of such value for the restoration of authority, that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... face was apoplectic; he was leaning forward, trying to speak, but he was too choked for utterance. Nathaniel Puntz looked as though a wet sponge had been dashed upon his sleek countenance. The other directors stared, dumfounded. This case had no precedent in their experience. They were at a loss how to ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... in itself, isn't it?" said his father. "It is an interesting fact, however, that Latin and the Latin text continued to be the language of the printed book for some time; this was not only because of an established precedent, but because the Renaissance in Italy revived an interest in classic literature. But by and by people demanded books in their native tongue. They wished to read something besides the classics—literature that was alive and a part of their own era. The written novello, or story, began to ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... began again, and the woman used every effort to make herself understood. The governor did his best to understand her, but no progress was made toward comprehension. She even followed Cayamo's precedent in drawing a line on the floor from north to south, designating the southern end as Tupoge, the northern end as Puye, for thus much she had kept in memory. Then she pointed out on that line the spot where Topanashka had been killed, and said, "Uan save," and made the gesture-sign for killing. ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... this precedent as an excuse for digressing at a moment when I have burned down a small settlement, dispatched a fellow being, and left my heroine alone in the company of an escaped convict who has just developed insanity as ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... Cynthia Greene, it now remained for the Mystic Seven to turn their attention to the matter of Maudie Heywood. The situation was growing acute. Maudie had been ten days at the Grange, and in that brief space of time she was already beginning to establish a precedent. She was a tall, slim girl, with earnest eyes, a decided chin, and an intellectual forehead. Work, with a capital W, was her fetish. She sat during classes with her gaze focused on her teacher, and a look of intelligent interest that surpassed everyone else in the Form. Miss Gibbs turned instinctively ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... liability of the State, under the operation of the charter of the bank, attached so soon or whenever the bonds were legally executed to the bank, and the execution of the mortgages was neither a condition precedent to the pledge of the faith of the State, nor the condition on which the State bonds were to be executed and delivered.' 'It does not appear from the facts that the bonds were sold for less than their par value. Held that the sale was neither illegal ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... head, knowing now what Erickson was driving at. "Well, I may as well be frank. I'm—I committed suicide. That's how drunk I was. There hasn't been a suicide in the Miller family in centuries. It took a skinful of liquor to set the precedent." ...
— The Day Time Stopped Moving • Bradner Buckner
... sundered social poles approaching in its favor, he apparently found himself without standing for opposition. At any rate, the papers won instant appreciation from his editor and publisher, and from the readers of their periodical, which they expected to prosper beyond precedent in its circulation. But those were days of simpler acceptance of the popular rights of newspapers than these are, when magazines strictly guard their vested interests against them. 'The New York Times' and the 'St. Louis Democrat' ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... evil stroke when Burke, whose whole soul was bound up in order, peace, and gently enlarged precedent, found himself face to face with the portentous man-devouring Sphinx. He who could not endure that a few clergymen should be allowed to subscribe to the Bible instead of to the Articles, saw the ancient ...
— Burke • John Morley
... have pitched himself upon the floor and bellowed. For, a soul of chicken and wine, lightly elated, is easily dashed; and if he had but said to Lord Suckling that, it might as well be deferred, the thing would have become a precedent, and his own debt might have been held back. He went on saying, as he rushed forward alone: "Never mind, Suckling. Oh, hang it! put it in your pocket;" and the imperative necessity for talking, and fancying what was adverse to fact, enabled him to feel for a time as if he had really acted ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was against all precedent to go to sea without looking at the ship, Bush and I appointed ourselves an examining committee for the party, and walked down to the wharf where she lay. The captain, a bluff Americanised German, met us at ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... the river that the very tradition had been lost. The appearance of the being that descended upon them and demanded inflexibly to be taken up to Patusan was discomposing; his insistence was alarming; his generosity more than suspicious. It was an unheard-of request. There was no precedent. What would the Rajah say to this? What would he do to them? The best part of the night was spent in consultation; but the immediate risk from the anger of that strange man seemed so great that at last a cranky dug-out was got ready. The women shrieked ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... look sick. I hope you'll get the V.C. or something—the Head'll be sure to give us a half-holiday. Young Smith, who pretends to read the Head's newspaper when he leaves it lying about—you know how he swanks about it—said the Precedent or General Joffre had given a French kid who was only fourteen and had enlisted and killed a lot of Huns, till they found him out and sent him back to school, a legion of honours or something. Smith said it was a medal; I said that ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... send her priests to the altar in habiliments that were fashionable before the fall of the Roman Empire, in token of her immovable conservatism? And, lastly, does not the Law, lumbering on in the wake of progress, symbolise its subjection to precedent by head-gear reminiscent of the ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... One precedent established, it was easy to make another. Tennessee was admitted in 1796, without scruple, on ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... had the satisfaction of seeing an object reared that bore in its outlines, a striking resemblance to a vinegar-cruet. There was less opposition to this model than to the windows; for the settlers were fond of novelty, and their steeple was without a precedent. ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... century and a half assumed the chances of rebellion and the certain perils of civil war, rather than submit to have Right infringed by Prerogative, and the scales of Justice made a cheat by false weights that kept the shape but lacked the substance of legitimate precedent. We are forced to think that there must be a bend sinister in the escutcheon of the descendants of such men, when we find them setting the form above the substance, and accepting as law that which is deadly to the spirit while it is true to the letter of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... seen that this would be no everyday affair, when the pilot, with difficulty, prevailed upon Tryphaena to undertake the office of herald, and propose a truce; so, when pledges of good faith had been given and received, in keeping with the ancient precedent she snatched an olive-branch from the ship's figurehead and, holding it out, advanced ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... Christ Church was significant. Men felt that the days of monasteries were past, and the Church was ready to welcome and to extend the New Learning. But his changes were a dangerous precedent; as Fuller says with his usual quaintness: "All the forest of religious foundations in England did shake, justly fearing the King would finish to fell the oaks, seeing the Cardinal began to cut the underwood." Henry, however, when he swept away the monasteries, ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... virtues, that it is apt to determine a man's sudden adhesion to an opinion, whether on a personal or impersonal matter, without leaving him time to consider his grounds. The adhesion is sudden and momentary, but it either forms a precedent for his line of thought and action, or it is presently seen to have been inconsistent with his true mind. This determination of partisanship by temper has its worst effects in the career of the public man, who is ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... bare Concealment of what was found, as in the former Case. Avarice presently treated this with Ridicule, called it a Distinction without a Difference, and absolutely insisted, that when once all Pretensions of Honour and Virtue were given up in any one Instance, that there was no Precedent for resorting to them upon a second Occasion. In short, poor Conscience had certainly been defeated in the Argument, had not Fear stept in to her Assistance, and very strenuously urged, that the real Distinction between the two Actions, ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... so frightful with the heartless and cruel insensibility of the son, that the sight chilled their blood. The sentiment was only the more common, from the silent but general conviction, that the unfeeling criminal must be permitted to escape. There was, indeed, no precedent for leading the child of a prince to the block, unless it were for an offence which touched the preservation of the father's interests. Much was said in maxims and apophthegms of the purity and necessity of rigid impartiality in administering the affairs of life, but neither had attained ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... Anglo-Indian fitness of things that the Governor-General should promulgate a justificatory manifesto. Of this composition it is unnecessary to say more than to quote Durand's observation that in it 'the words "justice and necessity" were applied in a manner for which there is fortunately no precedent in the English language,' and Sir Henry Edwardes' not less trenchant comment that 'the views and conduct of Dost Mahomed were misrepresented with a hardihood which a Russian statesman ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... and the other brethren. They decided the question whether it was necessary to be circumcised. See Acts 15, 1-31. The apostles were inspired, hence could have made the decision, without the assistance of the lay brethren; but it appears they desired no such prerogative. This precedent justifies the laity in being in council with the clergy for the purpose of deliberating on the most important ecclesiastical matters. Christians, in common, are called 'a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people,' and they are 'to show ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... and again, on investigation, be found to be only the English spirit shooting ahead faster than it can advance in England. When, in a particular matter, it appears as if England was coming to conform to American precedent, it is, in truth only that, having given the impulse to America, she herself is following with less speed than the younger runner, but with such ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... should, however, on the other hand, have anticipated, that in proportion to the strength of character required for the effort, and to the absence of distracting sentiments, whether respect for precedent, or affection for ideal beauty, would be the energy exhibited in the pursuit of the special objects which the youths proposed to themselves, and their success in ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... discontented nobles, won from his brother the affections of the young king, and believing every thing ripe for an attack on his usurped authority, he designed to bring forward in the ensuing parliament a proposal for separating, according to ancient precedent, the office of guardian of the king's person from that of protector of the realm, and for conferring upon himself the former. But he discovered too late that he had greatly miscalculated his forces; his proposal was not even permitted to come to a hearing. Having rendered himself further ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... one writing for which above all others Mr. Mill's disciples will love his memory is his essay "On Liberty." In this undertaking Mr. Mill followed the noble precedent of Locke, with greater largeness of view and perfection of work. Locke's four letters "Concerning Toleration" constitute a splendid manifesto of the Liberals of the seventeenth century. The principle, that the ends of political society are life, health, liberty, and immunity from harm, and not the ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... their guns. At the eviction a man had funked, frightened out of his seven senses. The police declined all responsibility, but offered to guard the farm for a shilling per man per day. MacAdam thought this proposal without precedent, and left the police to their own devices, driving along the twenty miles of hilly road, with sorry steeds that refused the last hill, so that the loads had to be pushed and carried up by the men. This was at eight or nine in the morning, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... fortune of the author to take part in a movement without precedent in the history of the world, and the incidents concurrent with, together with those subsequent to that movement, have furnished the material for this book. It has been the object of the writer to weave into the story of his actual experiences an account ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... have an undeniable freshness of outlook on the Roman alphabet. He treats it with a freedom and variety and a certain disregard of precedent—induced, perhaps, by his schooling in Blackletter—that often produces delightful, though sometimes, be it added, direful results. But if the extreme and bizarre forms be thrown aside the designer may ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... thing ought to be done and I think can be.' At the period of the session at which the Bill was introduced, the opposition of even half-a-dozen determined men could have at any stage achieved its ruin. Thanks, however, to the good feeling the precedent of the Act of 1903 and the admirably conciliatory temper displayed by the labourers themselves in their agitation had engendered, the Bill went triumphantly through and has been crowned with glory in its practical application. I never pass ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... swallow the information suavely by the help of a classical precedent, and said, with a gracious smile, "Then I perceive we must have played the part of AEneas and Anchises—" But before he had got so far, the idea had been quite too much for Dermot, who cried out, "Pick-a-back! With his boots sticking out on both sides! Thank you, Dora. Oh! my uncle, ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in Central America bestirred themselves to throw off the Mexican yoke. On July 1,1823, a Congress declared the region an independent republic under the name of the "United Provinces of Central America." In November of the next year, following the precedent established in Mexico, and obedient also to local demand, the new republic issued a constitution, in accordance with which the five little divisions of Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... that the general statute is sufficiently liberal to provide relief in all proper cases of destroyed United States bonds, and I believe that the act above referred to constitutes an evil precedent. It is not, however, so objectionable as to call for my formal disapproval, and I have allowed it to become a law under the constitutional provision, contenting myself with communicating to the Senate, in which the bill originated, my disapproval of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... creature symbolizes some of our human arts and initiations. Once organized by genius and consecrated by precedent, they become mighty elements in history, revelling amid the wealthy energy of life, exhausting the forces of the intellect, clipping the tendrils of affection, becoming colossal in the architecture of society and dorsal in its traditions, and tyrannizing with the heedless power of an element, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... events, a warning that youth must be served and that the doddering oldsters were to give place to those who could stand up under the stern and exacting tests of warfare. Such rash ardor was not according to precedent. Harrison promptly relieved the impetuous Croghan of his command and sent a colonel to replace him. But Croghan argued the point so eloquently that the stockade was restored to him next day and he won his chance to do or die. Harrison consolingly informed him that he was to retreat if attacked by ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... Bell had been in the habit of making such demands, the housekeeper would have continued to rebel. As it was, she had grave doubts of the wisdom of establishing such a dangerous precedent as compliance with the absurd request. But Raymond Mortimer's distress was so genuine, and the pleasure of the picnic so obviously rested on her surrender, that she made it, albeit slowly and with groans and dismal predictions. The boy's face ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... answered, considering the matter gravely. "Tell you what you do," he went on, "let the mule have his head! Let him go just where he wants to. It is the instinct of animals to follow precedent, same as men. A man will follow a cow path until it becomes a city street, and a cow, a horse, or a mule will follow a trail previously used—if only passed over once! Let the mule have his head, and he may take us to the place where ...
— The Boy Scout Camera Club - The Confession of a Photograph • G. Harvey Ralphson
... rather than to coin a new one, has only been done rarely. The Latin substitution of the combination th for the simple single [theta], was exceptionable. It was a precedent, however, which now begins to be ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... determine the nature of the voyage, to ascertain whether, by destination, by cargo, or by persons carried, the obligations of neutrality were being infringed. If there was reasonable cause for suspicion, the vessel, by accepted law and precedent, might be sent to a port of the belligerent, where the question was adjudicated by legal process; but the actual captor could not decide it on the spot. On the contrary, he was bound, to the utmost ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... traditional hero, Roque Guinart, who figures in the second part of Don Quixote. The revolt against the house of Austria in 1640, and the War of the Succession (1700-1714), gave a great stimulus to Catalan brigandage. But it was then put down in a way for which Italy offers no precedent. A country gentleman named Pedro Veciana, hereditary balio (military and civil lieutenant) of the archbishop of Tarragona in the town of Valls, armed his farm-servants, and resisted the attacks of the brigands. With the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... monarch who wore it more than three thousand years ago. The gold coins with the head of Alexander the Great are some of them so fresh one might think they were newer than much of the silver currency we were lately handling. As we have been quoting from the poets this morning, I will follow the precedent, and give some lines from an epistle of Pope to Addison after the latter had written, but not yet published, his Dialogue on Medals. Some of these lines have been lingering in my memory for a great many years, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... sense of danger was not so near as that of loneliness—of a pervading silence without precedent in her experience, as if its master's soul in flitting had, whatever Scripture may say, taken something out of the house with it. 'Lizabeth had known this kitchen for a score of years now; nevertheless, to-night it was unfamiliar, ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... as our intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger for the moral life. For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe without a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists. The philosopher, then, qua philosopher, is no better able to determine the best universe in the concrete emergency than other men. He sees, indeed, somewhat better than most men, what the question always is,—not ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... possibly the tomb of Khuithotpu at Saqqara; the Great Sphinx of Gizeh; a short inscription on the rocks of the Wady Maghara, which represents Zosiri (the same king of whom the priests of Khnumu in the Greek period made a precedent) working the turquoise or copper mines of Sinai; and finally the Step-Pyramid where ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... So I have rendered {tetraphaleron} which literally signifies having four cones. The cone was a tube into which the crest was inserted. The word quatre-crested may need a precedent for its justification, and seems to have a sufficient one in the cinque-spotted cowslip ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... perplexing question. The English law touching forgery became, at a later period, barbarously severe; but, in 1698, it was absurdly lax. The prisoner's offence was certainly not a felony; and lawyers apprehended that there would be much difficulty in convicting him even of a misdemeanour. But a recent precedent was fresh in the minds of all men. The weapon which had reached Fenwick might reach Duncombe. A bill of pains and penalties was brought in, and carried through the earlier stages with less opposition than might have been expected. Some Noes might perhaps be uttered; but no members ventured to say ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his dignified spouse swings slowly to and fro, conning the pages and the colored plates of the current fashion journal. Surely in the telltale word "rusticantur" you and I and the rest of human nature find a worthy precedent and much encouragement for our practice of loading up with plenty of good reading before we start for the ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... purpose of committing the nation to that theory. Its annexation was the prologue, as the Mexican war was the first act in the secession drama, and as the epilogue is the suppression of the rebellion on Texan soil. Texas is an exceptional case, and forms no precedent, and cannot be adduced as invalidating the general rule. Omitting Texas, the simple fact is, the States acquire all their sovereign powers by being States in the Union, instead of losing ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... things to say that an assailed boy could not have found, simply because of the mysteriousness of his impulses to himself. I understood no more than the people who called upon me to explain myself. There was no precedent. I verily believe mine was the only case of a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking a, so to speak, standing jump out of his racial surroundings and associations. For you must understand that there was no idea of any sort of "career" in my call. Of Russia or Germany there could ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... There is ample precedent, in this election year, for me to present you with a huge list of new proposals, knowing full well that there would not be any possibility of your passing them if ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Richard Nixon • Richard Nixon
... to do such a thing? It never had been done, of course, in all the world; but the essence and the object of the whole day's run were that it should defy all precedent. There were few people, however, of those on board who in their hearts dared harbor any hope; especially as the engine which was to be tried at this crucial moment was ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... way, crowding to applaud Coquelin cadet, Fragson, and other budding celebrities. It was here that the poets first had the idea of producing a piece in which rival cabarets were reviewed and laughingly criticised. The success was beyond all precedent, in spite of the difficulty of giving a play without a stage, without scenery or accessories of any kind, the interest centring in the talent with which the lines were declaimed by their authors, who next had the pleasant thought of passing in review the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... life. Neither had the outspoken, kind-hearted gentlewoman any particular application of her speech in her mind when she said sorrowfully—"Dear! dear! how grieved he would be if he knew how worn out you were, Miss Dora. He thought that his coming to the hospital would not only serve as a precedent, it would be the simplest, safest, least troublesome plan where he himself was concerned, though if he would have let me, I should have been only too glad to have turned my back on 'Robinson's' for a time, and done what I could for him. There is enough difference in our ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... similar action on the part of the Executive. In all such cases, it is the first step that is most difficult, and before making the one now proposed, you should, as I think, weigh well the importance of the precedent about to be established. No one can hold in greater respect than I do, the honorable gentleman who negotiated this treaty; but in thus attempting to substitute the executive will for legislative action, he seems to me to have ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... old Burgundian law, the right of female succession was not without precedent, the general inclination of popular sentiment was definitely against it; and while Helene by her father's will was authorized during her life to claim the rule of Gruyere, that will directed that his nephew Jean of the cadet branch of the family should succeed ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... of Continental Defense deplored the lack of precedent. But actually none was needed. You just don't drop four miles of dead or dying alien flesh on Seattle or any other part of a swarming homeland. You wait till it flies out over the ocean, if it will—the most commodious ...
— The Good Neighbors • Edgar Pangborn
... there were 80,000 incorrigible jacobins in England. Mr. Colquhoun is equally precise in the number of beggars, prostitutes, and thieves in the City of London. Mercetinus, who wrote under Lewis XV. seems to have afforded the precedent; he assures his readers, that by an accurate calculation there were 50,000 incorrigible atheists in the City of Paris! Atheism then may have been a co-cause of the French revolution; but it should not be burthened on ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Another] abbrev. In hackish acronyms this almost invariably expands to {Yet Another}, following the precedent set by UNIX 'yacc(1)' (Yet ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... a like sacrifice; and this he did on behalf of patrician and plebeian alike. Here the victorious general was to deposit his spoils, reaching the temple in the solemn procession of the triumphus, and wearing the ornamenta of the deity himself; for here, contrary to all precedent in the worship of Romans, there was an image of the god wrought in terra cotta and brought from Etruria.[505] It is in connection with such solemn events as these that we may find the origin of those ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... an alliance as debasing to a civilized lady. In their eyes, the Englishman was a barbarian; and though the Norman might well marry the Englishwoman, if she had beauty or wealth, it was a dangerous precedent to allow the Englishman to marry the Norman woman, and that woman a princess. Beside, there were those who coveted Edwin's broad lands; Roger de Montgomery, who already (it is probable) held part of ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... back drawing room, which was divided from the front by blue satin and white lace portieres. Her deadly pallid face gleamed out from the shadows in startling contrast to her jet black hair and the black dress which, against all precedent, she wore on this the ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... me proof and precedent Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, Stick in their numb'd and mortify'd bare arms Pins, wooden ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... a precedent which will last the men of Forty-Mile to the end of time,' he prophesied. Then he coiled the rope about his arm and led his followers out of doors, just in ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... I should say pleasant things merely, or such as the audience will assent to; and I resolve, accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself. They have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am determined that they shall have me, though I bore them beyond all precedent. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... exit is always at hand to furnish the means of flight from the dungeon or other imminent peril. The dread of ridicule, that conscience of all poets who write for the world of fashion, is very visible in the care with which he avoids all bolder flights as yet unsanctioned by precedent, and abstains from everything supernatural, because such a public carries not with it, even to the fantastic stage of the opera, a belief in wonders. Yet this fear has not always served as a sure guide to Metastasio: besides such an extravagant use of the "aside," ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... against Bolivar. The vice-president was forced to resign, and Arismendi was elected in his stead. His first action was to appoint Marino head of the army of the East. The substitution of a military president for a civilian was a vicious precedent which, unfortunately, has been followed in many instances by the Spanish American countries. Arismendi proved, nevertheless, a good vice-president, and retained the cabinet appointed by Bolivar. Affairs were in this condition when news arrived of ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... distinctions of good society, and the general exhilaration that prevailed in our party, I was far from being perfectly happy. To own the truth, I had left my heart in Picardie. I do not say I was in love; I am far from certain that there is any precedent for a pocket-handkerchief's being in love at all, and I am quite sure that the sensations I experienced were different from those I have since had frequent occasion to hear described. The circumstances which called them forth ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... the acceptance of Negroes in the Union army camps as contraband, on the ground that they were being used by the Confederates to build fortifications and the like and, if returned to the seceding territory, would be of further use in opposing the Federal troops. General Butler set this precedent when he was in charge of the forces at Fortress Monroe. At first there was some hesitation as to whether the administration should adopt such a policy. Butler's course, however, was approved by Cameron, the Secretary of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... written his Sword and Buckler in 1602 (if it were the same man), he still called his Muse "young" in 1613. I cannot call to mind any precedent for the form of stanza adopted by him, consisting, as it does, of six ten-syllable lines, rhyming alternately, followed by a twelve-syllable couplet. None of the other stanzas contain personal matter; the grief of the author of Great Britain's Sun's-set seems as artificial as might be expected; ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... what had happened. Yancoo's reputation had been grimly asserted. Every one now dreaded him anew. Again he was king. Though it was contrary to all precedent to point the death-bone at a member of the tribe, yet had Yan-coo made a law unto himself and his own justification, and the proudest testimonial to his skill was ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... henceforth he must live by it or else begin life over again in another sphere. At all events, for a term of years, his personal prosperity depends upon the use he can make of his hold upon the public goods. He is not individually to be blamed, perhaps, for he follows a precedent as widely recognized as it is universally pernicious. It is the system that is to be blamed, the general belief that a man can, and justly may, support himself by clinging to a set of principles of which he does not honestly ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... that a dangerous precedent would be established; that forest fires would be sure to originate from the locomotive's sparks, and that the Poquette woods were the center of the ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... without balloting. In the consciousness of his good intentions, and according to his way of thinking and the conception he had of himself, he believed that he deserved such a distinction, which, indeed, was not conformable to law or precedent. Consequently, when his suit was rejected, he fell into ill humor and disgust, vowed that he would never accept of any place, and, in order to render it impossible, procured the title of Imperial Councillor, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... 27, 1621, the House of Lords sentenced John Blount to pillory, imprisonment, and labour for life, for counterfeiting a Lord's protection. This was the first case of imprisonment beyond the session, by the House of Lords. The first precedent for their infliction of fines appears about two years afterwards, when they sentenced one Morley to pay 1,000l., and condemned him to the pillory for a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 576 - Vol. 20 No. 576., Saturday, November 17, 1832 • Various
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