"Prescriptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... madness of her husband to save her life. Emigration from our stocked communities of undeified men and women, emigration for conquest, for gold, for very restlessness of spirit, if they grow toward an imperial issue, have all thus a prescriptive and recognized ingredient of heroism. But when the immediate motive is as grand as the ultimate hope was lofty, and the ultimate success splendid, then, to use an expression of Bacon's," "the music ...
— Young Lion of the Woods - A Story of Early Colonial Days • Thomas Barlow Smith
... and granted to William Peverell. In 1204 John gave the manor to William Bruere and granted to the town all the privileges of a free borough which were enjoyed by Nottingham and Derby; but before this it seems to have had prescriptive borough rights. Later charters were granted by various sovereigns, and it was incorporated by Elizabeth in 1598 under the style of a mayor, 6 brethren and 12 capital burgesses. This charter was confirmed by Charles II. (1662), and the town was so governed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... protestant members seem to be such sticklers for the established church; but their zeal never makes them lose sight of the spoil of ignorance, which rapacious priests of superstitious memory have scraped together. No, wise in their generation, they venerate the prescriptive right of possession, as a strong hold, and still let the sluggish bell tingle to prayers, as during the days, when the elevation of the host was supposed to atone for the sins of the people, lest one reformation ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... he was free with his money he might be elected, and to Charles that unless he was free with his money he would not, but no sufficient reason had been shown why they should violate national prejudices, the laws of the Empire, and prescriptive hereditary right, in order to place Henry or Francis instead of a German upon the imperial throne. Neither people nor princes nor barons, wrote Leo's envoys, would permit the election of the Most Christian King;[267] and even if the electors wished to elect him, it ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... south-west horn of the new moon; but all authors, when they put pen to paper, seem actuated by the kind and neighborly spirit of the sagacious Dogberry—namely, to "bestow all their tediousness" upon their readers; and I do not know that I have any prescriptive right—I am sure I have no intention—to depart from so well-worn a track, or to fly in the face of so many ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... words from the lady at the bar, who inquired very cheerfully what the gentlemen would have. They soon found themselves seated in the tap, and, though it was not entirely unoccupied, in their accustomed places, for there seemed a general understanding that they enjoyed a prescriptive right. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... mighty empires of old time, fell, we know, and we can easily explain. Corrupt, luxurious, effeminate, eaten out by universal selfishness and mutual fear, they had at last no organic coherence. The moral anarchy within showed through, at last burst through, the painted skin of prescriptive order which held them together. Some braver and abler, and usually more virtuous people, often some little, hardy, homely mountain tribe, saw that the fruit was ripe for gathering; and, caring naught for superior numbers—and saying with German Alaric when the Romans ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... in the case of ships actually foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first washing their faces. But in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... town-hall to another part of the city, the leathern symbol of "unrestricted competition" was suspended, at the appointed season, from the roof of St. Peter's Church; until that reckless foe to antiquity, the Reform Bill, aimed a heavy blow at all our prescriptive rights and privileges, and decreed that the stranger should be henceforth on a footing with the freeborn citizen. Notwithstanding this, the authorities of the city still continued to "hang out their banner on the outward walls;" and it is only within the last ten ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 186, May 21, 1853 • Various
... death was as singular as his life was whimsical. He went one night to the club, and was surprised to find his seat occupied by a tall dark-browed man, who smoked a meerschaum of prodigious size in solemn silence. Numerous hints were thrown out to the stranger that the seat had by prescriptive right and ancient custom become the property of my uncle; he either did not or would not understand them, and continued to keep his possession of the leather-backed chair with the most imperturbable sang-froid. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... course, prescriptive. But given its age and its purpose this ought not to be construed in the contemporary, pejorative {4} sense. Collado, as Rodriguez and indeed all the grammarians of the period, felt obligated to train their students in ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... cruel and ferocious tyrant, the manner of whose acquisition of power I have already stated. He came too young and unexperienced to that throne of usurpation. It was a usurpation yet green in the country, and the country felt uneasy under it. It had not the advantage of that prescriptive usage, that inveterate habit, that traditionary opinion, which a long continuance of any system of government secures to it. The only real security which Surajah Dowlah's government could possess was the security of an army. But the great ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Fronde; the official collective genius of France brought to shame by the artful stupidity of a single individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks through the general suffrage, seeking its true expression in the prescriptive enemies of the public interests until it finally finds it in the arbitrary will of a filibuster. If ever a slice from history is drawn black upon black, it is this. Men and events appear as reversed "Schlemihls," [1 The hero In Chamisso's ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... now generally acknowledged to be the most cosmopolitan of modern times; and a native of this country, all things being equal, is likely to form a less prescriptive idea of other nations than the inhabitants of countries whose neighborhood and history unite to bequeathe and perpetuate certain fixed notions. Before the frequent intercourse now existing between Europe and the United States, we derived our impressions of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... have no direct power. On this basis the Society was formed, and maintained its integrity one year. However, as the justice of such discrimination on the ground of sex was questionable, and some women and many men refused to unite with a Society thus prescriptive, the Constitution was amended, and men ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Although still conducted by the priests and Levites and under the eye of the Sanhedrim or senate, the Jewish religion had lost much of its earlier character. Like philosophy, it was vexed with contending sects. Strict observance of the Mosaic law and the performance of prescriptive rites and duties were in the main regarded as the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... a revolutionary crater, the safest way was to let it burn out in itself, while the insane aggression of continental powers only confirmed the reign of terror. Burke would go to war for the idea of prescriptive right; Pitt declined to fight for the French monarchy, and would make war only for ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... between their legs, and their long dripping tongues depending from their watery mouths—he the most bare-faced caitiff of the whole. In general, however, he will have nothing to say to the canine species, for notwithstanding the classification of Buffon, he considers he has a prescriptive right to associate with man. He is, in fact, rather cross with other dogs; but with children he is quite at home, doubtless reckoning himself about on a level with them in the scale of rational beings. Every boy in the village knows his name, and I often catch ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... must we educate them, so that they will follow and rule themselves. But no platform of premise and conclusion, however logical and exact, is broad enough to place under an uneducated mind. Nothing deserving the name of conviction can have a place in such. Prejudices, notions, prescriptive rules, may exist there, but these are not ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... qualities, state that he is an ill-natured dog. How far the report was correct, I cannot vouch; but I watched him three or four days, and always found him at his post; and after such strict investigation, had I asserted ten years instead of four, I have a prescriptive right, as a traveller, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... side the renaissance sought to produce in the vernacular a literature comparable to that of Greece or Rome. Thus literary criticism was prescriptive, and the typical treatises were text-books. Rhetoric, which had long been taught, very naturally furnished the methods, the teachers, and in many cases the subject matter for this instruction in poetry. As has been shown in the preceding section of this study, ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... let them out to the youngsters at a farthing the puff. Albert when under age had instituted the puff, and when over it had organized the tariff. By the puff-a-farthing method the cigarettes could not be confiscated, for they belonged only to those who had a prescriptive right to them, while the puffers, with a little cunning, were able to enjoy ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... had some reason to be aggrieved. Few things are more trying than living with a person in the persistent enjoyment of the blues; and the old, saddened by failing health and the memory of heavy sorrows, are apt to look upon gloom in youth as entrenching on their own prescriptive rights. ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... youth. He held himself extremely upright, and his shrewd, steady eyes had lost none of their clear shining. Thus he gave an impression of superiority to the doubts and dislikes of smaller men. Having had his own way for innumerable years, he had earned a prescriptive right to it. It would never have occurred to old Jolyon that it was necessary to wear a look ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... legislative powers of the kingdom are vested in "the Cortes, together with the king." The Cortes consists of two co-ordinate chambers, the Senate and the Congress of Deputies. In the composition of the Senate the prescriptive, appointive, and elective principles are curiously intertwined, the chamber containing one group of men who are members in their own right, another who are appointed by the crown and sit for life, and a third who are elected by the corporations of the state and by the ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... and show its colours. Germans and Bohemians, who for many years had filled all the public offices in Hungary, were compelled either to learn the Hungarian language or surrender their places to natives. In most cases the latter was unavoidable, and these aliens, furious at being driven from their prescriptive sinecures, went up to Vienna and did their best to make it hot for the Hungarians. As every war has its origin in an inkstand, students are, naturally, the greatest Chauvinists, and I was to find that out ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... his wife act as prompters to the bride and bridegroom, and guide them through the complicated ritual of the wedding ceremony, taking the couple on their knees if they are children, and otherwise sitting behind them. The barber has a prescriptive right to receive the clothes in which the bridegroom goes to the bride's house, as on the latter's arrival he is always presented with new clothes by the bride's father. As the bridegroom's clothes may be an ancestral heirloom, a compact ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... any opposition to it is wrong on board ship; and every officer and man knows this when he signs the ship's articles. It is a part of the contract. Yet there has grown up in merchant vessels a series of customs, which have become a well-understood system, and have somewhat the force of prescriptive law. To be sure, all power is in the captain, and the officers hold their authority only during his will, and the men are liable to be called upon for any service; yet, by breaking in upon these ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... prescriptive. It was born in an age of rules. So much so, that the rhetorician who named his rules and tools was not out of rapport with the period. This accounts for the rigidity, the love of classification, and the schematic presentation of the work. It is nothing more than a highly organized dictionary ...
— A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes • Richard Sherry
... by flattery. But it is, on the other hand, by no means dependent on the artificial distinctions of privilege, and is peculiarly adapted to an age whose appointed task must be to create a natural aristocracy as a via media between an equalitarian democracy and a prescriptive oligarchy or plutocracy. It is a notable fact that, as the real hostility to the classics in the present day arises from an instinctive suspicion of them as standing in the way of a downward-levelling mediocrity, so, at other times, they ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... is no such thing as rank and station which impose a sort of prescriptive style on people of certain income. The consequence is that all sorts of furniture and belongings, which in the Old World have a recognized relation to certain possibilities of income, and which require certain other accessories to make them in good keeping, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... degree represented subsequently. But an ampler share of prosperity could not have made much difference in young Walter's prospects or training. Three brothers were all before him in the succession to the patrimony. His birthright could not have comprised more than the cadet's prescriptive portion of necessity and brains. It is unfair to the natural curiosity of posterity that his extraordinary endowments in the second respect are not traceable in anecdotes of his childhood. Naturally a local legend reports him to have loved the society of adventurous mariners. ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... enjoy equal rewards? What is the province of justice in economics? Where does justice end and charity begin? And what, behind all this, is the basis of property? What is its social function and value? What is the measure of consideration due to vested interest and prescriptive right? It is impossible, within the limits of a volume, to deal exhaustively with such fundamental questions. The best course will be to follow out the lines of development which appear to proceed from those principles of Liberalism which have been already indicated ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... with them, and freight ships; and the tenure by which they are held is superior to that of all other property, for it is original. It is tenure which does not exist in a doubtful title; which does not spring from any adventitious circumstances; it is not found—it is not purchased—it is not prescriptive—it is original; so it is the most natural of all titles, because it is the most simple and least artificial. It is paramount and sovereign, because it is a tenure ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... the record is of a very different scene, namely, Windsor Fair, when the Eton boys used to imagine they had a prescriptive right to make a riot and revel in ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... freedom of the young girl has its drawbacks. She is—I say it with all reluctance—irreverent, from her forty-dollar bonnet to the buckles in her eighteen-dollar shoes. She talks flippantly to her parents and men old enough to be her grandfather. She has a prescriptive right to the society of the man who arrives. ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... asserted that "Mr. D'Israeli is not nor ever was a Jew," a correspondent of the Morning Chronicle testifies that the Member from Buckinghamshire was at one time a Jew; at least that "he became a Jew outwardly, according to the customary and prescriptive rites of that ancient persuasion; for a most respectable gentleman (connected with literature) now deceased, has been heard to boast a hundred times that he was present at the entertainment given in ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... is any and what prescriptive power or privilege in said House to imprison its members for ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... form one consistent, symmetrical edifice. They were the productions of different minds and of adverse passions; one, ascending for the foundation of human government to the laws of nature and of God, written upon the heart of man; the other, resting upon the basis of human institutions, and prescriptive law, and colonial charter. The cornerstone of the one was right, that of ...
— Orations • John Quincy Adams
... deserted fief in possession for one year, shall be considered as having gained it by prescriptive right, and shall be defended in its possession against the previous owner who ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... white vote. Hence, the third group, which comprises: a military service qualification—any man who went to war, willingly or unwillingly, in a good cause or a bad, is entitled to register (Ala., Va.); a prescriptive qualification, under which are included all male persons who were entitled to vote on January 1, 1867, at which date the Negro had not yet been given the right to vote; a hereditary qualification (the so-called "grandfather" clause), whereby any ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... of the Parisian public, who, from long habit, considered that they had a sort of prescriptive right to this favourite promenade, the axe was laid to the celebrated arbre de Cracovie and other venerable trees, and their stately heads were soon levelled to the ground. Every one murmured as if these trees had been his own private property, and cut down against his will and pleasure. This will ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... them; but it will not do to war with the general tenor of education. We may blame, despise, regret as we please, but customs long established, and habits long indulged, assume an empire despotic, though their power is but prescriptive. Opposing them is vain; Nature herself, when forced aside, is not ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... for a form of prayer which he has introduced into his Journey. I am myself fully convinced that a form of prayer for publick worship is in general most decent and edifying. Solennia verba have a kind of prescriptive sanctity, and make a deeper impression on the mind than extemporaneous effusions, in which, as we know not what they are to be, we cannot readily acquiesce. Yet I would allow also of a certain portion of extempore ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... States. Perhaps this phenomenon is a survival from Reconstruction days and after. Since certain attitudes toward the negro, for example, were defended on the ground of the necessity of protecting womanhood, a certain standard must be demanded from women, and every man claimed a sort of prescriptive right to assist in laying down rules for such conduct on her part. For a long time the women of the South, consciously or unconsciously, were subject to these unwritten rules. Today in increasing numbers the women, particularly the younger women, ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... not only be social outcasts, but must leave such a taint of dishonor on their work that one cannot even do it for one's self without a sense of outraged dignity. You might account for this in Europe, where ages of prescriptive wrong have distorted the relation out of all human wholesomeness and Christian loveliness; but in America, where many, and perhaps most, of those who keep servants and call them so are but a single generation from fathers who earned their bread by the sweat of their brows, ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... mansion of San Donato, near Florence; and as he thought the possessor of so much wealth and the husband of so noble a lady deserved to have a title, he dubbed himself "prince," and continued to enjoy this self-given title, probably in the hope that an uncontested use would give him a prescriptive right to bear it. In this hope he was disappointed, for Count Medem, an attache of the Russian embassy at Paris, noticing "Prince Demidoff" on the list of the members of the Jockey Club, crossed the name out, adding the observation, "Il n'y a pas de prince ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... assize on certain occasions, never was offered nor received in the light of a bribe. And (until regularly abolished by the legislature) I insisted—but vainly insisted—that these and similar honoraria ought to be accepted, because else you were lowering the prescriptive rights and value of the office, which you—a mere locum tenens for some coming successor—had no right to do upon a solitary scruple or crotchet, arising probably from dyspepsia. Better men, no doubt, than ever stood in your stockings, had pocketed thankfully the ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... in the outskirts of the village, and close to the Calder, whose waters swept past the trimly kept garden attached to it, two young girls were employed in attiring a third, who was to represent Maid Marian, or Queen of May, in the pageant then about to ensue. And, certainly, by sovereign and prescriptive right of beauty, no one better deserved the high title and distinction conferred upon her than this fair girl. Lovelier maiden in the whole county, and however high her degree, than this rustic damsel, it was impossible to find; and though the becoming and fanciful costume in ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... subjects. For those who had remained on the island there was trouble at once. A small vessel, the prize of an English cruiser, bound to Sierra Leone with thirty liberated Africans, put into the roads for water, and had the misfortune to part her cable and come ashore. "The natives claim to a prescriptive right, which interest never fails to enforce to its fullest extent, to seize and appropriate the wrecks and cargoes of vessels stranded, under whatever circumstances, on their coast."[2] The vessel in question drifted to the mainland one mile from ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... (usucapio) of movable things is completed by one year's [possession], but [a prescriptive title] of an estate and of buildings [is ...
— The Twelve Tables • Anonymous
... with regularity, or to be silent with dignity and wisdom. All our proceedings have been constantly published, according to the discretion and ability of individuals out of doors, with impunity, almost ever since I came into Parliament. By usage, the people have obtained something like a prescriptive right to this abuse. I do not justify it; but the abuse is now grown so inveterate that to punish it without previous notice would have an appearance of hardship, if not injustice. The publications I allude to are frequently erroneous as well as irregular, but they are not ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... in the charter or established by prescription, it is now provided[o], that for the future no corporation shall be dissolved upon that account; and ample directions are given for appointing a new officer, in case there be no election, or a void one, made upon the charter or prescriptive day. ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... childish remembrances of the toad's teeth in Claude Mignon's pocket; whilst Monsieur Crapaud sat well-bred and silent, with a world of comprehension in his fiery eyes. Whoever thinks this puerile must remember that my hero was a Frenchman, and a young Frenchman, with a prescriptive right to chatter for chattering's sake, and also that he had not a very highly cultivated mind of his own to converse with, even if the most highly cultivated intellect is ever a reliable resource against ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... sense of Josiah's failure to read the future by electing another Mayor? The answer is, that while all were agreed that his antic was inexcusable, all were equally agreed to pretend that it was a mere trifle of no importance; you cannot deprive a man of his prescriptive right for a mere trifle of no importance. Besides, nobody could be so foolish as to imagine that goosedriving, though reprehensible in a Mayor about to succeed an Earl, is an act of which official ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... with those which a few model boroughs already possessed. The governing body was to consist of a mayor, aldermen, and councillors, together forming a town council. The councillors were to be elected directly by ratepaying occupiers, with a saving for the prescriptive rights of existing freemen. They were to hold office for three years; the aldermen were to be elected by the councillors for six years, with a provision for retirement by rotation. The mayor was to be elected annually by the town council. The ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... judges, or generals, or admirals, or bishops, or priests, or ministers, or justices of peace? Why, what have you to answer in favor of the prior rights of the crown and peerage but this: Our Constitution is a prescriptive constitution; it is a constitution whose sole authority is, that it has existed time out of mind? It is settled in these two portions against one, legislatively,—and in the whole of the judicature, the whole of the federal capacity, of the executive, the prudential, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... dealings with his workpeople. The cottage itself, however, was pleasant enough to look upon, half thatched and half slated, with a narrow strip of flower-garden in front full of hollyhocks, sun-flowers, and wall-flowers, enclosed in a high elder-hedge. Besides which, the occupier had a prescriptive right, by custom, to a patch of potato ground in the allotments about a mile up the road. And half-a-dozen damson-trees overshadowed the back of the cottage, their branches coquetting with the roof when the ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... the two classes were, as described by themselves, "live, and let live." The outgoing tenant claimed a right to a certain sum for his improvements and interest, from the incoming tenant, which was altogether irrespective of any bargain between the latter and the owner of the soil. This prescriptive right was so generally recognised, that all parties were satisfied. In the other provinces of Ireland it was otherwise. The English and Scottish settlers in Ulster found this usage, which was an old Celtic tradition, and adopted it; their power enabled them to assert ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of the same day Lord Blandamer was himself in Cullerne. He went to the office of Mr Martelet, solicitor by prescriptive right to the family at Fording, and spent an hour closeted with ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... manifestly should. In 1921, when she was twenty, the war work was over and she was "getting through the day" much as she lived the night. It was pretty easy to get through the day in 1921. That which the curmudgeons called license, and liberty the free, was in 1921 held by charter and by right prescriptive. ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... character of the subject the Course of Study must be more or less elastic, and the topics detailed in the programme are intended to be suggestive rather than prescriptive. It may be that, owing to local conditions, topics not named are among the best that can be used, but all substitutions and changes should be made a subject of consultation with the Inspector. The ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Lords and the prerogatives of the Crown settled on any adjudication in favour of natural rights, for they could never be so portioned. Your king, your lords, your judges, your juries, grand and little, all are prescriptive; and what proves it is the disputes not yet concluded, and never near becoming so, when any of them first originated. Prescription is the most solid of all titles, not only to property, but, which is to secure that property, to government. They harmonise with each other, and give ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... and the yearly toll at the wake were the sole resources of the household; and though there was no lack of meat, milk, and black bread, sufficient garments could scarce be come by, with all the spinning of the household, woven by the village webster, of whose time the baronial household, by prescriptive right, owned the ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in due time Had vanished, leaving others in their stead: And now I looked upon the living scene; Familiarly perused it; oftentimes, 145 In spite of strongest disappointment, pleased Through courteous self-submission, as a tax Paid to the object by prescriptive right. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... Native Americans went into council. This organisation, which had elected a mayor of New York in 1844, suddenly revived in 1854; and, in spite of its intolerant and prescriptive spirit, the movement spread rapidly. Mystery surrounded its methods. It held meetings in unknown places; its influence could not be measured; and its members professed to know nothing. Thus it became known as the "Know-Nothing" party. Members recognised each other by the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... not be angry with Augustine, of whom there is extant a remarkable Letter against a Manichean, in which he professes himself to assent to Antiquity, to Consent, to Perpetuity of Succession, and to the Church which, alone among so many heresies, claims by prescriptive right the ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... we feel no call whatever to undertake the gratuitous direction of the American conscience. Our ambition to "do the thinking" of our Yankee cousins is materially damped by the unpleasant necessity which it involves, of being "done" ourselves. They seem, however, to claim a prescriptive right to the works of the British press, as well as to the funds of the British public. They read our books, on the same principle as they borrow our money, and abuse their benefactors into the bargain with more than Hibernian asperity. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... arrogantly worded remonstrance to the king, declaring that "a secret and malign influence" deprived the people of their dearest rights, and desiring the dissolution of parliament and the removal of evil ministers. In accordance with a prescriptive right, this remonstrance was received by the king in person on March 14. George replied to it with a severe rebuke; the remonstrance was, he said, disrespectful to himself, injurious to his parliament, and irreconcilable with the principles of the constitution. ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... went to another school . . . or rather wandered up and down between those whom I have just described, and those who boast on their side prescriptive right, and apostolic succession . . . and I found that their ancient charter went back—just three hundred years . . . and there derived its transmitted virtue, it seemed to me, by something very like obtaining goods on false pretences, from the very church which it now anathematises. Disheartened, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... fact that it is a fashion, and nothing more, is unhappily fully established on ample and high authority within the medical prescriptive pale. And, in fact, even as "The Tonsure" or shaving of the crown, became by fashion and mendicity a feature of priesthood and monastic piety, so has the slaughter of the Tonsils come to be regarded by fashion and mendacity as a feature of childhood ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... not permit competition in the purchase of this monopoly. It seems to be predicated on the erroneous idea that the present stockholders have a prescriptive right not only to the favor but to the bounty of Government. It appears that more than a fourth part of the stock is held by foreigners and the residue is held by a few hundred of our own citizens, chiefly of the richest class. For their benefit does this act exclude ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... old woman's penny. If you lived in the country you might be alarmed late in the evening by hearing the tramp of feet round your house. But it is not burglars; it is young fellows with a large net and a lantern after the sparrows in the ivy. They have a prescriptive right to enter every garden in the village. They cry 'sparrow catchers' at the gate, and people sit still, knowing it is all right. In the jealous suburb of a city the dwellers in the villas would shrink from this winter custom, the constable would soon have orders to stop it; in the country people ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... and displeased by the firm tone of resolution I had assumed. 'Were I inclined for idle altercation,' answered he coldly, 'I might argue something for the dignity of the fair sex, who have ever claimed their prescriptive right of holding us lingering in their chains; and Lord Greville would do well to remember that his services are too important to his country to be held on the caprices of a silly girl's affected coyness. But be it so—since you are so petulant a lover, be prepared when you join her ...
— Theresa Marchmont • Mrs Charles Gore
... three and four miles when that prescriptive comfort and relief to wanderers in woods—a distant light—broke at last upon her searching eyes. It was so very small as to be almost sinister to a stranger, but to her it was what she sought. She pushed forward, and the dim outline of a dwelling ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... humour which, with our dialect, has lost its distinctive characteristics. John Clerk (afterwards a judge by the title of Lord Eldin) was arguing a Scotch appeal case before the House of Lords. His client claimed the use of a mill-stream by a prescriptive right. Mr. Clerk spoke broad Scotch, and argued that "the watter had rin that way for forty years. Indeed naebody kenn'd how long, and why should his client now be deprived of the watter?" etc. The chancellor, ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... nature of military government; that is to say, it must be arbitrary, it must be exercised by the will of one man, according to particular circumstances. You must shew some learning upon this occasion. You must shew, that a schoolmaster has a prescriptive right to beat; and that an action of assault and battery cannot be admitted against him, unless there is some great excess, some barbarity. This man has maimed none of his boys. They are all left with the full exercise of their corporeal ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... in Spain. Yet Jesuitism gained ground. It had the advantage of being a native, and a recent product. It was powerful by its appeals to the sensuous imagination and carnal superstitions of that Iberian-Latin people. It was seductive by its mitigation of oppressive orthodoxy and inflexible prescriptive law. Where the Dominican was steel, the Jesuit was reed; where the Dominican breathed fire and fagots, the Jesuit suggested casuistical distinctions; where the Dominican raised difficulties, the Jesuit solved scruples; where the Dominican presented theological ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... came into court, the lion accused the ox of having broken the laws of the beasts. The lion was king, and the others were bound to obey. Prescriptive usage was clearly on the lion's side. Minos called on the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... and antique abodes of venerable crime, those wild barbaric piles, in which old age palliates and almost hallows infamy! giving it somewhat the same prescriptive sanctuary as Milton bestows on the Palace of his Pandemonium! That cruel slinking flood, the only firmament the stone vaulted pits below were conscious of! Each looked as malignant and dangerous as they could, beneath the triumph of such a glorious sun; that light to which their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... of 1884 the Government Bill for extension of the franchise had strong and even passionate support throughout the country; but that policy threatened a breach with Lord Hartington, who in the opinion of many was by prescriptive right Mr. Gladstone's successor. Still more entangling were the difficulties in respect of Egypt, over which the Government was so hopelessly divided that no coherent policy could be pursued. Sir Charles notes that ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... of any inherent merit or fitness in that line, but because it had been accepted by the country as a settlement of the sectional question which, thirty years before, had threatened a rupture of the Union, and it had acquired in the public mind a prescriptive respect which it seemed unwise to disregard. A majority, however, decided otherwise, and the line of political conciliation was then obliterated, as far as it lay in the power of Congress to do so. An analysis of the vote will show that this result was effected almost exclusively by ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... which the rights of property are acknowledged, may, under the exasperation of overstrained pressure, in a land so peculiarly circumstanced as Ireland is, be altogether withheld, and thus its whole foundations shaken or overturned, and the justice of individual claims and prescriptive ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... which Lord Elgin had embarked. The state of political parties was favourable; for the old Tories of the British 'Family Compact' party were in good humour, being in enjoyment of the powers to which they claimed a prescriptive right, while the 'Liberals' of the Opposition were full of hope that the removal of Lord Metcalfe's disturbing influence would restore their proper preponderance. Something also was due to his own personal qualities. Whereas most of his immediate predecessors had been men advanced in years and enfeebled ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... tyrant over the Catholics; and in Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, and the Protestant Swiss cantons, persecution is now a part of the laws of these several states. Persecution is not sanctioned by the laws of the United States, if we except the prescriptive code of New Hampshire, which comes under that genus; but if it be not legalized, we are not to thank Protestantism for that. Wherever it has sway in the family, in the town council, or the assembly, there the cloven foot of intolerance and persecution is seen from under ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... Sacrament explicitly for adoration, to such devotions as Benediction and the Rosary simply because they have not explicit Apostolic sanction, or to vestments, incense and holy water because certain prescriptive laws passed four hundred years ago in England have never been repealed. Above all is it necessary that the Episcopal Church should declare itself formally for the reinstitution of the seven Catholic ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... lack of outward means for leading an agreeable life in the old villa. Wandering musicians haunted the precincts of Monte Beni, where they seemed to claim a prescriptive right; they made the lawn and shrubbery tuneful with the sound of fiddle, harp, and flute, and now and then with the tangled squeaking of a bagpipe. Improvisatori likewise came and told tales or ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of whose works I have undertaken the revision," writes Dr. Johnson, "may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration."[9] ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... mummery; but, the Templar reminding him that he was too far advanced to draw back, he repeated the words, or rather assented as they were repeated by Duke Hildebrod, who concluded the ceremony by allowing him the privilege of sanctuary, in the following form of prescriptive doggerel:— ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... are rapidly added to our list of authors, while little or nothing is done for the science. Nay, while new blunders have been committed in every new book, old ones have been allowed to stand as by prescriptive right;. and positions that were never true, and sentences that were never good English, have been published and republished under different names, till in our language grammar has become the most ungrammatical of all studies! "Imitators generally ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... little novelty, to pay a fifty-times repeated visit (where our individual faces should be as well known to the warden as those of his own charges) to the Lions in the Tower—to whose levee, by courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive title to admission. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... fame for the author; and perhaps much Of the success of this famous paper came from the circumstance That ten years of controversy over the question of political rights had forced Americans to abandon, step by step, the restricted ground of the positive and prescriptive rights of Englishmen and to take their stand on the broader ground of the natural and inherent rights of man. To have said, "We hold this truth to be self-evident: that all Englishmen are endowed by the ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... politics and set its flesh agreeably creeping with a peroration compounded equally of German spies and pro-German ministers. The campaign throve in the south, but slackened in the midlands and stopped short in the north. At the same time Lord Crawleigh's prescriptive right to the "leader" page of all daily papers met with a challenge from certain disrespectful sub-editors who first mislaid him among foreign telegrams and later buried him ignominiously in small type. It was when a thoughtful exegesis on "The War and Indian Home Rule," extending ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... it were not that etiquette and I were constantly at war, I should think myself very blamable in thus trespassing against one of its laws; but as it is long since I forswore its dominion, I have acquired a prescriptive right to act as I will—and I shall accordingly anticipate the station of a matron in addressing ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... of these men lived when men "had not had time to forget" the difficulties of government: we have forgotten them altogether. We reckon as the basis of our culture upon an amount of order, of tacit obedience, of prescriptive governability, which these philosophers hoped to get as a principal result of their culture; we take without thought as a datum what ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... where was the analogy of the eases? Was it only at the outset that we could trace violence and injustice on the part of the Slave Trade? Were the oppressors and the oppressed so reconciled, that enmities ultimately ceased? No. Was it reasonable then to urge a prescriptive right, not to the fruits of an ancient and forgotten evil, but to a series of new violences; to a chain of fresh enormities; to cruelties continually repeated; and of which every instance inflicted a fresh calamity, and constituted a separate and ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... Painting offers to experimental, individual, and prescriptive taste, the loyalty it invokes from the conservative, the "infinite possibilities" it offers to the imaginative, the intimacy it promotes with Nature and character, are the cause of so much originality and attractiveness in its votaries. The Lives of Painters abound in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... one part of the communal territory to another, but till always the same fields, and are obliged to manure the plots which they occupy. The principle of communal property rarely survives this change, for by long possession the families acquire a prescriptive right to the portions which they cultivate, and those who manure their land well naturally object to exchange it for land which has been held by indolent, improvident neighbours. In Russia, however, this change has not ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... people, labor to diffuse their views of Christianity in the various districts of the island; and the emigrant population are usually in attendance on their teaching. The census is an imperfect index of actual strength, the smaller sects exerting proportionately more influence. When the claims of prescriptive authority are finally exchanged for a reliance on moral power these discrepancies will disappear, and a vast apparatus, already supplied by the state and private zeal, will bring within reach of ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... long habit has secured to these pernicious customs a sort of prescriptive right. The distress consequent upon them, increases in proportion as the reactive powers of the organism decrease, which is more particularly the case in the present generation. The suppression of these abuses has never been more necessary than in our age. Indeed, the old proverb is again ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf |
