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More "Precedent" Quotes from Famous Books



... hand, the interior was peopled by descendants of Ostrogothic tribes mingling with numberless local peoples. Whatever they touch is necessarily crude at first, but constantly gaining as they gain facility in working. A precedent of some kind they must have, and they find it close at hand in the Roman basilicas. Uncertain, from the result of woful experiments, of arches of great span, they pack their columns close together and surmount them with sturdy little arches that ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 04, April 1895 - Byzantine-Romanesque Windows in Southern Italy • Various

... come from the porphyry in the condition of carbonate of lead, chloride of silver, etc., then the nature of the deposition was quite different from that of the similar ones of Tybo, Eureka, Bingham, etc., which are plainly gossans, and indeed is without precedent. But if the process was similar to that in the Galena lead region, and the ores were originally sulphides, their formation should have continued and been ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various

... after much debate, which almost wrecked the constitution. The California representatives elected by the convention left for Washington, where they presented to Congress the constitution and the petition of the California settlers asking for admission as a State. There had never been a precedent for their act. Yet the settlers in California felt perfectly justified, since it was their only safeguard against the pro-slavery leaders who were bringing ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various

... 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 ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... submit. Away back from time unnumbered, the African peoples have known only fear as the governing power, and, from long acclimatization, the Portuguese might almost count as African. This man of a superior race came and set himself up in authority over them, in defiance of all precedent, law, everything; and they submitted with dull indifference. The sweets of freedom are not always appreciated by those who have known the easy luxury ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... professional sentiment which the sternest scientist need not be ashamed to acknowledge. And then, beyond that, his many talks with Klinker had invested the campaign for the reformatory with a warmth of meaning which was without precedent in his experience. This was, in fact, his first personal contact with the suffering and sin of the world, his first grapple with a social problem in the raw. Two years before, when he had offered to write an article on this topic for the Assistant Secretary of Charities, his interest in a reformatory ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... that time. Dunlop's History of Prose Fiction had appeared in 1814, evidently a much more ambitious attempt than Scott's; but Scott could treat the British novelists with comparative freedom from the trammels of any established precedent. Of course his position as one who had struck out a wonderful new path in the writing of novels gave to his reflections on other novelists a very special interest. The Lives of the Novelists are not to be neglected even now, and this is ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball

... of 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 to be permitted to rule without ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath

... the doctor, "true," for he did not wish to fall out with the young lady, who was very pretty; "but, you see, in England we think a great deal of precedent." ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr

... hearts. With fidelity to ourselves and, what is the same thing, to him, we are bound to prosper and to have life more and more abundantly for ever." This attitude, where it concerns religion, involves two corollaries: first, what in accordance with Hebrew precedent may be called symbolically faith in God, that is, confidence in one's own impulse and destiny, a confidence which the world in the end is sure to reward; and second, abomination of all contrary religious tenets and practices—of asceticism, for instance, because it denies the will; of idolatry ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... home, and told him the important event in the bright moonlight. Fink made a grand flourish in the air with his riding-whip, and said, "Bravo! bravo! I should not have given our despot credit for such contempt of precedent. You will be launched a year the ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... to the general subject of structural usage which he raises, it would be easy to cite ample precedent among our classic authors; with respect to the word misticidad occurring in one of my books, I have put it into the mouth of a foreigner. The faults brought to light by Senor Bonilla are not very serious. But what ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... the outside contributor is the Daily Mail, one of the best-edited newspapers in the world. The Daily Mail does not ask itself on receiving an unsolicited contribution: "Is it our custom to publish things of this kind"? No, it scorns precedent and is always anxious for novelty. It demands absolute freshness, a great deal of verve, and the strictest brevity. It makes a feature of very short interviews and articles on topics of the hour. On its seventh page, under the title "The Daily Magazine," room is usually ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett

... said above, may be due to the naughtiness of the stiff-necked things that we have eaten, or to the poverty of our own arguments; but it may also arise from an attempt on the part of the stomach to be too damned clever, and to depart from precedent inconsiderately. The healthy stomach is nothing if not conservative. ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... 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 ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson

... 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 ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... 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 as RHhC come to meet the surface AB at the points AKkB. ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens

... discovers the 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 ...
— 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

... following a squadron of the 11th Bengal Lancers, had, in crossing the river after nightfall, missed the ford, and had been carried off by the current. Lieutenant Harford and no less than fifty men were drowned. This was an accident almost without precedent. ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston

... mourning mid folk of the Wire-pulling Clan; Agents, Managers, Chairmen, are wild to a man, For the Cambridgeshire precedent means that their calling Has passed to the ladies excelling in—squalling! "Free teaching" has come, and "Free Music"'s at hand; Which we owe to the courage ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various

... would have been more common Latin, and would have made better English. But this construction is not unfrequent in T., cf. 11: rex vel princeps audiuntur. Nor is it without precedent in other authors. Cf. Z. 374. Ritter reads propinqui. The attentive reader will discover here traces of many subsequent usages ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus

... pitch in her when Barry swung into the saddle and that was a thing without precedent in Molly's history. She tried none of her usual catlike side-steps and throwing of the head. Altogether, Vic was troubled even as he would have been at the sight of Betty Neal in the arms of ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand

... presuppositions are a little difficult. He is resolved to marry Louise for better or worse,—it is all understood, so far as he is concerned. Although there is no love-scene in the play, we do hear of precedent scenes of passionate self-surrender (always within the limits of virtue). One cannot help asking: Where were Louise's scruples then? Was she ignorant of her father's prejudice or resolved to brave it? Had she never reflected upon the august foundations of the social order? Had ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... not be; there is no power in Venice Can alter a decree established: 'Twill be recorded for a precedent; And many an error, by the same example, Will rush into ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... morning, when there was nothing left of the Equinoxes, because the Precession had preceded according to precedent, this 'satiable Elephant's Child took a hundred pounds of bananas (the little short red kind), and a hundred pounds of sugar-cane (the long purple kind), and seventeen melons (the greeny-crackly kind), and said to all his dear families, 'Goodbye. I am going to the great ...
— Just So Stories • Rudyard Kipling

... the unofficial chief of the secret Soviet forces in the United States, was alive and again in the field against law and order was enough to set in motion every force that he controlled. Waving aside precedent and crashing his way past secretaries, he set in motion not only the agents of the Department of Justice but also the post-office forces and the specialized but highly efficient Military and Naval Intelligence Divisions. The telephone and telegraph ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... last notice was eclipsed by the seriousness of the other two. It had always been taken for granted that the captain of Willoughby was also the Speaker of the House, and a contested election for that office was without precedent. Now, however, the old rule was to be challenged; and as the members waited for the clock to strike six they discussed the coming contest among themselves with a solemnity which could hardly have ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed

... tried for rustling. We didn't have much of a case, as the law went then, and they'd have gone free if the woman hadn't turned evidence against them. The killin' was too much for her. And, as the precedent held good in a lot of other rustlin' cases, Larry's death was really the beginnin' of law and order in ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White

... magnanimity, and wisdom of Lincoln guided him aright, and no harm has come to the great principles of liberty from the arbitrary acts which he did or suffered to be done. On the other hand he has so impressed himself upon the Commonwealth that he has made a precedent for future rulers in a time of national peril, and what he excused and defended will be assumed as a matter of course because it will be according to the Constitution as interpreted by Abraham Lincoln. This the Supreme Court foresaw when ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... status when the rebellion should be suppressed, were also beginning to be controverted points, especially among members of Congress. On these and other questions which the insurrection raised, novel, perplexing, and without law or precedent to guide or govern it, the Administration had developed no well defined policy when Congress convened in December, 1861, but it was compelled to act, and that in such a manner as not to alienate friends or give unnecessary offence, while ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... joined 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

... committee-men; the fundamental law of England knowing no such constitution, abhorring such administrations: and that the Hon. Court would release your petitioner from the injurious effects of the said committee's act, and explode so pernicious a precedent." ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... owners of American sealing vessels for seizure by Russian cruisers in Bering Sea are being pressed to a settlement. The equities of the cases justify the expectation that a measure of reparation will eventually be accorded in harmony with precedent and in the light ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... had been 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 to all popular ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston

... upon hope, whereupon our poet, lifting his eyes "to the hills," gains courage enough to answer thus: "Hope is the certain expectation of future glory, which is the effect of grace divine and merit precedent." St. James is so pleased with this answer that he glows even more brightly, as St. John, "who lay upon the breast of him, our Pelican," appeared, shining so brightly that Dante, turning to ask Beatrice ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... openly championing the German cause before the people of the United States by written and spoken word, this is self-evident in a country which recognizes the principles of freedom of the Press and free speech. Apart from this, however, the American Government have themselves provided a precedent in this connection during the civil war, when President Lincoln in 1863 sent to England the famous preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, whose sympathies were strongly on the side of the Federals. Through his speeches, ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff

... and Fletcher, of whom I am next to speak, had, with the advantage of Shakspeare's wit, which was their precedent, great natural gifts, improved by study. Beaumont, especially, being so accurate a judge of plays, that Ben Jonson while he lived submitted all his writings to his censure, and, 'tis thought, used his judgment in correcting, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various

... the land that freemen till; That sober-suited Freedom chose, The Land, where girt with friends or foes A man may speak the thing he will; A land of settled government, A land of old and just renown, Where freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent. ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various

... put aside her fears for his safety 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

... the red Indians. It is one of the puzzles of the antiquarians, this tradition that white Indians once lived in the land, but were swept away by the reds; Cornstalk had used it to spur his followers to mighty deeds, it was a precedent which Pontiac dwelt upon when organizing his conspiracy, and King Philip is said to have been inspired by it. But this is no place to discuss the genesis of the tale. Suffice it, that on Sand Island have been discovered great quantities of ancient remains. No doubt, in its ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... intellect behind what he did, and the spectator became so interested in observing his manner of striving for an effect, that he forgave him for falling short of what he strove for. But this is a very exceptional and a very dangerous kind of precedent. Art ever is more honored in the observance than in the breach. Yet its breach often is honored by modern audiences, and especially operatic audiences, because they tend to rate temperament too high and ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller

... parted; each persuaded that the other had less life in him than himself; and both greatly consoled and comforted by the little fiction they had agreed upon, respecting Becky Morgan, whose decease was no longer a precedent of uncomfortable application, and would be no business of theirs for half a score ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... much wish to see the plan of a conference realised against which Lord Ponsonby does not bring any very relevant reasons. Prince Metternich's plan of a declaration "that the case is to be considered an exceptional one and not to afford a precedent to other powers" is too absurd. The Prince very justly compared it to the case of a person giving another a box on the ear and declaring at the same time that he is to consider it as exceptional, and that it is in ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria

... Fellahheen were rapacious in demands 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 ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn

... building, strong enough almost for a fort. Military uniforms adorn every employee, from the supercilious station-master to the ill-paid wretch that handles our baggage. Mine is the first bicycle the Tiflis & Baku Railroad has ever carried. Having no precedent to govern themselves by, and, withal, ever eager to fleece and overcharge, the railway officials charge double rates for it; that is, twice as much as an ordinary package of the same weight. No baggage is carried free on the Tiflis & Baku Railroad except what one takes ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... the mines, but as reverses became more frequent, and it became evident beyond a doubt that the British troops were about to cross the Vaal, a strong section of the Government, supported by popular feeling, openly advocated the destruction of the mines as well as the town of Johannesburg. The precedent quoted for such a course was the burning of Moscow by the Russians, in order to retard the victorious advance ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt

... then, on the other hand, following the precedent of King Lear, and remembering the probable chronological juxtaposition of the two plays, regard Iago as the leading figure from the point of view of construction? This might at first seem the right view; ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... succeed. People never suspect until they have a precedent. Will you consider it? At least consider it. Remember, if there is a risk, it is I who am running it. On your own showing, you ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... questions of mercantile law. It came up for argument in the course of a few weeks, and gave the opportunity he wanted. His management of the case was so superior to that of the opposing counsel, and his citations of law and precedent so cumulative and explicit, that he gained not only an easy victory, but made for himself a very ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur

... is without precedent, sir! These mitigating circumstances may be brought to bear on the Commander-in-Chief, and may be embodied in a recommendation to mercy! They should have no weight in the finding of the verdict," said the President, ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth

... play of his abilities. His vital energy, his impressive personality, his gift for courting the influences that counted, whether man's or woman's, his astute readiness in stooping to some measures that were in keeping with the times but not with army precedent, had won for him the goal of his ambition. He had passed over the heads of older men, whom many thought his betters, rather ruthlessly. Those who would serve loyally he drew around him; those who were bitter he crowded out ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... the Judeans were all Jews and this was under the law before Christian baptism had superceded water baptism at Pentecost. Of course they baptized with water, circumcised the flesh and kept the law of Moses; but this is no precedent for us whether Jews or Gentiles in these gospel days; since the Holy Spirit is poured out upon all flesh in all the fulness ...
— Water Baptism • James H. Moon

... seems to belong rather to the period of action than to the precedent indefinite period of chaos, and may therefore be taken as marking the transition from the "beginning" to the first day, better than as belonging to that beginning itself. The Jewish interpretation of the clause is untenable in the light of the doctrine ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland

... Lawton agreed. "And that brings up another point. We simply can't hand this fellow over to the authorities. If we do, we establish a precedent that may wreck the whole system ...
— The Mercenaries • Henry Beam Piper

... folkways and mores, the traditions and conventions, of the group. So potentially fitted for social life is the natural man, however, so manifold are the expressions that the plastic original tendencies may take, that instinct is replaced by habit, precedent, personal taboo, and good form. This remade structure of human nature, this objective mind, as Hegel called it, is fixed and transmitted in the folkways and mores, social ritual, i.e., Sittlichkeit, to use the German word, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... aviator closing in on an enemy's plane, have the delirium of purpose excited by speed. But the tanks are not rapid. They are ponderous and relatively slow. Columbus had already been to sea in ships. The aviator and the commander of a destroyer know their steeds and have precedent to go by, while the skippers of the tanks had none. They went forth with a new kind of ship on a new kind of sea, whose waves were shell-craters, whose tempests sudden ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... 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 this shocking breach of common propriety was corrected everywhere. ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... prevalent as ever, and it must be confessed that undergraduates' wit has suffered severely from the feminine infusion. However, our visitors, distinguished and undistinguished alike, appreciate the disorder, and it certainly has plenty of precedent for it in all stages of ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells

... we might as well have a clear understanding. It will be better in every way. I have felt that Americans have been altogether too willing to subscribe to European customs in marrying off their daughters. I am going to establish a new precedent, if I can. Am ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry

... army had vanished; an event had happened almost without precedent in the history of the world, unless we instance the burying of the army of Cambyses in the African desert. When Dr. Brydon was sufficiently rested and refreshed he told his story. It is the story we have ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... It would have been the undying glory of Marcellus if, on obtaining possession, he had shielded the unhappy city from further miseries. The art-treasures of Syracuse were sent to Rome, aprecedent afterwards followed. ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce

... timidity, awkwardness, or non-interest of a beginner. His usually reserved manner, which had been lack of expression rather than of conviction, had deceived his tutors. The audacity of a mind that had never been dominated by others, and owed no allegiance to precedent, made his merely superficial ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte

... that little fact steadily before your eyes, there is nothing you may not reach in official life. But Pitt was Prime Minister at four-and-twenty, and that precedent has ruined ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope

... animates 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, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various

... 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

... establish a precedent that will threaten the security of every college and university faculty member in the state. In any state where ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper

... vulgar crowd," and Nicolo Machiavelli, fifteen centuries later, denounced the nobles of Florence for their "easy-going contempt of everything and everybody"; so Lady St. Maur had plenty of historical precedent for the coining of ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy

... all is said, the Congress of Vienna represents an important milestone along the road of progress. It is a great precedent. As a disillusioned contemporary admitted, it "prepared the world for a more complete political structure; if ever the powers should meet again to establish a political system by which wars of conquest would be rendered impossible and the rights of all guaranteed, the Congress of Vienna, as a ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... Lord Macclesfield gave Mistress Tipping paraphernalia to the value of L200,—whether so persuaded by law and precedent, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... 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 ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert

... the Lutheran Confessions. Hereupon the Iowa men declared that their Synod could not unite with the Council, because "in accordance with our deep and sincere conviction, which is at the same time that of the Synod we represent, we must declare it to be a necessary precedent condition of an official ecclesiastical connection between synodical bodies that there should be a complete and hearty agreement not only in the principles of faith and confession, but also in an ecclesiastical practise accordant with such faith and confession, as ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente

... 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 ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte

... 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 ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... comparisons as to the wants of dorgs and boys, eminently unfavourable to the latter. The weekly twopence for schooling Mrs. Haden had, during the year that Jack had been at school, paid out of her housekeeping money, knowing that the expenses of the dogs afforded no precedent whatever ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty

... (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 by General Hovey's order had expired. It is now sunset, and all ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... speech suddenly finds himself stepping about, like a dancer amidst his eggs, among the old addled majority-votes which he must not tread upon, he is a spectacle for men and angels. Submission to intellectual precedent and authority does very well for those who have been bred to it; we know that the under-ground courses of their minds are laid in the Roman cement of tradition, and that stately and splendid structures may be reared on such a foundation. But to see one laying a platform ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various

... society where mankind, held individually responsible for all other acts whatsoever, is held entirely irresponsible for the act of parenthood which, being more momentous than any other, ought to be held more responsible than any other. Marriage, the precedent condition of most parenthood, is thus regarded as the concern of the individuals and the present. Individuals and the present therefore decide what marriages shall occur; but by some obscure fatality which no one had thought of, the future appears upon the ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... a long reply to this, insisting that the recognition of Davis's power to make a treaty was the first and indispensable step to peace, and referred to the correspondence between King Charles I. and his Parliament as a trustworthy precedent of a constitutional ruler treating with rebels. Lincoln's face then wore that indescribable expression which generally preceded his hardest hits, as he remarked: 'Upon questions of history I must refer you to ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... York City in broad daylight, in a public place and under peculiarly atrocious circumstances, and that as the most skilful sleuth available was let loose upon the case, the perpetrator would never be discovered. Do you not think my postulation justified by precedent?" ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry

... slightest interest. Fabrice del Dongo himself,[131] with whom every woman falls in love, and who candidly confesses that he does not know whether he has ever been really in love with any woman—though there is one possible exception precedent, his aunt, the Duchess of Sanseverina, and one subsequent, Clelia Conti, who saves him from prison, as above—is depicted with extraordinary science of human nature. But it is a science which, once more, excludes passion, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... hackish acronyms this almost invariably expands to {Yet Another}, following the precedent set by UNIX 'yacc(1)' (Yet Another ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10

... by a member, and in this way acquired the privileges of a town without any special act of incorporation. Other similar districts were likewise represented, in accordance with the precept calling that body together, and they thus obtained municipal rights without the usual formality. The precedent seems to have been set by the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, which was made up of delegates from the districts as well as from the towns. It was a revolutionary step taken outside of the law. On March 23, 1786, this anomalous condition of affairs ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... 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 head he has opened ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various

... me 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

... to be no 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 ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn

... suggested by Sir James Graham and alluded to by Lord Palmerston, of following the precedent of the enquiry into the Convention of Cintra,[13] appears therefore to the Queen to be the only ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria

... 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 of ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid

... 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 Europe ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon

... him, not mechanically sawn to a set line. Now and again the blackbird feels the beauty of the time, the large white daisy stars, the grass with yellow-dusted tips, the air which comes so softly unperceived by any precedent rustle of the hedge. He feels the beauty of the time, and he must say it. His notes come like wild flowers not sown in order. There is not an oak here in June without ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies

... mention the better appreciation by either combatant of the value of the other, which a struggle to the bitter end alone could generate,—is a question for the political student. But it will always remain in doubt whether the practical exhaustion of the resources of the South was not a condition precedent to ending the war,—whether, in sooth, the "last ditch" was not actually reached when Lee ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge

... young lady covered herself with the veil and deputed one of the witnesses to execute the contract on her behalf. So they drew up the marriage contract and she acknowledged to have received the whole of her dowry, both precedent and contingent, and to be indebted to me in the sum of ten thousand dirhems. Then he gave the witnesses their fee and they withdrew whence they came; whereupon she put off her clothes and abode in a shift of fine silk, laced ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous

... down under a portrait of your great-grandfather, in a dim parlor full of mahogany and rose jars, with her black silk skirts spreading about her, and an Old Blue cup in her hand, and talk family,—how cousin this married a man whose people aren't anybody, and cousin that is outraging precedent by naming her child for her husband's side of the house. She's a funny, dear old lady! You know, Miss Paget," the professor went on, with his eager, impersonal air, "when I met you, I thought you didn't quite seem like a New Yorker ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris

... Assembly, and they may well have clung to a wise and tolerant intermediary like Franklin. Nothing, however, could now allay the hostile feelings. The Assembly voted money for immediate defense under the conditions imposed, but at the same time declared that the measure was not to be held as a precedent for the future; and Franklin was sent to England to treat with the proprietaries in person, and ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More

... colonies gave much less; New York, only 5000 pounds, and Maryland 6000 pounds. Morris, however, would not assent to the Assembly's bill unless it contained a clause suspending its effect until the King's pleasure was known. This was an attempt to establish a precedent for giving up the Assembly's charter right of passing laws which need not be submitted to the King for five years and which in the meantime were valid. The members of the Assembly very naturally refused to be forced by the necessities of the war into surrendering one of the most ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher

... vote for a five-year term; election last held 14 April 2002 (next to be held NA 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%, Francisco Xavier do ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... larger sales will appear upon this paper without troubling his Lordship to take them down upon his notes; there were very large sales for all of them several days precedent to the 21st. ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney

... cadi despatched most of them without the formality of written declarations, rejoinders, and replications. It is, in fact, the custom of the Turks that all causes, except those which relate to marriage, shall be immediately and summarily decided, rather by the rules of common sense than of legal precedent; and among these barbarians (if such they are in this respect) the cadi is the sole judge in all cases, cuts short the pleadings, gives sentence in a breath, and there is no appeal from his decision. Presently a khawass (that is to say, a Turkish alguazil) entered and ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... from actual sin? What is the meaning of the Angelic Salutation, "Hail, thou that art full of grace," unless it refer to a superadded grace, to such donum supernaturale as the first Eve received? There is indeed no precedent to guide in the case: the prophet Jeremiah and S. John Baptist had been preserved from sin from the womb, but this did not involve freedom from original sin. Still the fact that there was no precedent was not in anywise fatal; the point of ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... of English women and children by French raiders there was no precedent or just provocation. Here Frontenac must be deemed more culpable than the Puritans. The only extenuating circumstance is that those who survived the first moments of attack were in almost all cases spared, taken to Canada, and there treated ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby

... 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

... itself to those who see in the task only an assignment. Such men know the actual working of the financial mechanism, not as economists see it, but as Bagehot knew it. They understand the actual working of municipal machinery besides having a minute knowledge of character, decision, practice, and precedent in administration. In our real politics, big and little, they and the Washington and Albany correspondents are the only men who know both sides, are trusted with the secrets of both parties, and read closed pages of the book of the chronicles of the Republic. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... consent]. By occasion whereof all your Commons in their conscience surely account that, beside the marvellous fervent love that your Highness shall thereby engender in their hearts towards your Grace, ye shall do the most princely feat, and show the most honourable and charitable precedent and mirrour that ever did sovereign lord upon his subjects; and therewithal merit and deserve of our merciful God eternal bliss—whose goodness grant your Grace in goodly, princely, and honourable estate long to reign, prosper, ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... she sent another message to the house, signifying that the duke of Marlborough had declined her interposition. Notwithstanding this declaration, the commons in a body presented an address, acknowledging the eminent services of the duke of Marlborough, yet expressing their apprehension of making a precedent to alienate the revenue of the crown, which had been so much reduced by the exorbitant grants of the late reign, and so lately settled and secured by her majesty's unparalleled grace and goodness. The queen was satisfied with their apology; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... not alone for the stability of any particular form of government, not alone for the sustaining of an administration, not alone for the upholding of those God-given ideas which have made America the most favored land on earth; but against a PRECEDENT, which involves and would destroy them all. Precedent which is, and ever has been, all powerful to overturn theories and systems, to topple kings from their thrones, and plunge nations into slavery. Of all dangers which every liberal form of government has to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... a tight place we are apt to try to slip out of it under some plea of a European precedent. But it used to be supposed that it was precisely European precedents that we came over here to avoid. I am not profoundly versed in political economy, nor is this the time or place to discuss its principles; but, as regards protection, for example, I can conceive that there may be arguments ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne

... cross suit in the Chancery Court by Mr. Smith to ascertain the commoner's rights, and prevent the enclosure of the common. After a long trial the decision was given in Mr. Smith's favor, and not only was Berkhamstead Common thus preserved as an open space, but a precedent set for the future decision of other similar cases. Within the years between 1866 and 1874 dispute after dispute analogous to this arose, and decision after decision was given declaring the illegality of enclosures ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney

... of measures, was not a new measure, and that its constitutionality had been previously sanctioned, because a bank had been chartered in 1791 and had received the official signature of President Washington. A few facts will show the just weight to which this precedent should be entitled as bearing upon the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... principle, no precedent, no reason why, if the majority desire anything, a Legislative sanction should not be given to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 18, 1892 • Various

... and persuasion to induce the aforesaid gentlemen to desert their favorite chairs on the little stoop in front of Byers' Grocery Store, and approach anything resembling daily toil. There had been a Squire in the Weaver family three generations back, and Peleg held firmly to established precedent. He might be landed gentry, but he was no tiller of the soil, and he secretly looked down on his elder brother for personally cultivating the ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester

... a Thiras, habite pareillement par des Grecs, jadis bonne ville, et passage aussi fort que le precedent, parce qu'il est forme de meme par la mer. A chaque bout du pont etoit une grosse tour. La tour et la ville, tout a ete detruit ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt

... 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 ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... sympathies were with the latter, he still openly blamed and deplored the conduct of his legates, and refused to acknowledge Rodolph as king. The Pope well knew what a delicate undertaking it was to depose a sovereign whom he had consecrated, and how fraught with danger such a precedent must be. His interest evidently called him to receive Rodolph at once into his arms, and had he done this, the result of the contest would have been very different. In the behavior of Gregory we discover, in addition to an insuperable aversion to countenance civil ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles

... 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 and ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... of the Jewish high-priesthood, he was favorably received by Ptolemy and granted territory in the Nile Delta to the north of Memphis in which to rear a temple to Jehovah. In the light of recent discoveries at Elephantine it is evident that this step was not without precedent (Section XCI:vii). Ptolemy's object was to please his Jewish subjects and to attract others to the land of the Nile. Josephus's statement in The Jewish War, VII, 10:4 favors the conclusion that ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent

... 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, ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington

... 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 the ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip

... submitted this "Declaratory Statement" to the Synods of 1878 and 1879, in speeches of notable power and wealth of historic illustration, and, in the latter year, it was unanimously adopted and became a "Declaratory Act." The precedent thus set has been followed by nearly all the Presbyterian Churches which have since then had occasion to deal with ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns

... 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 ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt

... larger than, from SOME REASONS, I expected it would be, though not greater than the very last precedent authorized. The case of the late Lord Wilmington was, I ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... come out into the garden and call to Isabel, and Isabel would wake and his chance be lost. His chance? Isabel had rashly incurred a forfeit and would have to pay. The frolic was old, there was plenty of precedent for it, and not for one moment did Lawrence dream of letting her off. A moth, a dead leaf might have settled on her sleeping lips and she would have been none the wiser, and just such a moth's touch he promised himself, the contact of a moment, but enough to intoxicate him ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... gods might give him. He was quite content, he said, to vote for the Address, as, he believed, would be all the gentlemen on his side of the House. No one could suspect them or him of giving a factious opposition to Government. Had they not borne and forborne beyond all precedent known in that House? Then he touched lightly, and almost with grace to his opponents, on many subjects, promising support, and barely hinting that they were totally and manifestly wrong in all things. But—. Then the tone of his ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope

... occasions to inclose the stretch of shore below their summer homes, and to make it a private beach. But even the most acquisitive of the town councilmen (and there were several of the fraternity of the Itching Palm in the council) dared not establish such a precedent. The right of the public to the shore at tide-water could not safely be ignored in a community of fishermen ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper

... understanding of love, you are not yet acquainted with the little god. If your lover consents to the sacrifice you have demanded, he will indicate a weakness of character which augurs ill for the future: and if you insist upon the sacrifice, you will establish a selfish precedent which can only make you a tyrant in your own domain, and at the same time belittle your husband in ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... kneeling to make a hasty examination. "Hope I haven't done for him.... It would be the first time.... Bad precedent!... So! He's all right—conscious within an hour.... Too soon!" he added, standing and looking down. "Well, turn ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance

... of bringing a certain amount of pressure to bear upon the President from that source. He fully realized, however, that under the circumstances no interference was advisable. A departure from this policy would have created a precedent which might later have been appealed to by any European government in behalf of its subjects in this country. As Presidential candidate, however, William J. Bryan, in effect, if not in express terms, promised a mediation that would mean something should the Democrats come into power, and it ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell

... 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 permitted to come to a hearing. Having rendered ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... said to be "more noble than those of Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so." And it is added, "therefore many of them believed." Here at length, it will be said, is a precedent for such acts of private judgment as are most frequently recommended and instanced in religious tales; and indeed these texts commonly are understood to make it certain beyond dispute, that individuals ordinarily may find out the doctrines ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... by any means unanimous. Some were for a slight concession, just a sugar-plum to quieten the naughty child, a sacrifice to peace and quietness. Some were steadily and vehemently opposed to the dangerous precedent of yielding one jot or one tittle to the outward force of a turn-out. It was teaching the workpeople how to become masters, said they. Did they want the wildest thing here-after, they would know that the way to obtain ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... learn. If, following precedent, I become your successor, he will be of great help to ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin

... through his life he had a scholar's respect for learning, and for the great tradition of literature which it is the true business of scholarship to maintain. Radical and rebel as he was in politics and theology, contemptuous of law, custom and precedent, he was always the exact opposite in his art. There he never attempted the method of the tabula rasa, or clean slate, which made his political pamphlets so barren. The greatest of all proofs of the strength of his individuality ...
— Milton • John Bailey

... again, and often, despite all his resolves, impelled always by the psychological precedent that he had ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson

... lieutenants exercised slight control over the men in the ranks, who conceived that the offices had gone to the wrong men. The Wood County militia regarded itself as an "army of occupation," by law and precedent warranted in abusing a brief authority. Instead of guarding and protecting property not their own, the men showed their patriotic zeal by mutilating or demolishing the results of Blennerhassett's labor. They took malicious pleasure ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable

... are still arising, and in the increase of our own knowledge and mechanical inventions. But it is only a very little new that is added at a time, and that little is generally due to the desire to attain an end which cannot be attained by any of the means for which there exists a perceived precedent in the memory. When this is the case, either the memory is further ransacked for any forgotten shreds of details a combination of which may serve the desired purpose; or action is taken in the dark, which sometimes succeeds and becomes a fertile source of further combinations; or we are brought ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler

... to join him in doing that moral service to Politian. It 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

... disagreeable responsibility. Forgetting that he was cast for the executioner, not the hero, he murmured, "It is a far, far better thing," and graciously accepted the proposed alternative. Mr. ASQUITH, not unwilling to help in establishing a precedent which some day he himself may find useful, backed him up, and the House, as a whole, congratulating itself on its escape from the public executioner, cheerfully proceeded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various

... the waitress downstairs, and with the additional advantage that she was not stand-offish—indeed, she was a giggler. She giggled at my slightest word, and Tony altered her first impression and dubbed her a forward hussy. Personally, I liked the girl, though she broke all precedent by attending upon us in a silk blouse and ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors

... be hazarding too much to say, I think, that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in their turn as boys, with other boys of their time, each used a form of counting-out rhyme in the manner and for the purpose for which they are still in vogue by the boys and girls of the present day. Undoubtedly they found a precedent, if they did not actually themselves exercise a part, in the very ancient custom of casting lots, which prevailed among the heathen as well as among the chosen people of God in very early times. From sacred history we learn that lots were used to decide measures to be taken in battle; ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford

... ceremonies were attended by supernatural manifestations and he 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 ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... habit of caution robbed his acts of the fine flavor of spontaneity; he was painstaking, and as laborious as Philip, which is the last effort of comparison, seeing Philip's industry was all but without precedent. If he flooded coasts and inlands by the seas he emptied on them as if the seas were his, he also inundated courts of kings and assemblies of nobles with appeals, remonstrances, or letters of instruction or information. He lacked nothing of being ubiquitous, and was the moving spirit of all occasions ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... particularly the United States; such controversy is taken up in a different chapter of this history. In connection with the naval history of the Great War it suffices to say that such a proclamation constituted a precedent in naval history. The submarine had heretofore been an untried form of war craft. The rule had formerly been that a merchantman stopped by an enemy's warship was subject to search and seizure, and, if it offered ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... before she did in my passion for Saada, * I had healed my soul before repentance came. But she wept before I did: her tears drew mine; and I said, * The merit belongs to the precedent.'" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... 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 taught arithmetic ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... influence. She could do so very much for the Baptist church, it would never do to offend her. And the Colonel was so devoted to her, he might go off in a huff as poor Job Manning had done, and stand it out to the bitter end. It was a dilemma, no disputing about that. A bad precedent, more particularly after the precedent in the Manning case. But it must be got along with, and it was, and Mrs. Colonel Selby, a strict and ultra Presbyterian, always open and outspoken, became an honored member of this closely-guarded ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee

... considered a foolish panic. The newspapers insisted on the lesson of the year 1000—for then, too, people had anticipated the end. The star was no star—mere gas—a comet; and were it a star it could not possibly strike the earth. There was no precedent for such a thing. Common-sense was sturdy everywhere, scornful, jesting, a little inclined to persecute the obdurate fearful. That night, at seven-fifteen by Greenwich time, the star would be at ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... 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 ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)

... to facilitate commercial relations by negotiating a 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... has made a precedent for the future by inviting Vice-President Coolidge to attend all Cabinet meetings. The vice-president has accepted and meets regularly ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew

... life. They had the fault inherent in all hybrids, however fanciful and graceful. They were sterile and unprocreative. The warring elements, so deftly and beautifully blent in them, began at once to fall asunder. The San Galli attempted to follow classical precedent with stricter severity. Some buildings of their school may still be reckoned among the purest which remain to prove the sincerity of the Revival of Learning. The Sansovini exaggerated the naivete of ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... I 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 Europe than now there is. We see ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon

... of one of our early sovereigns seems to afford a precedent for the mode in which divers gentlemen and persons of quality voluntarily showed civility towards Richard Evelyn, and for that in which several gentlemen of birth and estate testified their respect and affection for Humphrey Chetham. Nicholas Assheton also appears to have the support of this ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various

... 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 mercy on him ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... were divided into little groups, who did not seem by any means unanimous. Some were for a slight concession, just a sugar-plum to quieten the naughty child, a sacrifice to peace and quietness. Some were steadily and vehemently opposed to the dangerous precedent of yielding one jot or one tittle to the outward force of a turn-out. It was teaching the workpeople how to become masters, said they. Did they want the wildest thing here-after, they would know that the way to obtain their ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... of the king, should he be a minor at the death of the preceding sovereign, in the hands of the next male heir, and the appointment of James's widow to the regency and the guardianship of his son was made in distinct disregard of all recognised precedent. The consent of the Scottish lords to the innovation had been given entirely from a sense of loyalty to their beloved and unfortunate monarch James IV. But a proviso had been made in his will, that ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone

... and very many politicians and thinkers at the time fully realized, that the old law as to tithes was a cruel injustice; but no change was made until the opposition to the payment of tithes amounted to something like civil war, involving a series of murders and outrages. Then the fatal precedent was set of a successful and violent revolt against contracts and debts. In 1838 an Act was passed commuting the tithes into a rent-charge payable not by the occupiers but the landlords. Some modern writers have argued that the change was merely ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous

... water into whose iridescent globe he has blown the speck from the bowl of the pipe. But this amazing development around us is not of airy and vanishing films. It is solidly constructed, in marble and brick, in stone and iron, while the proportions to which it has swelled surpass precedent, and rebuke the timidity of the boldest prediction. But that which has built it has been simply the industry, manifold, constant, going on in these cities, to which peace offers ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley

... pounds, and Maryland 6000 pounds. Morris, however, would not assent to the Assembly's bill unless it contained a clause suspending its effect until the King's pleasure was known. This was an attempt to establish a precedent for giving up the Assembly's charter right of passing laws which need not be submitted to the King for five years and which in the meantime were valid. The members of the Assembly very naturally refused to be forced by the necessities of the war into surrendering one of the most important privileges ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher

... whether the opening couplet quotes the deliverance of Israel from Egypt as a precedent for the future return of the northern tribes from captivity, described in the lines that follow; or whether this return is at once predicted by the couplet, with the usual prophetic assurance as though it had already happened. If we take the desert ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... 1549, 1559, and 1662 did not disturb them. And therefore, although neither law nor custom recognise the modern Roman sequence of colours, still there is precedent for the use of colours not specified in the rubric of Sarum, on days not mentioned therein, especially in Churches which already ...
— Ritual Conformity - Interpretations of the Rubrics of the Prayer-Book • Unknown

... win, and while he did not swear, drink liquor, or smoke, he proved he was no Puritan by chewing fine-cut tobacco and betting on his horses when he thought they had a chance to win and the odds were to his liking. For the latter he claimed Scriptural precedent. ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan

... impending doom. Certainly the Holofernes of Mr. CLAUDE KING never for a moment suggested it. I admit that I had not hitherto seen an Assyrian officer making love on the edge of his grave and so had no exact precedent to go by, but this officer, with his face far too well groomed for the conclusion of a heavy banquet, and those rather anaemic and perfunctory gestures of endearment, which had nothing to do with the sombre forces of elemental passion, gave no ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various

... to iron-clad rule, taking penalties, enforcing the most rigid etiquette. For he was one of those rare players who knew the game so thoroughly that while he, and the man he had taught, often ignored the classics of adversary play, the slightest relaxing of etiquette, rule, precept, or precedent, in his opponents, brought him out with a protest exacting the last ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... 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 which ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... I doubt whether that need be a precedent for you. I am answerable for her, and you could hardly keep out of it without ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... 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 ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... hit upon a heading of less pedantic aspect which would have served my purpose; and if it be urged that the new building looks over large for the edifice to which it is added, I can only plead the precedent of the ancient architects, who always made the adytum the ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... money-order at the Post-Office, so will he file his claim for damages, and it will have attention. The contingent fee will yet be a misdemeanor. Also, it will be possible for plain citizens to be able to go before a Court of Equity and be heard without regard to law and precedent and attorney's quillets and quibbles, which so often hamper justice. Justice should be cheap and easy, instead of ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard

... coquette, she was certainly very near being one. The light in which she regarded the advances of Captain Bezan, even puzzled herself; the phase of his case and the manner of his avowal were so far without precedent, that its novelty engaged her. She still felt vexed at the young soldier's assurance, but yet all unconsciously found herself endeavoring to invent any number of excuses for the conduct he ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray

... parties were breaking up under the pressure of new interests and passions; within the Liberal party the bubbling of new faiths was at its crudest and hottest; and those who stood by the slow and safe ripening of Freedom, from "precedent to precedent," were in much anxiety as to what shape or shapes might ultimately emerge from a brew so strong and heady. Which only means that now, as always, Whigs and Radicals were at odds; and the "unauthorized programme" of the day was sending its fiery cross through the ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... pure forgetfulness; they could not render That penal, which had neither name nor thought 190 In their great bosoms; who would have foreseen That Nature could be filed to such a crime[453] As sons 'gainst sires, and princes 'gainst their realms? Your sin hath made us make a law which will Become a precedent 'gainst such haught traitors, As would with treason mount to tyranny; Not even contented with a sceptre, till They can convert it to a two-edged sword! Was not the place of Doge sufficient for ye? What's nobler than the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... 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 Revelation Explained • F. Smith

... trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry, such as Shakespeare furnishes the precedent for in drama. Still there is a very powerful and majestic rhythmical ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman

... 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

... Washington a prisoner of war. But President Buchanan, although Paulding had acted exactly as Davis had done, refused to support him, and in a message to Congress declared that that officer had committed a grave error and established an unsafe precedent. ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis

... in his life Mr. Foote could find a family precedent. This matter had been handled thus, and that other matter had been handled so. But this thin—it had never been handled because it had never happened. He was left standing squarely on his own ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... white strangers arriving in the country of the People of the Rocks. Sometimes, though rarely, black men had come here, and from them they had heard of the existence of men much whiter than themselves, who sailed on the sea in ships, but for the arrival of such there was no precedent. We had, however, been seen dragging the boat up the canal, and he told us frankly that he had at once given orders for our destruction, seeing that it was unlawful for any stranger to enter here, when ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... completion of the "big fence" unfortunately set a bad precedent. Major Bach, flushed with the success of his first speeding-up tactics, grew more and more inexorable in this connection. For every job a rigid time-limit was now set, and he did not hesitate to reduce the period to an almost impossible point. The cause was perfectly obvious. He concluded ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney

... human cattle solidly upon the 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 to war with one another; exhausting in ecclesiastical ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton

... two great measures which followed his coronation, his grant of a charter, and his marriage with Matilda, mark the new relation which this support brought about between the people and their king. Henry's Charter is important, not merely as a direct precedent for the Great Charter of John, but as the first limitation on the despotism established by the Conqueror and carried to such a height by his son. The "evil customs" by which the Red King had enslaved and plundered the Church ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green

... they invest for the contingencies of the future tense, they imbibe at least half-a-crown for the exigencies of the present. The society soon rises into a condition of astonishing prosperity. The terms being liberal beyond all precedent, the Charitable Chums' becomes wonderfully popular. A guinea a week during sickness, besides medical attendance, and ten pounds at death, or half as much at the death of a wife, are assured for half the amount of subscription payable at the old clubs. The thing is as cheap ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various

... regular metre, but some of the words require 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 ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... of reform and of the happiness of the country so great as that man who would persuade you that we possess nothing good, and that all must be torn to pieces. There is no principle, no precedent, no regulations (except as to mere matter of detail), favourable to freedom, which is not to be found in the Laws of England or in the example of our ancestors. Therefore I say we may ask for, and we want nothing new. We have great constitutional laws and principles to ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury

... has ever known. And, thanks to the achievements of science, particularly to the investigations of three men, one of whom gave his life to the cause, the fight was successful and this dreadful outbreak was checked just at the time when according to all precedent it should have ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane

... declare the result, which he did. It was under the authority, therefore, and by the direction of the two houses that he acted. The resolutions by which the authority was given were according to unbroken usage and established precedent. ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... attack on M. CLEMENCEAU reaching the Commons there was a general desire that the House should pass a resolution of sympathy. But Mr. BONAR LAW deprecated the proposal as being, in his opinion, "against all precedent"—not a little to the surprise of some of the new Members, who thought that in a case like this the conseil du precedent might bow ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various

... speed and grace and fidelity his chief claims to fame. He never practised his art within the walls of academies; the material he so vividly dealt with was the stuff of life. The very absence of school in his illustrations is their chief charm; a man of genius this, self-taught, and a dangerous precedent for fumblers or those of less executive ability. From the huge mass of his work being unearthed from year to year he may be said to have lived crayon in hand. He is the first of a long line of newspaper illustrators. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... true and noble, and until you can write me so. You and I are to feel ourselves two school-children and live just so. It is not usual for school-children to marry, but that we dare upon the strength of our purpose, and in defiance of all counsel, and of every precedent. We are to feel that we owe our duty to our ideal; and that simply because of the strength and passion of our love for each other, we demand perfection, each of the other. My setting this stern challenge before you is nothing but my determination to give you my right love, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... of 1860-61. The rush of aimless visiting, matinees and dinners, balls and suppers, followed each other without cessation; dress and diamonds, equipage and cards, all cost more than ever before. This might be the last of it, said an uneasy sense of the coming storm; and in the precedent sultriness, the thousands who had come to make money vied with the tens who came to spend it in mad distribution of the proceeds. Madame, who had made an immense investment of somebody's capital in diamonds and lace, must let the world see them. Mademoiselle must make ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... 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 ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... acquaintance of Dyce Lashmar, she had thought of little but this invigorating theme. At last she had found the man to stand against Robb the Grinder, the man of hope, a political and moral enthusiast who might sweep away the mass of rotten privilege and precedent encumbering the borough of Hollingford. She wrote to all her friends, at Hollingford and throughout the country, making known that the ideal candidate in the Liberal cause had at last been discovered. And presently she sent out invitations to a dinner, ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing

... 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 ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... 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 Charlemagne Romances owed their origin ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... form. In other words, self-government had been the rule and not the exception throughout the centuries preceding 1800. This is a complete and sufficient answer to those who argue that the supporters of Irish Home Rule are making a proposal of a completely novel and revolutionary kind, without precedent in the history ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender

... exercised a clear act of sovereign independence. It had made its first Italian treaty. This was a proud step and a quotable precedent. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... 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 guess ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow

... three. And so it is also with the greatly higher human race. Place them in circumstances of degradation and hardship so extreme as almost to threaten their existence as individuals, and they increase, as if in behalf of the species, with a rapidity without precedent in circumstances of greater comfort. The aristocratic families of a country are continually running out; and it requires frequent creations to keep up the House of Lords; while our poor people seem increasing in some districts in almost the mathematical ratio. The county ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... capital before anything had transpired among the people, and thus the transition from the founder to his immediate successor—always a delicate crisis for a new dynasty—seemed to come about quite naturally. The precedent of co-regnancy having been established, it was scrupulously followed by most of the succeeding sovereigns. In the XIIIth year of his sovereignty, and after having reigned alone for thirty-two years, Usirtasen I. shared his throne with ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... attempt to fix the price of labor by arbitrary rules, this also was condemned as unwise and impracticable. Did he interfere with the merchants by inspecting their accounts, the deed was censured as without precedent "in Christendom"; and he was ordered to "treat the merchants with kindness, lest they return, and the country be depopulated." Did his zeal for Calvinism lead him to persecute Lutherans, he was chid for ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... easy to establish a precedent in the Cabbage Patch. When a certain course of action was once understood to be the proper thing, every resident promptly fell in line. The victim of "celebrated concussion" was overwhelmed with attention. She lay in a pink wrapper in Miss Hazy's kitchen, and received the homage of ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice

... on his post, with a grave responsibility, it is proper that he should be fully protected in the discharge of his duty. To permit anyone, of whatever rank, to molest or interfere with him while thus employed, without becoming liable to severe penalty, would clearly establish a precedent highly prejudicial to the interests of the ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss

... heartily. He might have gone further and, following the precedent set by Adam in Eden, have said, "Eternally right!" for what lover ever thought his mistress in the wrong? But this time there was more than a lover's agreement. "Uncle, surely you see that Mademoiselle de Vesc is right, right every way? If that scoundrel has lied, then there is a trap set, ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond

... are all more or less alike. It is only in solitary abodes that strong natures grow up in their own way. Catrina had grown to womanhood in one of the solitary places of the earth. She had no facile axiom, no powerful precedent, to guide her every step through life. The woman who was in daily contact with her was immeasurably beneath her in mental power, in force of character, in those possibilities of love or hatred which go to make a strong life for good or for evil. By the side of her daughter the Countess Lanovitch ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman

... and began to take counsel how they could turn Furetiere out of their body. There was no precedent for such a degradation, but a parallel was sought for in the fact that the Sorbonne had successfully ejected one of its most famous doctors, Arnauld. Meanwhile the suit went on, the Thirty-nine versus the ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... prisoners of war to Africa and Asia, remote from all probability of exchange, and where they can scarce hope ever to hear from their families, even if the unwholesomeness of the climate does not put a speedy end to their lives, is a manner of treating captives that you can justify by no other precedent or custom except that of the black savages of Guinea. We are your Lordship's most obedient, humble servants, ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... issue was injected into the debate when Mr. Collamer, of Vermont, while reviewing what is implied in being a sovereign State and a State in the Union, argued that the imposition by Congress of any condition precedent to the entrance, whether or not that condition be the abolition of slavery, is an unwarranted interference with the internal affairs of that State. Under such circumstances the proposed new State would not come into the Union on ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various

... neutral countries, particularly the United States; such controversy is taken up in a different chapter of this history. In connection with the naval history of the Great War it suffices to say that such a proclamation constituted a precedent in naval history. The submarine had heretofore been an untried form of war craft. The rule had formerly been that a merchantman stopped by an enemy's warship was subject to search and seizure, and, if it offered no resistance, was taken to ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... for the East India Company to export their Tea to America payable here, and the sending of said tea by the Company, is with an intent to enforce the Revenue Acts and Design'd for a precedent for Establishing Taxes, Duties & Monopolies in America, that they might take our property from us and dispose of it as they please and reduce us to ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... like minute relics of earlier organic life in the very stone he builds with. The central and most intimate principles of his teaching challenge us to go back beyond them, not merely to his own immediate, somewhat enigmatic master—to Socrates, who survives chiefly in his pages—but to various precedent schools of speculative thought, in Greece, in Ionia, in Italy; beyond these into that age of poetry, in which the first efforts of philosophic apprehension had hardly understood themselves; beyond that unconscious philosophy, again, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... They first persuaded them to believe that he was a deity, and then to sacrifice to him those Rights and Liberties which their ancestors had so long maintained, with unexampled bravery, and with blood & treasure. By this act they fixed a precedent fatal to all posterity: The Roman people afterwards, influenced no doubt by this pernicious example, renew'd it to his successors, not at the end of every ten years, but for life. They transfer'd all their right and power to Charles the ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams

... 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

... continued Henderson, smiling, "if you have no objection, I am willing that you should take Skinadre's affair and mine as a precedent between you and me. Let us not be fools, Mr. Travers; it is every one ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton

... father, let me tell thee why I came. I have been banished from my native land Because by right of primogeniture I claimed possession of thy sovereign throne Wherefrom Etocles, my younger brother, Ousted me, not by weight of precedent, Nor by the last arbitrament of war, But by his popular acts; and the prime cause Of this I deem the curse that rests on thee. So likewise hold the soothsayers, for when I came to Argos in the Dorian land And took the king Adrastus' child to wife, Under my standard I enlisted ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles

... rising clouds in the East and presently the outbreak of the Crimean War prevented further efforts. Ships and men were needed elsewhere than in the northern seas. It began to look as if failure was now final, and that nothing more could be done. Following naval precedent, a court-martial had been held to investigate the action of Captain Sir Edward Belcher. 'The solemn silence,' wrote Captain M'Clure afterwards, 'with which the venerable president of the court returned Captain Belcher his sword, with a bare acquittal, ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock

... Montpensier interrupted the lady-in-waiting and those who shared her opinion. "I cannot bring myself to establish such a precedent," she said, in her usual haughty tone. "It is I who have to walk first, and I shall only go half-way across the courtyard of the Louvre. It's quite far enough for the Holy Wafer-box; what's the use of walking any further for ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... this "balance between 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 Goethe and Victor Hugo; in Lyly also we may see the first embodiment ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson

... Railroad by building a competing line, the South Pennsylvania Railroad. In the construction of this road he had an agreement with the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, an intense competitor of the Pennsylvania; and, as a precedent to building his line, he obtained a large interest in the Reading Railroad. Out of this arrangement grew a highly important sequence which few then foresaw—the gradual assumption by the Vanderbilt family of a large share of the ownership and control of the anthracite ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... 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 ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie

... vested with extraordinary powers of entering houses, or extend a sort of influence which I never wished to increase. The colonists now have it in their power, by agreeing to this tax, to establish a precedent for their being consulted before any tax is imposed upon them by Parliament; for their approbation of it being signified to Parliament next year... will afford a forcible argument for the like proceeding in all such cases. If they ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker

... has experience shown by what has happened to our province, because no religious went from these kingdoms from the year 1692 until that of 1710, during which time Archbishop Camacho was attempting to bring about the subjection. That is a precedent which induces the strong suspicion that no one could be found who would voluntarily submit to correction by a strange prelate, and at times be accused and denounced in a foreign jurisdiction as he had only promised ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various

... communicated to the Press a scheme for solving the Irish problem. This is regarded by Irish politicians generally as a dangerous precedent. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • 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 ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... irreclaimably, a despot, as a warrior; but his successor, whether a Bourbon or a Buonaparte, was likely to be a constitutional sovereign. The tyranny of a meaner hand would not have been endured after that precedent. ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... have been more common Latin, and would have made better English. But this construction is not unfrequent in T., cf. 11: rex vel princeps audiuntur. Nor is it without precedent in other authors. Cf. Z. 374. Ritter reads propinqui. The attentive reader will discover here traces of many ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus

... 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 ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... way," said Madeline, "have you heard that this year's junior ushers are going to keep up the precedent, out of ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde

... put old wine into new bottles, which betrays a want of confidence in the expansive power of God. I hate with a deep-seated hatred all such attempts to bind and confine the rising tide of thought. I want to see religion vital and not formal, elastic and not cramped by precedent and tradition. And thus I love to see worship enshrined in noble classical buildings, which seem to me to speak of a desire to infuse the intellectual spirit of Greece, the dignified imperialism of Rome into the ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... inexperience nearly ended my life: for though I had a minute theoretical knowledge of all British workings, I was, in my practical relation to them, like a man who has learnt seamanship on shore. At this place the dead were accumulated, I think beyond precedent, the dark plain around for at least three miles being as strewn as a reaped field with stacks, and, near the bank, much more strewn than stack-fields, filling the only house within sight of the pit-mouth—the ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... matters had at no time "looked favorably" on the right up to ten o'clock. The condition, therefore, which was assumed as precedent to Burnside's movement, never existed; and this was better known to McClellan than to any one else, for he received the first discouraging reports after Mansfield fell, and the subsequent alarming ones when Sedgwick was routed. Burnside's report was dated on the 30th of September, within two weeks ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... is still everywhere talking of Mr. Roosevelt. It was a thing almost without precedent that this blase city kept up its interest in him without abatement for eight days; but that a week after his departure should still find him the main topic of conversation is a fact which has undoubtedly entered into Paris history. The Temps ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt

... bill would be to furnish a very dangerous precedent which would open the door to demands upon Congress in other cases which have been fully heard ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley

... time. I was advised not to pay them the sum promised, as they were profiting by my ignorance, and it might make me trouble afterwards. But I reasoned that my ignorance was my own fault; they had not asked, I had offered the reward, and I was sure the evil of a broken promise was greater than any bad precedent. So the men got their tip, and I am certain I gained by the reputation I thus acquired of keeping my word. I never again gave such rewards, but I always had ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall

... 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 ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... laws which enable a person to obtain pecuniary compensation for personal injuries, appear to be founded on very ancient precedent. Mr. Sharon Turner, in his History of the Anglo-Saxons, gives a statement of the sums at which our ancestors valued the various parts of their earthly tenements. He says "Homer is celebrated for discriminating the wounds of his heroes with anatomical precision. The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various

... Miss Salmon, she maintained throughout it, moving about in pursuit of her pince-nez, a rather loud, constant, tuneless humming. When her moment came she would always begin "Well, now" and then swallow forcibly as though the swallowing gave her pain. "Well, now" (gulp). This introduction was always precedent to speech by Miss Salmon, whether after humming or not. Rosalie frequently went to Sunday church service with her and there was an occasion in the Litany on which Miss Salmon, who either had been wandering or sleeping, ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... 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, spared his great ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells

... of a judge of the Supreme Court sitting with two assessors representing capital and labour respectively. The trio are appointed for three years, and in default of crime or insanity can only be removed by statute. Their court may not be appealed from, and their procedure is not fettered by precedent. No disputant may employ counsel unless all agree to do so. The decisions of this Court are binding in law, and may be enforced by pains and penalties. The arbitration law has been in active operation for about three years, during which time some thirty-five Labour disputes have been successfully ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... unlikely, but altogether impossible and unmeaning, the so-called temple of Concord. No reasonable guess can be made at its pagan dedication; in the fifteenth century of our era it followed the far earlier precedent of the temples in the akropolis. It became the church of Saint Gregory, not of any of the great pontiffs and doctors of the Church, but of the local bishop whose full description as Saint Gregory of the Turnips can hardly be written without a smile. The peristyle was walled up, and arches ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various

... on, 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 ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke

... 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 his boots sticking out on both sides! Thank you, Dora. ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Gerrard-street, in a house which looked backwards into the garden of Leicester House. Newton lived in St. Martin's-street, on the south side of the square. Steele lived in Bury-street, St. James'; he furnishes an illustrious precedent for the loungers in St. James'-street, where scandal-mongers of those times delighted to detect Isaac Bickerstaff in the person of captain Steele, idling before the Coffee-house, and jerking his leg and stick alternately against the pavement. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various

... 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

... these irregularities," said the elder Cruger, whose diplomatic training had made him something of a stickler for formality and precedent. "There will be time enough for that when ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein

... 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. ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... There, too, we found the little brown mamma, the same, as we suppose, whose nest-building we had watched with so much interest. She also had a youngster under her charge. But how was this! a brown baby clad like herself! Could it be that the sons and daughters of this warbler family outrage all precedent by wearing their grown-up dress in the cradle? We consulted the authorities and found ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller

... 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 tenets ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... were said to have only "conquered by giving way," for they agreed to put the number of men into the Estimate, and thus avoid making a precedent, according to our contention, absolutely unconstitutional. On the other hand, Lord Beaconsfield's speech in the House of Lords was defiant in the extreme, and Holker's [Footnote: The Attorney-General.] in the Lower House was an assertion of higher prerogative ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn

... this we convict ourselves of provincialism. Society is far larger than America, or China, or Russia, or all the islands of the sea in combination. It may entail some straining at the mental leash to win this concept of society, but it must be won as a condition precedent to a fair and just estimate of what the function of education really is and what it is of which the schoolhouse must be an exponent. Society must be thought of as including all nations, tribes, and tongues. In our thinking, ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... His own life-spirit. By His inhabiting our hearts, and moulding our wills, and being the life of our lives and the soul of our souls, are we made able to do the commandments of the Lord. And so, seeing that actual union with Jesus Christ, and the reception into ourselves of His life, is the precedent condition of all true obedience, then the more familiar form of presenting the bond between Him and us, which runs through the New Testament, falls into its proper place, and the faith, which is the condition of receiving the life of Christ into our hearts, is at once the affinity ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... came up, and grew warm. The wind died. I took off my sweater. Between flights I basked deliciously. The affair was outside of all precedent and reason. A duck shooter ought to be out in a storm, a good cold storm. He ought to break the scum ice when he puts out his decoys. He ought to sit half frozen in a wintry blast, his fingers numb, his nose blue, his body shivering. That sort of discomfort goes with ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... thought, made the punishment. He hoped no Texan feared a bullet. A clean, honorable death like that was for a man who had never wronged his manhood. Every rascally horse thief or Mexican assassin would demand a shot if they were given a precedent. And arguments that would have been essentially false in some localities had a compelling weight in that one. The men gravely nodded their heads in assent, and Lorimer knew that any further pleading was in vain. Yet when he returned to ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... little sense!" he declared; "but you're right. It's one of your English customs to go on from precedent to precedent until you get an unmodifiable standard, when you slavishly conform to it. Now your book's neither a classification nor a catalogue—it's something far bigger. Never mind what the experts and scientists say; wait until the people who love ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss

... German, and US systems that combine "continental" or "civil" code and case-precedent; constitution ambiguous on judicial review of legislative acts; has not accepted ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... was a man who, without having been aware of it, possessed an excellent capacity for business. The neglect of his property resulted not from want of feeling, but merely from want of consideration. There had, moreover, been no precedent for him to follow. He had seen no Irishman of rank ever bestow a moment's attention on his tenantry. They had been, for the most part, absentees like himself, and felt satisfied if they succeeded in receiving their half-yearly remittance in due course, without ever reflecting ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... lay distraint And force him thus to answer my complaint, Which I, in well-considered counts, should draw. Not free to fly, he needs must seek some flaw To mar my pleading, though his heart were faint; Declare his counsel to me, and acquaint Himself with maxim, precedent, and saw. ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill

... mistooke (my Lady) Polixenes for Leontes: O thou Thing, (Which Ile not call a Creature of thy place, Least Barbarisme (making me the precedent) Should a like Language vse to all degrees, And mannerly distinguishment leaue out, Betwixt the Prince and Begger:) I haue said Shee's an Adultresse, I haue said with whom: More; shee's a Traytor, and Camillo is A Federarie with her, and one that knowes What she ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... society, the head of the Young Labor party, the unofficial chief of the secret Soviet forces in the United States, was alive and again in the field against law and order was enough to set in motion every force that he controlled. Waving aside precedent and crashing his way past secretaries, he set in motion not only the agents of the Department of Justice but also the post-office forces and the specialized but highly efficient Military and Naval Intelligence Divisions. The telephone and telegraph ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... quite content, he said, to vote for the Address, as, he believed, would be all the gentlemen on his side of the House. No one could suspect them or him of giving a factious opposition to Government. Had they not borne and forborne beyond all precedent known in that House? Then he touched lightly, and almost with grace to his opponents, on many subjects, promising support, and barely hinting that they were totally and manifestly wrong in all things. But—. Then ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope

... literally 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, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... conduct of the present Ministers to that of those odious tools of power, who, towards the close of the reign of Charles the Second, seized the charters of the Whig corporations. Now, there was another precedent, which I wonder that he did not recollect, both because it is much more nearly in point than that to which he referred, and because my noble friend, the Paymaster of the Forces, had previously alluded to it. If the elective franchise is property, if to disfranchise voters without a crime proved, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... all very well to shake yourself and say you must work. It's easy enough to recall that in 1870 Fantin Latour shut himself up and painted fruit and flowers, and by emulation, buoyed up perhaps by this precedent, you sit down and sketch a still life. What greater joy than to seek out a harmony, find the delicate suave tones, and paint it in an unctuous medium. Yes, it's a joy, but only when head and heart are both in it! The museums too, used to be a source ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard

... not afford the unbroken example of municipal control that they would if a new system were to be created at the present day. Precedent looms large in British administration and even now there are only two ways of establishing a market—by Parliamentary authority and Royal Charter. King Henry III covenanted by charter with the City of London ...
— A Terminal Market System - New York's Most Urgent Need; Some Observations, Comments, - and Comparisons of European Markets • Mrs. Elmer Black

... enthusiasm for ballad poetry (Spectators 70, 74, 85) was not a sheer novelty. He had a ringing English precedent in Sidney, whom he quotes. And he may have had one in Jonson; at least he thought he had. He cited Dryden and Dorset as collectors and readers of ballads; and he might have cited others. He found comfort in the fact that Moliere's Misanthrope was on his side. The modern or broadside version of Chevy ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe

... course, of course. I don't know that you ought to have brought him here," said Mr. Brett, shaking his head waggishly at Dino. "Against rules, you know: against custom: against precedent. But I believe you want to arrange matters pleasantly amongst yourselves. Well, Mr. Heron, I don't often like to commit myself to a statement, but, under the circumstances, I have no hesitation in saying that I believe this gentleman ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... unlimited rights of jurisdiction. At once he put into exercise the advantages and opportunities which were united in him so as never before in the promoter of a like enterprise, and achieved a success speedy and splendid beyond all precedent. ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... to repeal the Boston Port Bill, because (independently of the dangerous precedent of suspending the rights of the subject during the king's pleasure) it was passed, as I apprehend, with less regularity, and on more partial principles, than it ought. The corporation of Boston was not heard before it was condemned. Other towns, full as guilty as ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... meeting fits Simon." And here let me remark, that I am an enthusiastic admirer of the perambulating gentleman who outwitted the pastie purchaser; in fact, "I go solid for the Simonian." If the field is dusty on the morning of the race, it will be following precedent. When I think of the Derby, I cannot help remembering HENRY THE EIGHTH, for it was to hold the Field of the Cloth of Gold that that eminent monarch had to raise the dust. Well might FRANCOIS PREMIER have observed (as I do), "Bravo, Gouverneur!" If DICKENS's naval ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 30, 1891 • Various

... ceremony was modelled on the precedent of other royal funerals, but surely rarely was mourning so keen or sorrow ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler

... extent indefinitely beyond what has ever been required in any other. And especially is this true when we consider that our government is representative as it regards the people, and federative as it regards the states; and that, in this respect, it has no precedent on the file of nations. We hence require a double portion of general intelligence and practical wisdom. But men are not born in the possession of these requisites to self-government, neither are they necessarily developed in the growth from infancy to manhood. They are the product of cultivation ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew

... 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. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... let us 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 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 any ...
— 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 men to whose country they were accredited. The Judges of the Supreme Court, in their flowing silk gowns, alone reminded the spectator that the United States had not sprung full-fledged from nothing, without traditions and without precedent. ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton

... face of adverse votes; but this was a vote upon the general policy of the government, not upon its policy in some non-essential particular, and constitutionally decided that the ministry did not possess the confidence of the commons house of parliament. According to all rule and precedent, Sir Robert ought to have resigned. The Duke of Sussex, Lord Holland, the great Fox, and other statesmen of acknowledged constitutional principles and respect for public rights, had always maintained these views. The conduct ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... with his characters is a gross error, but is not without precedent. We always like to trace the author in the hero of a romance, and to seek the actor beneath the disguise. No doubt, as Taine has said, "the works of an intelligence have not the intelligence alone for father and mother, but ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... his position at the head of the most respected periodical formed a natural temptation to a dictatorial manner. He was a judge who tried to uphold the literary constitution but wavered in the face of a strong popular opposition. When the support of precedent failed him, he remained without any firm conviction of his own. While his poetic taste was quite adequate to the appreciation of a Samuel Rogers or a Barry Cornwall, it was incomparably futile in the perception of a Wordsworth or a Shelley. In a passage composed ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... those who see in the task only an assignment. Such men know the actual working of the financial mechanism, not as economists see it, but as Bagehot knew it. They understand the actual working of municipal machinery besides having a minute knowledge of character, decision, practice, and precedent in administration. In our real politics, big and little, they and the Washington and Albany correspondents are the only men who know both sides, are trusted with the secrets of both parties, and read closed pages of the book of the chronicles of the ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... to admit that they had all the arguments on their side. He had gone his own obstinate way, in defiance of all advice and of all precedent; and now he saw what had come of it—exactly what every common-sense person had foreseen. He and Corydon had tried their "living as brother and sister"—and here she was with child! And that was all right, no one proposed to blame him for it; it was what people had predicted, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... which, however, always became righted in time for the wedding. Or even had he been a pork butcher, and there were many in the neighbourhood, I could have thought of him as a swineherd, and so found precedent ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... the same way as before, and carried by a majority of 85. The prime minister then informed Lord Lorne that in the opinion of the government Mr. Letellier's "usefulness was gone," and he recommended his removal from office; but the governor-general was unwilling to agree hastily to such a dangerous precedent as the removal of a lieutenant-governor, and as an imperial officer he referred the whole matter to her Majesty's government for their consideration and instructions. The colonial secretary did not hesitate to state "that the lieutenant-governor ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot

... silver, golden, and diamond weddings we are tolerably familiar, but, so far as we know, a crown-diamond wedding such as was celebrated a short time ago at Maebuell, in the island of Alsen, is a ceremony altogether without precedent in matrimonial annals. Having completed their sixty-fifth year of conjugal bliss, Claus Jacobsen and his venerable spouse were solemnly blessed by the parson of their parish, and went, for the fifth time in ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... narrower and more rigid tone, to put old wine into new bottles, which betrays a want of confidence in the expansive power of God. I hate with a deep-seated hatred all such attempts to bind and confine the rising tide of thought. I want to see religion vital and not formal, elastic and not cramped by precedent and tradition. And thus I love to see worship enshrined in noble classical buildings, which seem to me to speak of a desire to infuse the intellectual spirit of Greece, the dignified imperialism of Rome into the more timid and secluded ecclesiastical ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... and the Republican platform of 1860 characterized the dogma that the Constitution carried slavery into the territories as "a dangerous political heresy at variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself ... with legislative and judicial precedent ... revolutionary in tendency and subversive of the peace ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... heating surface is 1,160 square feet, the diameters of the cylinders 18 in., and that of the driving wheels 8 ft. 1 in. We have here, then, a diameter very near to that adopted by M. Estrade, and which, together with the previous example, forms a precedent of great interest. The locomotive of the Great Northern has a leading four-wheeled bogie, which considerably increases the steadiness of the engine, and counterbalances the disturbing effect of outside cylinders. Acting on the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various

... him. He found his patient cured by the draught! It was contrary to all rule and precedent; it savored of quackery—the red lavender had no business to do what the red lavender had done—but there she was, nevertheless, up and dressed, and contemplating a journey to London on the next day but one. ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins

... back from its word, and often struggles gallantly against its own inclinations; it becomes stubborn for honour's sake, and sacrifices everything to the noble pride of keeping its word. Though I have pardoned him now, do not consider this a precedent for the future. Whatever fortune has in store for me, I cannot think of giving my hand to the Prince of Navarre, until he has shown that he is completely cured of those gloomy fits which unsettle ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere

... fortune, and who was born, as the story books say, of poor but honest parents. Poverty and honesty, however, were not sufficient recommendations in the eyes of Mr Curtis, senior, to excuse such a match; so he promptly followed the precedent set by Oxford, and expelled his son from the family circle. That young gentleman and his wife came out to Australia filled with ambitious dreams of acquiring a fortune, and then of returning to heap coals of fire on the heads of those who had ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume

... 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

... not a confession, your Holiness, and even if it had been, as your Holiness knows better than we do, it would not be without precedent to reveal the facts which are necessary to be known ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine

... at "the 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 ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington

... her to the knowledge dispensary, Which to every rule and precedent was recklessly contrary. Immediately whereupon the pedagogue superior, Exasperated, did eject the lamb ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... abetted our daubing. We knew no other boys at all, and we even saw no others, I seem to remember, save the essentially rude ones, rude with a kind of mediaeval rudeness for which our clear New York experience had given us no precedent, and of which the great and constant sign was the artless, invidious wonder produced in them, on our public appearances, by the alien stamp in us that, for our comfort, we vainly sought to dissimulate. We conformed in each particular, so far ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... 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

... the Constitution.—Before making a study of this epoch-making document, let us inquire briefly as to its origin. An analysis of the Constitution shows that there are some provisions which are new and that English precedent had an influence. The main features, however, were derived from the constitutions of the States with whose practical workings the delegates were familiar. The following well-known statement is an excellent summary: "Nearly every provision of the Federal Constitution that ...
— Our Government: Local, State, and National: Idaho Edition • J.A. James

... 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 ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant

... a hitch in proceedings. Plainly there was no precedent to follow in considering the application of so non-existent a being for permission to leave Mexico. The official smoked a cigarette pensively and idly turned over the leaves of ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... a five-year term; election last held 14 April 2002 (next to be held NA 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: Jose Alexander GUSMAO elected president; percent of vote - Jose Alexander GUSMAO 82.7%, Francisco Xavier ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... been destined for my church. In accordance with precedent, I shall build here," said ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin

... reaping. There is no dogma except belief in this extrahuman influence—no conception of moral effort as based on and sanctioned by a definite moral ideal, no struggle of the sort that we call spiritual. Religion consists of a body of practices whose authority rests on precedent; as it is supposed they have existed from time immemorial, they are held to be necessary to secure the well-being of the tribe (a sufficient supply of food, or victory over enemies); to the question why such and such things are ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... be assured that there will be little restriction as to the company who will comprise this assemblage. The Governor will take sides with the wealthy, be their sympathies what they may. Well, if he establish the precedent, I dare say, none will be so determined as to oppose him. Do you wish to ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett

... his own students; and he watched and guarded them unto the end, even according to his promise, "Lo, I am with you alway!" Nowhere in the four Gospels will Christian Scientists find any precedent for employing another student to take charge of their students, or for neglecting their own students, in order to enlarge their ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy

... know the difference in feeling and views which separate the royalist emigrant nobles 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 wealthiest ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... experience, which teaches lessons that fine-spun theories cannot upset. It is so with his Colonial theories of economics and government. The dead weight of tradition does not hang around his neck where State affairs are concerned and precedent only counts when it ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie

... American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise. The Land of Democracy has always appealed to its more enthusiastic children chiefly as a land of wonderful and more than national possibilities. "Neither race nor tradition," says Professor Hugo ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... interest. Fabrice del Dongo himself,[131] with whom every woman falls in love, and who candidly confesses that he does not know whether he has ever been really in love with any woman—though there is one possible exception precedent, his aunt, the Duchess of Sanseverina, and one subsequent, Clelia Conti, who saves him from prison, as above—is depicted with extraordinary science of human nature. But it is a science which, once more, excludes passion, humour, gusto—all the fluids of real or fictitious life. Fabrice ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... 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 ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... the grain market from which Spain, Italy and other countries drew their supplies. All the products of the world found purchasers here, and a well-developed banking system greatly facilitated the exchange. The rapid accumulation of fortunes by the Dutch merchants and bankers was without precedent in Europe. Besides this, the progress which Holland made in ship-building and navigation and the advantages which she derived from her colonial trade placed her in a position to outstrip all other nations in the carrying ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee

... first development, and to reproduce as copyists its original expressions. It is not by any means a necessary condition of a consistent revival of early Heraldry, that our revived Heraldry should admit no deviation from original usage or precedent. So long as we are thoroughly animated by the spirit of the early Heralds, we may lead our Heraldry onwards with the advance of time. It is for us, indeed, to prepare a Heraldry for the future, no less than to revive true Heraldry in the time ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell

... 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

... of homesteaders were preparing to leave the country—driven out by an army of insects—when, as suddenly as they came, the worms disappeared. Where they came from, where they went, no one knew. I mention this episode as one without precedent or repetition in the history of the frontier, so far as ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... rather than that of another. It would thus become too much involved in party controversy to act as a central agency of a movement which must embrace men of all parties. Should this view prevail, the difficulty can be easily surmounted by following the Irish precedent, where we had a very similar and indeed far more delicate situation to save from political trouble. An American Agricultural Organisation Society could be founded for the purpose in view, and as it is probable that leading advocates of the Conservation policy would take a ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett

... consider this interesting point, as FIBBINS is again in difficulties about some precedent that he wants to quote, but which he has forgotten, and turns sharply round on me, saying, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various

... 1877, at Deauville, the comte de Clermont-Tonnere and his jockey, Goddart, were expelled from the turf because the latter had "pulled" his horse in such a clumsy and unmistakable way that the spectators could not fail to see it. This circumstance was without precedent in France, and yet how often has the trick, which in this case was exposed, been practised without any one being the wiser for it! It ought to be added that the betters make one claim that is altogether unreasonable, and that is—at least this is the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various

... face with men in winning their friendship, and my partner's displeasure put me on my mettle. I felt that when I got into touch with this gentleman I could convince him that what he proposed would result in a bad precedent. My reasoning (in my own mind) was logical and convincing. I went to see him, and put forth all the arguments that I had so carefully thought out. But he stormed about, and in the end I had the further humiliation of confessing to my ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller

... in 1838, he sent to the Senate the nomination of John A. McClernand as Secretary of State, assuming that the office had been vacated and that a new Governor might choose his advisers.[118] Precedent, it is true, militated against this theory, for Secretary Field had held office under three successive governors; but now that parties had become more sharply defined, it was deemed important that the Secretary of State should be of the ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... great a trust to a woman, and amongst all that I shall do to arrive at glory, that will brand me with feebleness; but Sylvia, when lovers shall read it, the men will excuse me, and the maids bless me! I shall be a fond admired precedent for them to point out to their remiss reserving lovers, who will be reproached for not pursuing my example. I know not what opinion men generally have of the weakness of women; but 'tis sure a vulgar error, for were they like ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn

... made use of there on 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 ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath

... census in 1885 was a breach of the Constitution for which no previous decade affords a precedent, and the absence of a school census becomes, year by year, a graver sin of omission as the pressure of economic conditions makes child labor more ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various

... fortnight or so, she likewise dispensed with her rules in mere indulgence to my foibles, and idler habits; for I also, (though I had the benefit of an example I so much admired) am too much of a modern. Yet, as to morning risings, I had corrected myself by such a precedent, in the summer-time; and can witness to the benefit I found by it in my health: as also to the many useful things I was enabled, by that means, with ease and pleasure, to perform. And in her account-book I have found this memorandum, since her ever-to-be-lamented death:—'From ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... pompous hotel manager, who looked down upon her with distrustful scrutiny. She was wholly aware of every inch of her appearance—the shabbiness of her brown Norfolk suit, the rakishness of her boyish brown beaver hat, and the vagabond gloves. But of what value is the precedent of having been found hanging on the thorn of a Killarney rose-bush by the Physician to the King, of what value is the knowledge of past kinship with a certain Dan O'Connell, if one allows a little matter of clothes to spoil one's entrance and ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer

... of view to either party. But the fact that the result would 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

... Lack of precedent was no difficulty to Bowdler's learned opponent. A ready imagination made up. To hear him talk you would think he had spent his life assisting at the trials of ex-Kaisers. He described the whole affair as if it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various

... heroine of a novel, who discards her lover upon such a discovery as was made by you last night. It is a common novel incident, and, of course, from novels every young lady, even, who might not have felt without a precedent, knows how she ought to express herself in such circumstances. But you will observe, my dear, that both in novels and in real life, young ladies generally like and encourage men of feeling in contradistinction to men of principle, and too often men of gallantry in preference ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth

... impossible to him; no General knows what he can do till he tries. Therefore, he, the British General, must always try! must never listen to the rule-of-thumb advisers who seek to chain down adventure to precedent. But our wounds make us weaker and weaker. Oh that we could fill up the gaps in the thinned ranks of those ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton

... them.... But, 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 ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton

... establish the "ruling rates." They continued at a real a load, until H., with reckless generosity, one day paid our improvised oyster-man two reals for his cargo, who thereupon, appealing to this bad precedent, refused to go out, unless previously assured of receiving the advanced rate. This led to the immediate arrest of H., on an indictment charging him with "wilfully and maliciously combining and conniving with one Juan ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... conchology, especially if it had several brilliant colors, one would take off his coat, another his shirt, and insist that he should exchange the shell for the garment. When he declined the exchange, but on the contrary presented the coveted article, he soon found he had established a dangerous precedent. Immediately they all commenced to beg for everything in the vast collection which they happened to take a liking to. This cost Barnum many valuable specimens, and often "put him to his trumps" for an excuse ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton

... 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 ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... I ask whether there is any precedent (I think there can be no excuse) for calling ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various

... local gods of the separate tribes, but of the highest God, above all the rest. That he was the acknowledged arbiter of surrounding tribes appears from the fact that Abraham paid to him tithes out of the spoils. It is not likely that Abraham did this if there were no precedent for it; for he regarded the spoils as belonging, not to himself, but to the confederates in whose cause he fought. No doubt it was the custom, as in the case of Delphi, to pay tithes to this supreme arbiter; and in doing so Abraham was simply following the custom. The Jewish traveller, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... chapter was their desire to establish a more effective check on the people. They showed no special preference for the English form where some other method would better accomplish the desired purpose. Hence in many instances they deliberately rejected English precedent, but always with the view of providing something that would impose a more effective check on the public will. An apparent exception to this may be found in the limited term of President and United States senators. ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith

... lady-in-waiting and those who shared her opinion. "I cannot bring myself to establish such a precedent," she said, in her usual haughty tone. "It is I who have to walk first, and I shall only go half-way across the courtyard of the Louvre. It's quite far enough for the Holy Wafer-box; what's the use of walking any further ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... 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 in the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... cultivate a good understanding between our two countries, made me now press him for an explicit answer. He told me that he was convinced that I did not wish to embarrass him, but observed, with some peevishness, —— as Mr Elfried is by the Russian. He cites precedent and you have none. ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various

... great Metternich observes that if he had never been born he never could have loved or hated. Following so illustrious a precedent, I may observe that if I had not been born in East Anglia I never could have been an East Anglian. Whether I should have been wiser or better off had I been born elsewhere, is an interesting question, which, however, it is to be hoped the public will forgive me if I decline to discuss on ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie

... lighted it, and thrust the box across the table to Koltsoff. "But we might as well have a clear understanding. It will be better in every way. I have felt that Americans have been altogether too willing to subscribe to European customs in marrying off their daughters. I am going to establish a new precedent, if I ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry

... and the House of Assembly. As Englishmen especially plume themselves on the fact that the members of their legislative bodies are unremunerated, it is somewhat difficult to understand how this exception was made in John Arthur's favor. As a precedent it is to be hoped that it has not been followed; for it is obvious that such an arrangement, however advantageous or pleasant to individual members, might throw grave suspicions on the purity of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... Scott Monument,—a structure which, erected to do honour to the genius of one illustrious Scotsman, will be long recognised as a proud trophy of the fine taste and vigorous talent of another. The arrangement was not without precedent; and had it been possible for Sir Walter to have anticipated it, we do not think it would have greatly displeased him. The Egyptian architect inscribed the name of his kingly master on but the plaster of the pyramid, while he engraved his own on the enduring granite underneath; ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... to Lord Gower:—"Johnson, the Lichfield librarian, is now here. He propagates learning all over this diocese, and advanceth knowledge to its just height. All the clergy here are his pupils, and suck all they have from him; Allen cannot make a warrant without his precedent, nor our quondam John Evans draw a recognizance sine directione Michaelis."—Gent. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various

... cannot be denied that divines have from time to time been much inclined to give a traditional, logical shape to sciences which do not admit of any such treatment. Nor can it be denied, on the other hand, that men of science often show a special irritation at theologians for going by antiquity, precedent, authority, and logic, and for declining to introduce Bacon or Niebuhr into their own school, or to apply some new experimental and critical process for the improvement of that which has been given once ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... If the manager of a theatre saw fit to produce "adult" matter without excluding 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 under ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... 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 Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... the impressment, service and sufferings of Fernando Stevens and his friends are no exaggerations. Well authenticated history shows that there were thousands of cases similar, and even worse than theirs. The conduct of England was without precedent and unbearable. Their great need of men might have been some excuse for impressment of Americans; but there was a spice of hatred in their cruel treatment of the ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,

... the secret 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 ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson

... custom are synonymous. Whatever the ancestors did is right, and hence has religious sanction. The lakay and his advisors will give their decisions according to the decrees of the past, if that is possible, but when precedent is lacking, they will deliberate and decide on a course. The following may be taken as typical of the laws or customs which regulate the actions of the people, within a ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole

... 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 from time to time imparted to Catholics ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... and showed conclusively that she was not "all Randall," as had been supposed. Miranda was rather mollified by and pleased with the turn of events, although she did not intend to show it, or give anybody any reason to expect that this expression of hospitality was to serve for a precedent on ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... his troops in Harlem, and he had furnished the citizens with arms to defend themselves, giving free permission to use them against the insurgent troops. By this means the mutiny had been quelled, but a dangerous precedent established. Anxiety concerning this rebellion is supposed to have hastened the Grand Commander's death. A violent fever seized him on the 1st, and terminated his existence on the 5th of March, in the fifty-first year ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... British men. Thus it is that in the grey old cathedrals, as we look round upon the brasses on the walls, we see strange names, such names as they who reared those walls had never heard, for it is in Peshawar, and Umballah, and Korti and Fort Pearson that the youngsters die, leaving only a precedent and a brass behind them. But if every man had his obelisk, even where he lay, then no frontier line need be drawn, for a cordon of British graves would ever show how high ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... nothing to the testimony that established the fortitude, manliness and dignity of the prisoners, as beyond precedent or example. That their bearing, one and all, was truly noble, friends and foes took pride in attesting.[11] It was a solemn and a glorious sight; and men, through all time, will turn to that Clonmel dock to learn the inestimable and imperishable ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny

... oligarchical government of the Hanoverian period, just as that system had been a step from the kingly power of the Tudors and the Stuarts, which, in turn, had arisen upon the ruins of feudalism and military monarchical power. It is this gradual growth, this "gently broadening down from precedent to precedent," which makes the British constitution of to-day the more or less perfected result of centuries of experience and struggle. But that result has only been made possible by a peculiar series of national adjustments ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins

... 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 ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston

... to safeguard our neutral rights by diplomatic means against the unwarranted infringements they are suffering at the hands of Germany, there may be no recourse but to armed neutrality, which we shall know how to maintain and for which there is abundant American precedent. ...
— Why We are at War • Woodrow Wilson

... them, had no precedent, and no vocabulary. They had come across death raw and real, uncooked by religion, undeodorised by the sayings ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... I have it all before me—with references to the documents cited, if you please, otherwise it is difficult to follow—I will see whether it calls for a detailed reply on my part, in which case I might, according to American precedent, republish my article, inserting, with your permission, your reply. This was done by the New York Outlook, when it published in the same number, "the Case of the Boers," and "the Case of ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot

... why. Types.—[They had to deal with a carnal people and to render them the depositary of the spiritual covenant.] To give faith to the Messiah, it was necessary there should have been precedent prophecies, and that these should be conveyed by persons above suspicion, diligent, faithful, unusually zealous, and known to all ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal

... 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

... 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

... but humour abhors logic, and 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 ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson

... the recital. He described the difficulties which he had encountered and the machinations of the enemies who had been constantly thwarting him. He pleaded that he had been obliged to create a line of conduct for himself, having to deal with an entirely new combination of circumstances without any precedent to guide him. And he implored the Queen to believe that the accusations which had, of late, poured in against him, were prompted by the disappointed ambition and the jealousy of his enemies, and had not any solid ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps

... of that time, and affected the course in which things ran. And it is easy to blame, it is hard to do justice to, the various persons and parties who contributed to the events of that strange and confused time. All was new, and unusual, and without precedent in Oxford; a powerful and enthusiastic school reviving old doctrines in a way to make them seem novelties, and creating a wild panic from a quarter where it was the least expected; the terror of this panic acting on authorities not in the least prepared for such a trial of their ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... 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 of gold between us, thanks to this ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... strange. One of my chief errands was to speak to Sir W. Clerke about my wife's brother, who importunes me, and I doubt he do want mightily, but I can do little for him there as to employment in the army, and out of my purse I dare not for fear of a precedent, and letting him come often to me is troublesome and dangerous too, he living in the dangerous part of the town, but I will do what I can possibly for him and as soon as I can. Mightily troubled all this afternoon with masters coming to me about Bills of Exchange and my signing ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... Boers and Red Indians. In South Africa the Briton has always insisted upon standing bravely up, unsheltered, before the hidden Boer, and taking the results: Jameson's men would follow the custom. Jameson would not have listened to me—he would have been intent upon repeating history, according to precedent. Americans are not acquainted with the British-Boer war of 1881; but its history is interesting, and could have been instructive to Jameson if he had been receptive. I will cull some details of it from trustworthy sources mainly from "Russell's Natal." Mr. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... IIIrd dynasty: namely, the hypogeum of Shiri, priest of Sondi and Pirsenu; 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 this same ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... saturnalia of crime in this community. Already several of our young men are reading dime novels and taking lessons in banditry; but the sheriff has stated that this parole will not be considered a precedent. The affair has resulted in some good, however. In addition to placing the young man under Christian influences, and others, it has unearthed a patch of the biggest, best, ripest and sweetest wild strawberries in Monterey County ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick

... is true, and now you have put your finger on the danger spot. Why has the Election been delayed beyond all precedent?" ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr

... that even medical families cannot escape the more insidious forms of disease, and that, after all, Dr. Sloper had lost other patients beside the two I have mentioned; which constituted an honourable precedent. His little girl remained to him, and though she was not what he had desired, he proposed to himself to make the best of her. He had on hand a stock of unexpended authority, by which the child, in its early years, profited largely. She had been ...
— Washington Square • Henry James

... Brittany, wife of Louis XII. and the personification of all that is good and virtuous. To her belongs the honor of having taken the first step toward the social emancipation of French women; she was the first to give to woman an important place at court. This precedent she established by requesting her state officials and the foreign ambassadors to bring their wives and daughters when they paid their respects to her. To the ladies themselves, she sent a "royal command," bidding them leave their gloomy ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... 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

... not thought it necessary to give a separate and distinct reply to the theory of Mr. Congreve, that Roman Imperialism was the type of all good government, and a desirable precedent for ourselves. Those who feel any penchant for the notion, I should strongly recommend to read the answer of Professor G. Smith, in the Oxford Essays for 1856, which is as complete and crushing as that ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... was unique as an individual, perhaps in the very fact of an individuality unembarrassed by the limitations of convention, of education and of precedent, he becomes in a sense typical of his people ...
— Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles • Ruth McEnery Stuart

... Christ, this is that for the sake of which grace is given unto us, as it is intimated by the text; 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 communications of grace to us, it is the fruit of his merit and purchase. But, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... which is founded on usage and general consent. The chiefs, in pronouncing their decisions, are not heard to say, "so the law directs," but "such is the custom." It is true that, if any case arises for which there is no precedent on record (of memory), they deliberate and agree on some mode that shall serve as a rule in future similar circumstances. If the affair be trifling that is seldom objected to; but when it is a matter of consequence the pangeran, or kalippah (in places where ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... is no man that knows life well, and remembers all the incidents of his past existence, who would accept it again; we are certainly here to punish precedent sins.—Campbell. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... and towns held in 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 ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen

... to complain, declared greatly, and like a general, that he was used to enlist and not to buy his soldiers, when they heard of this, they conceived an implacable hatred against him; for he did not seem to defraud them merely himself in their present expectations, but to give an ill precedent, and instruct his successors to do the like. This heart-burning, however, was as yet at Rome a thing undeclared, and a certain respect for Galba's personal presence somewhat retarded their motions, and took off their edge, and their having no obvious occasion for beginning a revolution ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... 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, instead of doing ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long

... were found dead there might be a possibility of that. But I should explain to him, and he would understand that it was a case without diplomatic precedent." ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath

... cleavage in the Unionist camp began to appear. Already, landlords in the South and West had found a common ground of action with representatives of the tenants. It was felt, alike in Ireland and England, that this precedent might ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn

... integrated and routine manner. 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 treatment ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... concern with any object of internal administration. An exact equality of suffrage between the members has also been insisted upon as a leading feature of a confederate government. These positions are, in the main, arbitrary; they are supported neither by principle nor precedent. It has indeed happened, that governments of this kind have generally operated in the manner which the distinction taken notice of, supposes to be inherent in their nature; but there have been in most of them extensive exceptions to the practice, which serve to prove, as far ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

... right of Evelina's as her elaborately crinkled hair. But now she began to transfer to herself a portion of the sympathy she had so long bestowed on Evelina. She had at last recognized her right to set up some lost opportunities of her own; and once that dangerous precedent established, they began ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton

... upon students for quarrelling among themselves was light and limited to a small fine. Kierson's was an aggravated offence, however. The dignity of the Governor's son had suffered, and as there was no precedent the case was allowed to drag on indefinitely. Loris used his influence with the authorities to keep Joseph ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith

... chance of gaining attention for what appeared to me the only mode of combining relief to immediate destitution with permanent improvement of the social and economical condition of the Irish people. But the idea was new and strange; there was no English precedent for such a proceeding: and the profound ignorance of English politicians and the English public concerning all social phenomena not generally met with in England (however common elsewhere), made my endeavours an entire failure. Instead of a great operation on the waste lands, ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill

... think, that what we delayed to do, must be done at last, and done with more difficulty, as it was delayed longer; that while we were complaining, and they were eluding, or answering our complaints, fort was rising upon fort, and one invasion made a precedent ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson

... lord, as your lordship will quickly apprehend when the new point is brought before your notice. A question of principle is here which may form a precedent for the guidance of future Judges, as did the famous case of Perryman v. Lister, which went to the House of Lords about prosecuting a man for stealing a gun. This is about a pig, my lord—a little pig, no doubt, and although there is not ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris

... pharmacopoeia, or Compleat English Physician, was dedicated to Mary, second Queen of England, Scotland, France, Ireland, &c., and appears to have been the first. The preface says "it was the first of that kind extant in the world, a subject for which we have no precedent." ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various

... for so far back as I remembered, breakfast had been my heartiest meal of the entire day, with perhaps two exceptions—luncheon and dinner. Precedent inclined me toward ordering about as many pieces of sliced banana as would be required to button a fairly tall woman's princess frock all the way down her back, with plenty of sugar and cream, and likewise ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb

... 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 ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... it had been in the past, and modern languages were gaining an importance which they had not had in his own youth. His own mind was divided, for a younger brother of his had been sent to Germany when he failed in some examination, thus creating a precedent but since he had there died of typhoid it was impossible to look upon the experiment as other than dangerous. The result of innumerable conversations was that Philip should go back to Tercanbury for another term, and then should leave. With this agreement ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... her fears for his safety 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

... 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 Golden ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... 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 Charlemagne Romances ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... of the Messiah is, in other passages, attributed to God: compare Job xv. 30, where it is said of the wicked: "By the breath of His mouth he shall go away;" Hos. vi. 5: "I have slain them by the word of my mouth." In general, according to the precedent in Gen. i., doing by the mere word is, in Scripture, the characteristic designation of Divine Omnipotence. Parallel is chap. xlix. 2, where Christ says: "And He hath made my mouth like a sharp sword," equivalent ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... novel 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... 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 by General ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... the Union of the Canadas, dissolved as a failure by the Canadians themselves in 1867, was actually based on the success of the Anglo-Irish Union in repressing a dangerous nationality. Did the proof of the error in Canada induce Englishmen to question the soundness of the precedent on which the error was based? On the contrary, the lesson passed unnoticed, and the Irish precedent has survived to darken thought, to retard democratic progress, and to pervert domestic and Imperial policy to this very day. It even had the truly extraordinary retrospective effect ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers

... cash to induce him to take the decisive plunge. Scott illustrates both cases. The melancholy drudgery of his later years was forced from him in spite of nature; but nobody ever wrote more spontaneously than Scott when he was composing his early poems and novels. If the precedent of Shakespeare is good for anything, it is good for this. Shakespeare, it may be, had a more moderate ambition; but there seems to be no reason why the desire of a good house at Stratford should be intrinsically ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... 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 this shocking breach of common propriety was corrected everywhere. The pictorial representations, ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... who hasn't lived among the Chinese can't imagine what a strange, superstitious people they are; more than any other race on the face of the earth they are bound to the past—and I suppose when we came up there to Tung-sha and began to dig tunnels in their hills we were breaking the precedent of the past. Still we didn't really expect any trouble—and for many months all went smoothly. Some wonderful things happened up there in that out-of-the-way corner of the world. We lived—Marion and I—in ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst

... Soviet, German, and US systems that combine "continental" or "civil" code and case-precedent; constitution ambiguous on judicial review of legislative acts; has not ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... their sentence. Next day it was published in the Boston Gazette. He called them before him, and required them on oath to abjure the communication: three officers refused. Poor Gage is to be scapegoat, not for this, but for what was a reason against employing him, incapacity. I wonder at the precedent! Howe is talked of for his successor.—Well, I have done with you!—Now I shall go ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole

... 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 dust ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn

... be so far emasculated as to be incapable of defending the town workers against the peasants who will then be the ruling class. Thus they attack the present Trades Union leaders for being directly influenced by the Government in fixing the rate of wages, on the ground that this establishes a precedent from which, when the change comes, it will be difficult to break away. The Communists answer them by insisting that it is to everybody's interest to pull Russia through the crisis, and that if the Trades Unions were for such academic reasons to insist on their complete independence instead ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome

... mill, a fulling mill, a printing press, a schoolhouse, dwellings for the married members, and large dormitories for the celibates. The meeting-house was built entirely without metal, following literally the precedent of Solomon, who built his temple "so that there was neither hammer nor ax nor any tool of iron heard in the house while it was building." Wooden pegs took the place of nails, and the laths were fastened laboriously into grooves. Averse to riches, Beissel's people refused gifts from William Penn, ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth

... her when Barry swung into the saddle and that was a thing without precedent in Molly's history. She tried none of her usual catlike side-steps and throwing of the head. Altogether, Vic was troubled even as he would have been at the sight of Betty Neal in the arms of ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand

... Mrs. Garnett was duplicating the uneventful placidity of her parents' early years, content to rule her household wisely, to love and minister to her husband, and to devote her energies to the rearing of her children according to time-honored precedent. Pocahontas, the youngest of the family, was still unmarried, nay, ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland

... are many instances of persons being freed from slavery by the laws of England, but (God be thanked) there is neither law, nor even a precedent, (at least I have not been able to find one) of a legal determination to justify a master in claiming or detaining any person whatsoever as a slave in England, who has not voluntarily bound himself as such by ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet

... presumptuous of me, too. The fact that you've been a kind adviser to one of the family doesn't form a precedent for all the rest of us. But, business aside, cannot you ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond

... insensibly, and their place be, pari passu, filled up by free white laborers. If, on the contrary, it is left to force itself on, human nature must shudder at the prospect held up. We should in vain look for an example in the Spanish deportation or deletion of the Moors. This precedent would fall far ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... surprise to me. I had 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 ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds

... delivered, and a 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, did not lie in the different degrees of Honour, but ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson

... an angry and overmastered villain bound to a tree to await death or rescue? The result is rescue every time, and one way and another a mort of trouble for the good characters. Still it may be argued that if the protagonist of The Fortunes of Garin (CONSTABLE) had not followed this risky precedent those fortunes would not have led him where they eventually did, and we should have missed one of the best costume novels of the year. Miss MARY JOHNSTON is among the very few waiters whom I can follow without weariness through the mazes of mediaevalism. This tale of the adventures of a knight ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 12, 1916 • Various

... house-top to pray at "the 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. ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington

... only by a bill of pains and penalties. Such a bill the Whig party, then decidedly predominant in both houses, was quite prepared to support. Many hot-headed members of that party were eager to follow the precedent which had been set in the case of Sir John Fenwick, and to pass an act for cutting off the bishop's head. Cadogan, who commanded the army, a brave soldier, but a headstrong politician, is said to have exclaimed with ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... of the one made famous by Mr. Vanderbilt, and posted it all about, had pamphlets distributed, and made a speech on courtesy in railroad management and elsewhere. Since that time, not altogether because of the precedent which had been established, but because people were beginning to realize that with this new element creeping into business the old regime had to die because it could not compete with it, there have been all sorts of courtesy campaigns ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney

... governess; but the evening meetings at supper were never interrupted; they took place at the house of the Comtesse de Provence. Madame Elisabeth made one of the party when she had finished her education, and sometimes Mesdames, the King's aunts, were invited. The custom, which had no precedent at Court, was the work of Marie Antoinette, and she maintained it with ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan

... machinery to which it had applied. Popular agitation[71] had taken a new shape. The county associations formed in the last days of the American war of independence, and the societies due to the French revolution had set a precedent. The revolutionary societies had been suppressed or had died out, as opposed to the general spirit of the nation, although they had done a good deal to arouse political speculation. In the period of distress which followed ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... the refined sentiment of cruelty revealed in it is deserving of the severest censure. It is true that the introduction of German cookery into France by the Prussians, as you propose, would in a short time decimate the population, but what a fearful precedent it would be! You can best realize it by imagining Massachusetts cookery introduced into New York, and the consequent desolation ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 25, September 17, 1870 • Various

... Embden, in Germany. A mutiny had at about the same time, broken out among his troops in Harlem, and he had furnished the citizens with arms to defend themselves, giving free permission to use them against the insurgent troops. By this means the mutiny had been quelled, but a dangerous precedent established. Anxiety concerning this rebellion is supposed to have hastened the Grand Commander's death. A violent fever seized him on the 1st, and terminated his existence on the 5th of March, in the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... not smoke. If I crossed the line I should establish a dangerous precedent. A good stroke. Now, the idea. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath

... it among others in the colony of a different religious description, by a legislative act. Both of these were necessary. The former, however, he resolved to attempt first. The Society itself had already afforded him a precedent, by its resolutions in 1688 and in 1696, as before mentioned, and had thereby done something material in the progress of the work. It was only to get a minute passed upon their books to the intended effect. Accordingly, at the very first Monthly Meeting of the Society, which took place in Philadelphia ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge

... 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

... "another boy alonga Hinchinbrook!" Having thus completely and satisfactorily settled the point, his face assumed a slow, wise smile, and his agitated mind rested. Was it not all another palpable proof, a precedent to be cited, of the manner in which a no-good-boy wantonly brought ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... Agastya, while engaged in the performance of a grand sacrifice, chased the deer, and devoted every deer in the forest unto the gods in general. Thou hast been slain, pursuant to the usage sanctioned by such precedent. Wherefore reprovest us then? For his especial sacrifices Agastya performed the homa with ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)

... persons, and for the many 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, in the ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost

... represent to ourselves the sudden restoration of vision to a blind eye by a word or a touch? as purely miraculous and magical? That would be to give up thinking on the subject. As magnetic? There is no precedent of magnetism having influence over a disease of this nature. Or, lastly, as psychical? But blindness is something so independent of the mental life, so entirely corporeal, that the idea of its removal at all, still less of its sudden removal by means of a mental operation, ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... a similar instance of a whole body of men, thus repelling every allurement of protection and preferment, of home, country, friends, fortune, possessions, for the still calls of piety, and private dictates of conscience, precedent may be defied, and the annals ...
— Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy (1793) • Frances Burney

... over on its axis with unfailing regularity, and nights followed mornings and mornings followed nights according to well-established precedent. One man turned up in Bootstrap with radiation burns, but he had not offered himself for check over at the hospital. He was found dead in his lodging. Since nobody else appeared to have suffered any burns at all, ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster

... client, impatiently. 'Don't talk to me of cases. The general precedent is in a much larger volume than any of your law books. Besides, do you think I have lived six weeks in ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens

... together, for Jean was as much of a bibliomaniac, almost, as was her husband, and I confess I enjoyed myself amid the rich collection, made without precedent or reason, but, somehow, wonderfully attractive. They were whimsical, the pair, with books as with regard to other things, but the few who might invade their library were inclined to linger there. I always found a mingled odor there of cigar-smoke and of some perfume which ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo

... nominal appointment as assistant surgeon to H.M.S. "Fisguard" at Woolwich, for "particular service," but with leave of absence from the ship so that he could live and pursue his avocations in London. There was a precedent for this course in the case of Dr. Hooker, when he had to work out the scientific results of the voyage of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... established why the franchise should be given to the one and not to the other. It would remain still to present grounds of principle on which that right as such may be denied to her and not denied to him. I have heard reasons of policy, reasons of sentiment, reasons of precedent advanced to justify this exclusion; but in all frankness, and with no disrespect intended, I must say that those which have been presented during this debate seem to me trivial, illogical, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... 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 ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... dear and well-beloved countrymen, what creatures of fashion and precedent we all are, from high to low! What one does, the rest must do; and in the self-same manner. I verily believe, if the late Albert Smith had left it on record that, in ascending Mont Blanc, he planted his foot ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham

... did," Ned 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 ...
— The Boy Scout Camera Club - The Confession of a Photograph • G. Harvey Ralphson

... 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 ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... Zerezo declares that Geronimo de Fuentes, an inhabitant of that city, bid for a magistracy at auction. The judges of the auction knocked it down to him, and made out his title for it. Some of the regidors opposed this, and appealed to the Audiencia. The latter, in order not to make a precedent, so that the alcaldes or judges of the provinces should attempt the same with their successors, had the possession [of the magistracy] given to him, and left the party his right safe and in force. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various

... understanding and the avoidance of prejudice. This sapped the bulldog qualities of British pluck and persistence terribly. You can see at a glance how it would shut out a budding Nelson or a Wellington. But its most notable effect was to be seen among politicians, who were able to claim Fox for a precedent. ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... the work of the range. This was more difficult to take at once by reason of lack of precedent. But by tactful watchfulness she felt it could be accomplished. Her first step must be to impress on Lal Hobhouse her intention, and, in this, even sooner than she had dared to hope, she managed to secure a footing. Once her mind was set to achieve a purpose her capacity was beyond all question, ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum

... he had a scholar's respect for learning, and for the great tradition of literature which it is the true business of scholarship to maintain. Radical and rebel as he was in politics and theology, contemptuous of law, custom and precedent, he was always the exact opposite in his art. There he never attempted the method of the tabula rasa, or clean slate, which made his political pamphlets so barren. The greatest of all proofs of the strength of his individuality is that it ...
— Milton • John Bailey

... he, "since unwisely, Miss Westfall, for eugenic reasons, we grant a certain freedom of marital choice to our princes—since wisely or not as you will, the Salic Law does not, by an ancient precedent, obtain with us, and a woman may come in the line of succession, the danger to Ronador's little son, is, ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple

... but not an indifferent one. Once again mere momentary material interest counseled abstention; precedent was invoked to justify isolation and indifference. The timid, the ignorant, the disloyal, those to whom physical life was more precious than the dictates of conscience, counseled "peace and prosperity." Many began to wonder if America had a soul and was indeed ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy

... naval preparation been free from a sort of noisy violence, a certain massive dullness of conception? Have we really made anything like a sane use of our resources? I do not mean of our resources in money or stuff. It is manifest that the next naval war will be beyond all precedent a war of mechanisms, giving such scope for invention and scientifically equipped wit and courage as the world has never had before. Now, have we really developed any considerable proportion of the potential human quality available to meet the demand for wits? What are we doing to discover, encourage ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... August morning when Paw died. This was an unexpected and unsettling contingency. One doesn't look for a "chronic's" doing anything so unscheduled and foreign to routine; but Paw spoiled all precedent. They found him that morning with his heart quite still, and Luke knew they stood in the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... 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. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... itself by its own impulses. But if, as I believe, there will not prove to be any natural tendencies common to women, and distinguishing their genius from that of men, yet every individual writer among them has her individual tendencies, which at present are still subdued by the influence of precedent and example: and it will require generations more, before their individuality is sufficiently developed to make ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill

... it, but look well to the political freedom that is still your own. With five hundred thousand armed puppets, moving at the will of a clique of ambitious epauletted politicians and experimentalists, you may live to witness, whether we be subdued or not, a coup d'etat for which there is a precedent not far back in ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood

... against Darwin will please a large body of sincerely pious voters. If it will be easier to carry on the business of the country on the understanding that the present state of things is to be called Socialism, I have no objection in the world to call it Socialism. There is the precedent of the Emperor Constantine, who saved the society of his own day by agreeing to call his Imperialism Christianity. Mind: I must not go ahead of the electorate. You must not call a voter a ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... deal with them not by arms but by process of law. But the work which he now undertook was far greater and weightier than this. The pledges of Henry the First had long been forgotten when the Justiciar brought them to light, but Langton saw the vast importance of such a precedent. At the close of the month he produced Henry's charter in a fresh gathering of barons at St. Paul's, and it was at once welcomed as a base for the needed reforms. From London Langton hastened to the king, ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green

... and they agreed to refrain from going to the Lord's Table for a year, that all the Church might by that time have knowledge and proof of their consistent Christian life, though so young in years. This discipline, I thought, would be good for them; and the Lord might use it as a precedent ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton

... of the United States since the adoption of the Federal Constitution has in this particular followed the precedent established by the mother country. In the treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States following the Revolutionary war, the former not only relinquished the right of government, but renounced and yielded to the United States all pretensions and claims whatsoever to ...
— Cessions of Land by Indian Tribes to the United States: Illustrated by Those in the State of Indiana • C. C. Royce

... 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

... about. I had the greatest time to get her off for the afternoon. I had to go to Walker's, you know, and see all sorts of Heads of Departments. My! they acted like Crowned Heads! They said it wouldn't do at all,—it would establish a precedent,—and all sorts of things like that. But, somehow or other, I wheedled them into it, and at last they said Jenny might come. She was just crazy about it. She said, she never has any fun in her life, except looking at ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells

... cried Ruth, cheerfully. "Of course we ought to be storm-bound in a deserted house. That is according to all romantic precedent." ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson

... 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 Hague Court of Arbitration; Dr. Paul Doumer, ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church

... Rapid and 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 displayed ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various

... came for their tickets and Archie took advantage of the interruption to ponder the ethics and the etiquette of his predicament; but there was no precedent in all history for such a synchronization of two gentlemen who had recently engaged in a midnight duel. Archie was appalled by the consciousness that he and Congdon were really ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson

... with the usual education given to women in this country. If it succeeds, it will be the true, the lasting glory of Florence Nightingale and her band of devoted assistants, that they have broken down a Chinese wall of prejudices,—religious, social, professional,—and have established a precedent which will, indeed, multiply the good to all time." She did succeed, and the results can scarcely ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton

... Philosophy, not from objection to Mr. Anderson, in whose election he would willingly have concurred, but because he regarded the method of proceeding as irregular and possibly establishing a bad precedent." As patrons of University chairs, the professors were trustees for the community, and ought each to be bound by a tacit self-denying ordinance, at least to the extent of refraining from actively using this ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae

... substantially free from slavery, and which it was well understood was not adapted to slave labor. It raised no such question, as would have been raised, if it had been applied to territory where slavery then largely existed, or which was adapted to negro slave labor. It is, therefore, no precedent for Congressional action in such a case. The precedent of one case is not a rule of decision for another, unless the two are substantially alike. This noble ordinance of 1787, then rather affirmed ...
— The Relations of the Federal Government to Slavery - Delivered at Fort Wayne, Ind., October 30th 1860 • Joseph Ketchum Edgerton

... 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 ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke

... very outset of his term, he had entered, against all precedent, into the fight in the Legislature over a Senatorial election. Demanding that the Legislature keep faith with the people, who in a preferential primary had designated a candidate for United States Senator who did not command the support of ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan

... Northerners generally reflected that they wanted quiet and had an instinct, curiously falsified, that the Democratic party was the more likely to give it them. The Whigs again proposed a hero, General Scott, a greater soldier than Taylor, but a vainer man, who mistakenly broke with all precedent and went upon the stump for himself. The President who was elected, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, a friend of Hawthorne, might perhaps claim the palm among the Presidents of those days, for sheer, deleterious insignificance. The favourite observation of his contemporaries upon him was that ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... 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 ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur

... cleansing the senses of pre-impressions, begin anew. The marvel is for each of us, individually, an exception to evolution; it is a special creation, like all the rainbows seen in one's life—a thing to be reverently absorbed by sight, by scent, by touch, absorbed and realized without precedent or limit. Only ultimately do we find it necessary to adulterate this fine perception with definitive words and phrases, and so attempt to register ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... relationship sinks into the background and is superseded by the official relationship. Under these circumstances it is evident that the etiquette of the profession intervenes, which overmastering force compels me to point out to you how improper and contrary to precedent it would be for me to listen to you without the presence ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard

... mistake, however, of not using the actual names of localities. Just why I shuffled the names of trails and towns and valleys so recklessly, I cannot now explain, for there was abundant literary precedent for their proper and exact use. Perhaps I resented the prosaic sound of "Sneffles" and "Montrose Junction." Anyhow, whatever my motive, I covered my tracks so well that it was impossible even for a resident to follow me. In The Eagle's Heart I was equally elusive, ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... 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 ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey

... 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 Boyle had also happened ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton

... began to assume a more 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 again driven ...
— The Wentworth Letter • Joseph Smith

... 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 without ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... eulogies on his friends and others, further, witness to the extension of the field of poetry after Elizabeth's age;—in which his enthusiastic geniality, his quick and easy transitions of subject, have also little precedent. ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick

... sculpture, for 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 ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... Behemoth. The editor has been unable to find any precedent for Chapman's application of this name—which in the Book of Job denotes the whale or hippopotamus—to the chief ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman

... [Roman] name and gown, and of eternal Vesta, grown old in the lands of hostile fathers-in-law, Jupiter and the city being in safety? The prudent mind of Regulus had provided against this, dissenting from ignominious terms, and inferring from such a precedent destruction to the succeeding age, if the captive youth were not to perish unpitied. I have beheld, said he, the Roman standards affixed to the Carthaginian temples, and their arms taken away from our soldiers without bloodshed. I have beheld the arms of our citizens bound ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace

... his grateful thanks: 'Your sacred Majesty, may I be thy sacrifice;' but he added in a subdued tone, 'A lion requires at least a lamb a day.' The Shah laughed at the meaning speech, and said, 'Let him have it.' The granting of a title does not give any emolument unless specially directed. As a precedent for this title, the Shah may have had in his mind the story of Ali Kuli Khan, one of the favourites of Shah Suliman. During the reign of Shah Abbas this chief was generally in prison, except when his services were required against the enemies ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon

... its 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 ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory

... decide. Our situation is not without a precedent. A few months ago the Count de Lavalette was condemned to death. The King wished to pardon him, but his ministers and friends opposed it. Though the King was master, what did he do? He seemed to be deaf to all the supplications ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau

... Courier—the steady, ever cautious old Courier, England's premier paper, created a precedent by the use of a quite conspicuously large type; vide ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell

... graded processes such as this that the great end will be accomplished. Beginning with such annotated reports as a basis for precedents, each new case tried before this tribunal will add a further precedent, and presently a complete international code will be in existence. It was in this way that the English common law was built, and such has been the admirable history of the work done ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... which Napoleon took over from the French Revolutionary leaders. A more philosophic outlook might have suggested that the phenomenon was not really exceptional, but rather the natural outcome of popular energy inspired by a stirring political ideal. But the British precedent was forgotten, and so profound was the disturbance caused by the new French methods that its effects are with us still. We are in fact still dominated by the idea that since the Napoleonic era war has been essentially a different thing. Our teachers incline to insist that there is now ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett

... little before his death, the chief priest of Eleusis, following the Socratic precedent, entered an indictment against him for impiety. This indictment was supported by citations of certain heretical doctrines from his published writings; on which Grote makes the significant remark, that his paean in honour of his friend Hermeias would be more offensive to the feelings of an ordinary ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... contributed to their injury was brought very near to his 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

... permissible, and understandingly done, facilitates comprehension, which is baffled by a multiplication of minutiae, just as the impression of a work of art, or of a story, is lost amid a multiplicity of figures or of actors. The investigation precedent to formulation of ideas must be close and minute, but that done, the unbiassed selection of the most important, expressed graphically by a few lines and a few dots, leads most certainly to the comprehension of decisive relations in a military ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan

... 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 ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad

... enforcing the most rigid etiquette. For he was one of those rare players who knew the game so thoroughly that while he, and the man he had taught, often ignored the classics of adversary play, the slightest relaxing of etiquette, rule, precept, or precedent, in his opponents, brought him out with a protest exacting the last item of toll ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... then forever be that, though I cast out sin, both root and 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, ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith

... 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 the elan ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip

... novel was in knightly days, that it has continued to be. There is a mysterious practical potency in precedent. All ideas and institutes seem to grow in the direction of their first steps, as if from germs. Thus, the doctrines of the Church fathers are still peculiarly authoritative in theology, and the immemorial traditions of the common law are still binding in civil life. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... for more innocent kinds of food was equally excessive. He would eat seven or eight peaches before breakfast, and declared that he had only once in his life had as much wall-fruit as he wished. His consumption of tea was prodigious, beyond all precedent. Hawkins quotes Bishop Burnet as having drunk sixteen large cups every morning, a feat which would entitle him to be reckoned as a rival. "A hardened and shameless tea-drinker," Johnson called himself, who "with ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen

... to endow the cigarette-case my doctor forbade me, on pain of some awful 'itis,' to exceed three cigarettes a day. With the first instalment you had provided me with cigarettes for the year. So what should I do in these circumstances but follow the precedent set by your family? Only, instead of a dormouse and a stamp-album, I chose to purchase smartness. I spent the three remaining instalments on ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various

... he knows, a principle which has guided our pen from the inception of this work to this point, and which must continue to the bitter end. We shall be relentless and truthful to the last, even though in so doing we are compelled to overthrow all historical precedent. ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs

... cheerfulness was on the faces of his old comrades. For it had been recognized that, after all, "Prossy" had a perfect right to bring his old mother there—his well-known youth and inexperience preventing this baleful performance from being established as a precedent. For these reasons hats were cheerfully doffed, and some jackets put on, as the buggy swept up the hill to the pretty new cottage, with its green blinds and white ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... 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 a ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... for openly championing the German cause before the people of the United States by written and spoken word, this is self-evident in a country which recognizes the principles of freedom of the Press and free speech. Apart from this, however, the American Government have themselves provided a precedent in this connection during the civil war, when President Lincoln in 1863 sent to England the famous preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, whose sympathies were strongly on the side of the Federals. Through his speeches, afterwards ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff

... the doctor said. He was a little ashamed of his weakness in the matter, knew it was a bad precedent, didn't wish to hear any more about it. "Haven't you got something warmer to put on?" he asked. "You're not going out into this pouring rain in ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann

... event? What heart but spurns at precedent And warnings of the wise, Contemned foreclosures of surprise? The banners play, the bugles call, The air is blue and prodigal. No berrying party, pleasure-wooed, No picnic party in the May, Ever went less loth than they Into that leafy neighborhood. In Bacchic glee they file toward Fate, Moloch's ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville

... brought the adherents of the Red Rose back to triumph, Gerald Mor was still Lord-deputy. He was not deposed, however, on that account, although the Butlers were at once reinstated in their own property, and Sir Thomas Butler was created Earl of Ormond. According to a precedent now prevailing for several reigns, the Lord-Lieutenancy was conferred upon the Duke of Bedford, the king's uncle, Kildare continuing, however, practically to exercise all the functions of ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless









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