"Unwritten" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... notion of constant danger from infection, there arose a code of unwritten custom as rigid as that enforced by a careful physician in infectious cases at the present day; and thus, too, in course of time there was developed the idea of the possibility of disinfection, an idea as salutary as the discovery in medical ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... judgment to insert a solo at the cross-roads after she had told us that she hadn't a moment to spare if she was to get home from the ball before the rest of the family. But here again it was a matter of obedience to some unwritten and inscrutable law of pantomime which it is not for us, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... fine tradition, or unwritten law, handed down from the time of Montgomery's father, a subaltern officer of Runnymede had power to send any decent-looking swagman—or a couple of them, for that matter—to the hut for a feed. Certain conditions, however, had formulated themselves ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... you, my hedgerow acquaintance. Take me for a man, decently furnished within, or take me not at all. Take me never, at least, for a clothes-horse." In all these things, which he had proclaimed far and wide, in divers tongues, all of them eloquent, he had violated the unwritten laws of our country as great and small know them to be. Chiefest he broke them in being happy. That was outrageous. But he was now, it seemed, confronted with a Law of Nature when he found that, having broken with a way of life, you cannot resume it, not because it isn't there ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... Tahitian Hercules. Of course he, too, bade the sun to stay a while unmoving, and it did. Joshua, the son of Nun, whose astronomical exploit at Gibeon brought him immortal fame, was a glorious warrior; but Haui's unwritten achievements, as chanted by the orero at the marae where Tetuanui, Brooke, and I stood, would have forced the successor of Moses to have withdrawn his book from circulation, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... that she could not repress the desire to pen down her glowing thoughts. She entreated an officer to furnish her for a moment with pen and paper. The request was refused. It is much to be regretted that we are thus deprived of that unwritten chapter of her life. It can not be doubted that the words she would then have written would have long vibrated upon the ear of a listening world. Soul-utterances will force their way over mountains, and valleys, and ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... and white was necessary. When they drew up the rules of membership the other sex never fell like a black shadow on the paper; it was forgotten. We owe our eligibility to many other offices (generally disputed at law) to the same accident. In short, the unwritten law of the argumentum ad crinolinam puts ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... pioneers before the fact and the first settlers of the west after the fact had their part, witting or unwitting, willing or unwilling, written or unwritten, along with George Rogers Clark and his men, who seized the British forts in that territory during the Revolution (and thus gave standing to the claim for its transfer), and along with the men of the ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... read aloud at the meetings, particulars recorded of nests that had been built in the school grounds, with data as to the number of days in which eggs were hatched and the young ones fledged. It was an unwritten law at The Woodlands never to disturb the birds. The girls were not allowed to take any eggs from the nests, and were taught not to frighten a sitting bird or to interfere with the fledge-lings. After several years of such consideration The Woodlands had become a kind of bird ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... assembly. The letter to Connecticut appears to have been approved at a meeting of the sub-committee on July 4. At a meeting of the sub-committee on July 15 Adams was asked to draft a letter on general government to the committees of the neighboring governments. This letter was still unwritten on August 19, and on September 29 the sub-committee called a meeting of the full committee for October 20. On that date it was voted expedient to write a circular letter to the other committees, and in the afternoon of the same day Adams ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... Briar Farm? I should like to see the tomb of my very ancestral uncle—could we not arrange a day's outing in the country while the weather is fine? I throw myself on your consideration and clemency for this—and for many other unwritten things! ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... rule of right, unwritten, but delivered by tradition from one to another, in which oftentimes there appeareth great show of equity in determining the right between parties, but in many things repugning quite both to God's ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... newly granted liberty altogether. Upon this point the young, the coming dramatist would perhaps do well to ponder; he would do well, I think, to realize fully that freedom in art must be guarded by the eternal unwritten laws of good taste, morality, and beauty, he would do well to remember always that the real courage of the artist is in his capacity for restraint. [Cheers.] I am deeply sensible of the honor which has been done me in the association of my name with this toast, and I ask your leave to add one ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... 1982 (Constitution Act); originally, the machinery of the government was set up in the British North America Act of 1867; charter of rights and unwritten customs ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... first of her duties; however much she may suffer, she must present as calm and serene a countenance as a warrior in the hour of danger, and fall, if necessary, upon the spot, with death in her heart and a smile upon her lips. In order to obey this unwritten law, Madame de Bergenheim, after a slight interruption, seated herself at the piano to accompany three or four young girls who were each to sing in turn the songs that they had been drilled on ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... troubles. To keep them in my memory was the most difficult task, as it was quite contrary to the prison rules to write one's own compositions in a copy-book. If John Bunyan had been unfortunate enough to get into one of our model prisons, the "Pilgrim's Progress" would have been unwritten. From this time up to the close of my imprisonment I exercised my mind in the manufacture of verses, my stock ultimately amounting to many hundreds of lines, which my memory faithfully retained. My chest ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... us yet this grassy lap of thine— We would be still thy children, through the shower and the shine! So pray we, lisping, whispering, in childish love and trust With our beseeching hands and faces lifted from the dust By fervor of the poem, all unwritten and unsung, Thou givest us in answer, while ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... naturally had a grudge against the railway folk, who only had to work eight hours per day for more than a farmer could make in sixteen; further, the perquisites of the railway employes were inconceivable. By an unwritten but nevertheless imperative etiquette, farmers had to render them tribute in the form of a portion of whatever fruit or vegetables were consigned at Noonoon, and the townspeople also had little to say in favour of them, averring ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... longer the three stood silent, then Wabi and the old Indian returned to the fire to finish the preparation of breakfast, leaving Rod alone in his enchantment. What unsolved mysteries, what unwritten tragedies, what romance, what treasure of gold that vast North must hold! For a thousand, perhaps a million centuries, it had lain thus undisturbed in the embrace of nature; few white men had broken its solitudes, and the wild things still ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... through without a hitch but for one thing. He had overlooked the fact that the Kingdom of Mammon in America has a king and that the present ruler is very much alive. This king has never been officially crowned and his laws are unwritten, but his rule is none the less real, and he is by far the most potent monarch Wall Street has ever known. A man of few words, of iron will, of fiery temper, of keen intellect, proud, ambitious, resourceful, bold, successful, a giant in physique, and a giant in personality. He moves among ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... AUTHOR'S SON.—[See also Prefatory Note]—The hand that wrote thus far has left unwritten the last scene of the tragedy of poor Fox. In the deep where Prospero has dropped his wand are now irrevocably buried the humour and the pathos of this cynophagous banquet. One detail of it, however, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of youth unfinished! And songs unwritten, left By young and passionate hearts! O melodies Unheard, whereof we ever stand bereft! Clear-singing Schubert, boyish Keats — with these He roams henceforth, one with the starry band, Still paying ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... the law, he knew how many laws there are unwritten and implied that make obedience to the law an experiment in caddishness and ingratitude. There were reasons enough then to believe that Marie Louise had meant no harm and had not understood the evil in which she was so useful an accomplice. Even if she were guilty ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... The inhabitants grew to be proud of their rosy citadel; it was an unwritten law among them that every new house should adapt itself to this tone. For the rest, there was not much building done after his death, with the exception of a few isolated villas that sprang up, despite his old commands, in the neighbourhood. And the decline in population once more set in. Men ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Prince of unremembered towers destroyed before the birth of Babylon; I am also the (writer) of unremembered letters, and to a much greater extent the designer and imaginer of unwritten letters: and I cannot remember whether I ever acknowledged properly your communications about Claudel, especially your interesting remarks about the comparative coolness of Henri de Regnier about ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... The unwritten rule—indeed, the only rule—was the "forfeit essay," a game productive of so much that was novel and brilliant, that no later invention of peace-times has equaled it. At each meeting two hats would be handed round, all drawing ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... in 1843, in a small volume entitled "Dramatic Lyrics." The same volume contained the well-known rime of "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." Robert Browning was at that time a young man of thirty, and most of the poems which afterwards made him famous were still unwritten. ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... Kentucky, I know he cannot tell me what common law is meant by that first section. We know, as jurists, what is meant by the term common law, for it is a technical term. The common law is the law of England, the unwritten law of England, the lex non scripta. That is the common law in its legal acceptation. Is it, then, the law of England that is made a part of the Constitution, and to which the master is remitted for the security of his rights between him and his servant? Will any gentleman ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... called on first. When she arose and began to speak, I felt instantly that she had something to say; something that she felt was important we should hear, and how beautifully, how simply it was said! Not a thought of self, not one instant's hesitation for a thought or a word, yet it was evidently unwritten and not committed to memory. Every eye was drawn to her earnest face; every heart was touched. As she sat down, I rose and left the room rather rapidly; and when my name was called and my fizzling fireworks expected, ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... suffered from the temptation in this country of adapting business methods and ideals to politics rather than political ideals and methods to business. Our eighteenth-century thinkers explained citizenship itself, not as a duty to our neighbours but as the fulfilment of an unwritten contract. Our nineteenth-century legal writers elevated the idea of free contract almost to an industrial ideal; while, in somewhat the same spirit, the gutter journalists of to-day, when they are at a loss for a popular watchword, call for a business government. Such theories and battle-cries ...
— Progress and History • Various
... magnify his name as long as history is read. "Of illustrious men," says Thucydides, "the whole earth is the sepulcher. They are immortalized not alone by columns and inscriptions in their own lands; memorials to them rise in foreign countries as well—not of stone, it may be, but unwritten, ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... in which the date of our arrival at St. Louis is given as February 28th. And I well know that we were only two days on the trip. And besides the date given in my letter, I distinctly remember several unwritten facts and circumstances that satisfy me beyond any doubt, that the day we left Carrollton was February 27, 1862. Early in the morning of that day, the regiment filed out at the big gate, and marched south on the dirt road. Good-bye to old Camp Carrollton! Many of ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... than a single copy. It came at eight in the morning and was laid on the dining-room mantelpiece, from which (by an unwritten law of the house) it was the duty as well as the honour of the person who had first finished breakfast to take it up and read the most startling part of the news to ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... generation, and from East to West and North to South, but not so much, I believe, as grown people are apt to think. Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities, and it has its unwritten usages, which are handed down from old to young, and perpetuated on the same level of years, and are lived into and lived out of, but are binding, through all personal vicissitudes, upon the great body of boys between six and twelve years old. No boy can violate them without ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... whole seems unnecessary, if only because it is predominantly open and aggressive. Moreover, since the constitution of society has largely been in the hands of men, the nature of the sexual impulse in men has largely been expressed in the written and unwritten codes of social law. The sexual instinct in women is much more elusive. This, indeed, is involved at the outset in the organic psychological play of male and female, manifesting itself in the phenomena of modesty and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... opinion and tradition, that is, by the ideas handed down from one generation to another and constantly discussed around the camp-fire and the council-fire. Every decent Indian was singularly obedient to this unwritten code. He wanted always to do what he was told his fathers had been accustomed to do, and what was expected of him. Thus there was a ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... might enjoy a short walk. She really had forgotten Mrs. Burton's suggestion that no one of the girls leave the farm alone and had no thought of deliberately breaking an unwritten law. ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... fond of young fools. That is why they are permitted to rush in where angels fear to tread—and survive their daring! This supreme protection, this unwritten warranty to disregard all laws, occult or apparent, divine or earthly, may be attributed to the fact that none but young fools dream gloriously. For such of us as pretend to be wise—and we are but fools in a lesser degree—we know that humanity ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... error. She had imagined that the hostels were hers simply because he had put it in that way. They had never been anything but his, and now it was manifest he would do what he liked with his own. The law takes no cognizance of the unwritten terms of a ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... agree with the speaker! But it is not the British military way, and the unwritten laws of the Service stand firm. So let me only remind you that General Horne led the artillery at Mons; that he has commanded the First Army since September, 1916; that, in conjunction with Sir Julian Byng, he carried the Vimy Ridge in 1917, and held the left at Arras in 1918; and, finally, that ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... decision, for the inhabitants of the spot so engaging to Damaris' imagination were a close corporation, a race of sailors and fishermen and, so said rumour, somewhat rough customers at that. They lived according to their own traditions and unwritten laws, entertained a lordly contempt for wage-earning labourers and landsmen, and, save when money was likely to pass, were grudging of hospitality even to persons of quality ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... the German really believes, and you agree or disagree with him according to the phase of life you look at when he is speaking. You find that when he comes to England he honestly feels checked at every turn by our unwritten laws, while when you go to Germany you wonder how he can submit so patiently to the pettiness and multiplicity of his written ones. He vaguely feels the pressure and criticism of your indefinite code of manners; you think his elaborate system of titles, introductions, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... returned; the disease steadily deepened its hold, and a few days before her death, foreseeing that the end was near, Mrs. Jackson sent the manuscript to her publisher, with a brief note, enclosing a short outline of the chapters which remained unwritten.... The real lesson of the book lies in Zeph's unconquerable affection for his worthless wife, and in the beautiful illustration of the divine trait of forgiveness which he constantly manifested toward her. As a portraiture of a character moulded and guided by this sentiment, 'Zeph' will ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... Even the University of Virginia, which Thomas Jefferson had founded as a center of liberal thought, had fallen under the direction of sectarians, and among the great majority of the Northern colleges an unwritten law seemed to require that a university president should be a clergyman. The instruction in the best of these institutions was, as I have shown elsewhere, narrow, their methods outworn, and the students, as a rule, confined to one simple, single, cast-iron course, in which the great majority ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... deserted fish-stage, and lonely grave remain, a crumbling commentary of yesterday, a hint of recurring to-morrows. Son succeeds father, race replaces race, but the great Mackenzie flows on, and, as it flows, unwritten history along these banks is ever in the making. Tragedy and triumph, self-aggrandisement and self-obliteration, are here as well as in the noisy world we have left. Lessons these are for us, too, if we bring the keen eye and listening ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... writers of the age touch in the same tone upon the philosophy underlying the various rules of manners and conversation which were first discussed at the Hotel de Rambouillet, and which have passed into permanent though unwritten laws—unfortunately a little out of ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... civilization, a good police, or a watchful and philanthropic government furnishes to the masses and to individuals, is a liberty acquired, a liberty not the less practical, positive, and fruitful for being unwritten, unestablished by any charter. These, I shall be told, are 'little liberties.' I do not call them such. But we have a greater and more essential one,—the right of the representatives of the nation to discuss and vote on the budget; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... properly with the Twelve Tables. It is strictly the first and the only Roman code,[1] collecting the earliest known laws of the Roman people and forming the foundation of the whole fabric of Roman Law. Its importance lies in the fact that by its promulgation was substituted for an unwritten usage, of which the knowledge had been confined to some citizens of the community, a public and written body of laws, which were easily accessible to and strictly binding ...
— The Twelve Tables • Anonymous
... I need tell only what I knew and saw, in the strange, interwoven life we three have led. Three only? Nay, Harriet of the true heart, Harriet of the tender hand, could we have been three without you? My fingers should wither before they left your name unwritten. ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... man would approach Mrs. Errington and be promptly sent about his business. Her negative would, no doubt, be eager enough even upon this exquisite and charitable morning. Wishing devoutly that, being a gentleman, he had not to conform to an unwritten code of manners, Hindford walked away. And, as he walked, he saw continually the back of the beggar with that black coat of the two hills and the valley ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... "drouth" we could have loitered in that pleasant shade; but we were due at the Red Lilies "second night out"; and it being one of the unwritten laws of a "nigger-hunt" to keep appointments—"the other chaps worrying a bit if you don't turn up"—soon after four o'clock we were out in the blazing heat again, following the river now along its higher flood-bank through grassy plains and open ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... Wagner, and what excited his gratitude to even more superlative utterance, was the confidence which Liszt showed in his genius, and without which, it is no exaggeration to say, Wagner's greatest works would probably have remained unwritten. ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... which was still the ground-work of the whole. And this appears to be the best supported and most plausible conjecture, (for certainty is not to be expected,) of the rise and original of that admirable system of maxims and unwritten customs which is now known by the name of the common law, as extending its authority universally over all the realm, and which is doubtless of Saxon parentage." 4 ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... true, according to which the architect was not Joao but one Ayres do Quintal. Nothing else seems to be known of Ayres—though a head carved under the west window of the chapter-house is said to be his—but in a country so long illiterate as Portugal, where unwritten stories have been handed down from quite distant times, it is possible that oral tradition may be ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... hath been written shall remain, Nor be erased nor written o'er again; The unwritten only still belongs to thee: Take heed, and ponder well what that ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... 'Wrote to me! Could any mere letter of your writing break the bond by which we were bound together? Had not the distance between us seemed to have made you safe would you have dared to write that letter? The letter must be unwritten. It has already been contradicted by your conduct to me since I have been ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... was because I did not wish to punish her, and any blow at you would have reached her heavily. The second reason, subordinate to the first, is obvious: decent men, in these days, have tacitly agreed to suspend a violent appeal to the unwritten law as a concession to civilisation. This second reason, however, depends entirely upon the ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... was ever known to pull the cord which set in motion a guillotine that took off his own head. But there is much unknown, as well as unwritten, history. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... his misfortune that he lived before his country was ready for him. Coming a quarter of a century later, he might have made a part of a national emancipation of intellect. Coming when he did, he stood merely for one of the spasmodic reactions against the dominant spirit. Unwritten history is full of such reactions, since it is by the accumulated energy of their revolts that the ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... her lip; but hospitality is an unwritten law of the West—a law not to be lightly broken. "That's where I live. We'll be glad to have you stop there, ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... knowing that only the unwritten law of Western hospitality compelled that speech; it was the crackle and flare of the bright fire which overcame ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... only an entrance wedge to disrupt the Union. The Constitution has guaranteed to us exclusively the preservation of an institution on which our welfare rests. You usurp a privilege which you call a right. Your demands are dangerous to the peace of the Union, and are preposterous. You violate unwritten law. You seek to do what the founders of our republic never dreamed of. When two of the States ceded their own slave territory to the central government, it was with the understanding that slavery should remain as it was in the district we ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... account, he had brought the Major in a debtor to him of more than a thousand pounds. The Major had remarked that as he was half-owner of the horses his partner had good security for the money. Then something of an unwritten arrangement was made. The "Prime Minister" was now one of the favourites for the Leger. If the horse won that race there would be money enough for everything. If that race were lost, then there should be a settlement by the transfer of the stud to the younger partner. ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... small value, a penny, or a farthing has been quietly put into Mr. Smith's hands, in furtherance of his work, by some poor Gipsy woman. The story which made us laugh was of a Gipsy marriage. It is one of the unwritten laws of Gipsy life that the wife works while the husband idles about the tent. The wife hawks with the basket or the cart and sells, while the husband loiters about the encampment or cooks the evening meal. But one young Gipsy fell in love with an Irish girl ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... responsible for the safety of the party, and every member should do his best to help him by carrying out any instructions he may give for their greater safety. This is not always appreciated by people who do not know the Alps and their unwritten laws, and the Guides complain somewhat bitterly that they are often put in very difficult positions. For instance, on one occasion, when a party was crossing an avalanche slope, the Guide asked them to go singly at intervals of 20 metres, so that if anyone was carried ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... to have committed the fatal act of naturalisation. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 581—Admiral Phillip, 26 Feb. 1805.] Alien seamen in distress through shipwreck or other accidental causes, formed a humane exception to this unwritten law. ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... ceased dreaming. She glanced across at her interlocutor, and by reason of long obedience to the unwritten rule of eating-houses which requires that one must be pleasant to customers always, she forgot for a moment that she was on her way to be married. ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... their faces with the same vehemence as they did each other's, but there was no public evidence of partiality. However, if any boy was too rough or took advantage of a girl smaller than himself, he was promptly thrashed by his fellows. There was an unwritten law and public sentiment in that little Academy world that enabled us to study and play together with the greatest freedom ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... It has been an unwritten law for four generations that an Estenega and an Iturbi y Moncada should not marry; the enmity began, as you should know, when a member of each family was an officer in a detachment of troops sent to protect the Missions in their ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... race. There the Celt found refuge when Saxon invasion swept him from the open country of England and from the Scotch Lowlands. There he was preserved with his own language, indicating by its variety of dialects the rapid flux and change of unwritten speech; with his own Christianity, which was that of Apostolic Britain; with his un-Teutonic gifts and weaknesses, his lively, social, sympathetic nature, his religious enthusiasm, essentially the same in its Calvinistic as in its Catholic guise, his superstition, his clannishness, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... form the impression, however, that this reckless lawlessness was attended with insubordination or lack of discipline. On the contrary, they were rigorously governed by an iron hand and by the unwritten "code of honor." A pirate entered upon "the account" (a term meaning piracy) by taking the oath of fealty to the cause, abjuring all social ties, pledging himself never to desert his ship or defraud his comrades or steal anything belonging to his fellows. Having thus bound him ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... could have but one wild fling more, play the good fellow and the wastrel one last time, ere he settled down to grey lecture- rooms and sober matrimony. And, further to tempt him, the very last chapter of Labour Tactics and Strategy remained unwritten for lack of a trifle more of essential data which ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... fail of its effect upon their victims. The middle of the seventeenth century was the golden age, not only of the robber, but of the robbed. The game was played upon either side with a scrupulous respect for a potent, if unwritten, law. Neither might nor right was permitted to control the issue. A gaily attired, superbly mounted highwayman would hold up a coach packed with armed men, and take a purse from each, though a vigorous remonstrance ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... its own laws,—the common and unwritten law of the forecastle, of which Admiralty Courts take infrequent cognizance, and the law of the quarter-deck, which is to be read in acts of Parliament and statutes of Congress. The sea has its own customs, superstitions, traditions, architecture, and government; wherefore not its own language? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... were the Spanish pieces, which told of the loss of one of the early explorers. All this, of the vessels named, is a matter of history, and is to be found in the SOUTH PACIFIC SAILING DIRECTORY. But that there was other history, unwritten, I was yet to learn. In the meantime I puzzled why six thousand primitive savages let one ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... unwritten laws of the little community that on some selected day in May everybody would repair to the graveyard to plant, trim and clip. It was not an unpleasant duty, even to those whose sorrow was fresh. It seemed as if they were still doing something for the friends ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... indebtedness to Major J. R. M. Taylor, who has translated and compiled the Insurgent [4] records, thereby making available a very large mass of reliable and most valuable information without which a number of chapters of this book would have remained unwritten. Surely no man who bases his statements concerning Filipino rule on the facts set forth in these records can be accused of deriving his information from hostile or ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... due pressing on the part of host and hostess, the other members of the company advanced upon the piano, either singly or in couples, to bear a hand in the burden of entertainment. Their seeming reluctance had no basis in fact; for it was an unwritten law that every one who could must add his mite; and only those who literally had "not a note of music in them" were exempt. Tilly took a mischievous pleasure in announcing bluntly: "So sorry, my dear, not to be able to do you a tool-de-rool! ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... us with a wish to be wise above what is written, we merely reply: There are unwritten revelations which are nevertheless true. Besides, we are not sure that at least an intimation of other races than those of the earth is not already on record. Not to prove any position, but to check obstructive criticism, we refer to the divine who is said to have witnessed in magnificent ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... rebel against the unwritten rule that seats are not to be made use of, but a moment's reflection convinced her of the unwisdom of such ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... distaste fanned itself alive in Allen's brain. Why in the name of World Government did every other girl who made first play with him have to be protected? But there was his out. By unwritten social code he could declare the date off. Except that he had grown to increasingly hate the spiteful practice of 'protection'. It meant Nedda had peeved some local lothario who, along with other males in his clique, was going to damn well see she wasn't intimate with anyone else until she begged ...
— DP • Arthur Dekker Savage
... to be requited being a kindness, is called gratitude, but when it is an injury, it is called revenge. And these principles are common both to natural and statute law. But there are also other divisions of law; for there is both the written and the unwritten law,—each of which is maintained by the rights of nations and the customs of our ancestors. Again, written law is divided into public law and private law. Public law is laws, resolutions of the senate, treaties; private law ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... they looked at each other guiltily. They had no desire to spread scandal, no desire to be ill-natured. Who would have? And to outsiders no word was breathed, unwritten ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... most other countries of Europe are unwritten. They consist of the common usages and maxims that have become fixed by long experience. In those countries, when a new political custom grows into common practice it thereby becomes a part of the ...
— Elements of Civil Government • Alexander L. Peterman
... have a common history, issuing out of each man's struggle to assert his own personality and his own convictions. Till that point is reached, the history of the masses will be mere statistic concerning their physical well-being or ill-being, which (for the early ages of our race) is unwritten, and ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... method of thought one would expect from a graduate of Cornell University. The last address of the convention was given by the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw, entitled The America Undiscovered by Columbus. This, like so many of Miss Shaw's unsurpassed lectures, will be lost to posterity because unwritten and not stenographically reported. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... father moved to a house at Hatcham, transporting thither his long rows of books, together with those many volumes which lay still unwritten in the "celle fantastyk" of his son. "There is a vast view from our greatest hill," wrote Browning; a vast view, though Wordsworth had scorned the Londoner's hill—"Hill? we call that, such as that, a rise." Here he read and wrote, enjoyed his rides on the ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... her lips. Sir Purcell had not been told of her tribulations, and he had not expressed any doubt of her truth; but sentimentalists can read one another with peculiar accuracy through their bewitching gauzes. She read his unwritten doubt, and therefore expected her unwritten misery ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 4,000, C 3,000, D 1,000, A would simply have to assign 6,000 votes to B and 6,000 to C; while D, being hopeless of success, would naturally let C have his 1,000 also. There would be no risk of a seat being left vacant through two candidates of the same party sharing a quota between them—an unwritten law would soon come to be recognised—that the one with fewest votes should give place to the other. And, with candidates of two opposite parties, this difficulty could not arise at all; one or the other could always be returned by the surplus votes ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... substance of flesh. She had no difficulty in writing, and covered a page every morning as instinctively as a thrush sings, but nevertheless, with all this to urge and inspire, and the most devout intention to accomplish the work, the book still remained unwritten. Papers accumulated without much furthering their task, and in dull moments Katharine had her doubts whether they would ever produce anything at all fit to lay before the public. Where did the difficulty lie? Not in their materials, alas! nor in their ambitions, but in something more profound, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... sufficiently—far from it—but only to recall them to memory, whether we have forgot aught, or whether for the purpose of not forgetting. Many things, well I know, have escaped us, through length of time, that have dropped away unwritten. There are then some things of which we have no recollection; for the power that was in the ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... we can neither see the ends toward which it is almost blindly groping, nor the few perfected creations that will be left standing amidst the rubble of abortive effort. An age must always decry itself and extol its forbears. The unwritten history of every Art will show us that. Consider the novel—that most recent form of Art! Did not the age which followed Fielding lament the treachery of authors to the Picaresque tradition, complaining that they were not as Fielding and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... for miles. Yet, though it is usual to speak of wild birds and of their freedom, the more you watch their ways the more you feel that the wildest have their routes and customs: that they do not act entirely from the impulse of the moment, but have their unwritten laws. How do the gnats there playing under the horse-chestnut boughs escape being struck down by the heavy raindrops, each one of which looks as if it would drown so small a creature? The numbers of insects far exceed all that words can express: ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... something very moving and pathetic in the death of an old language. Permit me to tell you, not as a philologist, a character to which I have no claim, but as an imaginative writer, how the death of an ancient tongue affects me. It is unlike any other form of death, for an unwritten language is even as a breath of air which when it is spent leaves no trace behind. A nation may die, yet its history remains, and that is the tangible part of its past. A city may fall to decay and lie a thousand years under the sands of the desert, ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... spectacular glare of the second empire. It was the moment of a short-lived renaissance; literature, art, science, seemed to be starting on new voyages of discovery. New worlds were opened up for conquest; oriental studies for the first time became popular, the great field of unwritten traditions surrendered its virgin soil. Above all, it was a time of fermentation in moral ideas; every one expected the millennium, though there was a lack of agreement as to what it would consist in. Every one, like Lamennais in Beranger's poem, was going ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... abruptly. He had broken the unwritten law of Rocky Springs, where it was understood that no man spoke of another man's past, or questioned his present doings, or even admitted knowledge of them. But like all the rest of the male portion of Rocky Springs, he possessed a soft ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... looks at her, speechless with amazement. Her eyes do not flinch from his. "If," she continues, with that terrible calmness,—"if you wanted to marry Miss Constance Devereux; if I wished to marry—let us say, Lord Harford—there is nothing to prevent it except," slowly, "the unwritten law of ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... kind of equitable arrangement was so strongly felt by American publishers that a kind of unwritten law gradually established itself among them. It was tacitly understood, that, when a publisher had paid an English author for advance sheets, no rival American edition should be published. But it already appears too plainly that an arrangement ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... old dreary looking castle still stands there. From Elsinore I went to Copenhagen, and occupied myself for a few days in visiting the wonderful museums. There I saw, in the Northern Antiquities Collection, the unwritten history of civilisation in the stone, bronze, and iron tools which have brought the world to what it is now. This museum is perfectly unrivalled. I saw there the first section of kitchen-middens—that is, the refuse of oyster shells, fish-bones, and other stuff thrown out by the ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... with an eloquent unwritten peroration which told of her last hours with Miss Anthony as the great soul was about to take its flight and ended: "The object of her life was to awaken in women the consciousness of the need of freedom and the courage to demand it, not as an end but as a means ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... dine with H.R.H." The horrible capillary plaster necessary before a man can serve decently as an opener of carriage-doors! The horsehair envelopes without which our legal brains cannot work! The unwritten law by which a man has to nurse his hat and stick throughout a call unless his hostess specially asks ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... and when I came quite close under it it really drowned the storm. It was playing such things as "Tommy Atkins" and "You Can Depend on Young Australia," and many others of which I do not know the words, but I should think they would be "John, Pat, and Mac, With the Union Jack," or that fine though unwritten poem, "Wait till the Bull Dog gets a bite of you." Now, I for one detest Imperialism, but I have a great deal of sympathy with Jingoism. And there seemed something so touching about this unbroken and innocent bragging under the brutal menace ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... seen, and was happy that they two were alone together—that was the joy of it all, so much alone together; for Swift Wing did not live with them, and, like Breaking Rock, she watched her daughter's life, standing afar off, since it was the unwritten law of the tribe that the wife's mother must not cross the path or enter the home of her daughter's husband. But at last Dingan had broken through this custom, and insisted that Swift Wing should be with her daughter when he was away from ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... nor Justice that dwelleth with the gods below. I judged not that thy decrees had such authority that a man should transgress for them the unwritten sure commandments of the gods. For these, indeed, are not of today or yesterday, but they live forever, and their beginning no man knoweth. Should I, for fear of thee, be found guilty against them? That I should die I knew. Why not? All men must die. And if I die before ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... time, but the helpless stenographer lived a street farther west, and each additional block meant another nickel according to the unwritten umbrella tariff. ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... curious things about law, and custom, and usage, and all that sort of thing, when you come to look at it; yes, and about the drift and progress of human opinion and movement, too. There are written laws—they perish; but there are also unwritten laws—they are eternal. Take the unwritten law of wages: it says they've got to advance, little by little, straight through the centuries. And notice how it works. We know what wages are now, here and there and yonder; we strike an average, and say that's the wages of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a mysterious, unwritten law governing the social organism which causes a natural and wholesome reaction to take place whenever tendencies, perhaps inherent in certain classes, threaten to become general, and thereby dangerous to the community. ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... back into his cushions, feeling a little hurt and very feeble and unimportant. Clearly the big thing, the sincere thing, the significant thing was beyond his reach. The City's Maw must remain unwritten. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were stored ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... Carried away by my conception, I tried to persuade myself that this piece would be easier to produce than the other more serious and terrible drama. With this idea in my mind I informed Liszt of my purpose, and offered the Weimar management to compose a score for Junger Siegfried, which as yet was unwritten, in return for which I would definitely accept their proposal to grant me a year's salary of fifteen hundred marks. This they agreed to without delay, and I took up my quarters in the attic-room evacuated the previous year by Karl ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... person," she repeated, hastily. "Go through the list of our acquaintances, if you will. Have I ever shown any partiality for anyone? You cannot honestly believe that I have not been faithful to our unwritten compact?" ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... our existence is imaginary; and wise-acres may scoff as much as they please at what they term 'castle-building,' I believe all mankind indulge in it more or less; and it is an innocent, harmless pastime, which injures no one. I consider it the 'unwritten poetry,' the romance of life, which all feel; but many, like the dumb, strive in vain to ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... the codes adopted by man for regulating his actions toward his fellow-mortals, the greatest are these—the code of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table, the Constitution of the United States and the unwritten rules of the New York Fire Department. The Round Table methods are no longer practicable since the invention of street cars and breach-of-promise suits, and our Constitution is being found more and more unconstitutional every day, so the code of our firemen must be considered ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... necessary according to the usual mode of instruction. That its acquisition leads the pupil to the correct pronunciation of every word. That it will present to the missionary a superior alphabet for the representation of hitherto unwritten languages," &c. A similar committee, to whom the question was referred by the House of Representatives in 1852, state that during the past year the system had been tried in twelve public schools, and that, according to ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... exclusively, and are still held mainly, by Protestants; but it was absolutely necessary to be a thoroughgoing supporter of the Ascendancy, and in thoroughgoing hostility to Irish public opinion as a whole. In other words, the unwritten Penal Code was preserved after the abolition of the written enactments, and was used for precisely the same pernicious purpose. It was a subtle and sustained attempt "to debauch the intellect of Ireland," ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... seldom proceeded to practical rowdyism and never except with the school. As a rule, they amused themselves by shouting rude chaff. The school regarded them with a lofty contempt, much as an Oxford man regards the townee. The school was always anxious for a row, but it was the unwritten law that only in special circumstances should they proceed to active measures. A curious dislike for school-and-town rows and most misplaced severity in dealing with the offenders when they took place, were among the few flaws in the otherwise ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... letter which, as Mr. Froude notices, was not written by Cecil and merely signed by the queen, but was her own peculiar and characteristic composition. "Far sooner," she wrote, "would I pass over those murders on land; far rather would I leave unwritten those noyades in the rivers—those men and women hacked in pieces; but the shrieks of the strangled wives, great with child—the cries of the infants at their mothers' breasts—pierce me through. What drug of rhubarb can purge the bile which ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... still retain its hold over local legislation, and added that it was his purpose to explain in a pamphlet a policy which he thought might be adopted to the 'satisfaction of the nation at large.' The pamphlet, however, remained unwritten, and the scheme in its fulness, therefore, was never explained. Evidently Lord Russell's mind was changing in its attitude towards the Irish problem; but, as Mr. Lecky points out in the personal reminiscences with which he has enriched these pages, ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... asks the following question: "On what evidence do we put faith in the existence of St. George, the patron of England? Upon such, assuredly, as an acute critic or skillful pleader might easily scatter to the winds; the belief of prejudiced or credulous witnesses, the unwritten record of empty pageants and bauble decorations. On the side of scepticism might be exhibited a powerful array of suspicious legends and exploded acts. Yet, after all, what Catholic is there but would count it a profaneness to question the existence of St. George?" On ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... a programme or even of an unwritten plan as to the negotiations was further evidenced by the fact that the President, certainly as late as March 19, had not made up his mind whether the treaty which was being negotiated should be preliminary or final. He had up to that time the peculiar idea that a preliminary treaty was in the ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... flights of his own imagination; and he illustrated his speech with a wealth of gesticulation and a variety of intonation that convulsed his scanty audience with laughter. People wondered mildly what punishment was in store for the audacious man who was thus breaking one of the unwritten canons of the House, for in those days it was regarded as bad form on the part of a man not himself in the front rank to attack one in the position of Mr. Disraeli. As the speech proceeded, the Prime Minister sat in his favourite attitude, his arms folded, his head slightly bent forward, ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... has a lot of unwritten history about the business man who divides his energies between his office and the ticker. The business man who is trying to make more progress than his competitor in business and at the same time trying to beat out the stock market is dividing his energies, and between the two occupations ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive him to do. Even I would not write this article, were not the publication-day hard on my heels. I should read Hawthorne and Emerson and Holmes, and dream in my arm-chair, and project in the clouds those lovely unwritten stories that curl and veer and change like mist-wreaths in the sun. So, also, however dignified, however invigorating, however really desirable are habits of life involving daily physical toil, there is a constant evil demon at every one's elbow, seducing him ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... barbarous, has such a code of its own. Without it social life would be impossible, for no man would know what to expect of his neighbors, nor be able promptly to interpret the words and actions of his fellow-men. It is in obedience to an unwritten law of this kind that an American takes off his hat when he goes into a church, and an Asiatic, when he enters a mosque, takes off his shoes; that Englishmen shake hands, and Africans rub noses. Where etiquette is well understood and well adapted to the persons ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... governments of the Southern States, by any and all means which might be by them considered most desirable, judicious, expedient, and effectual; the solidifying of these Southern States into a new Confederation, or league, in fact—with an unwritten but well understood Constitution of its own—to be known under the apparently harmless title of the "Solid South," whose mission it would be to build up, and strengthen, and populate, and enrich itself within the Union, for a time, greater ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... could fix her mind only upon her lost darling. She collected his playthings, soiled, broken, and all. She gathered flowers to fling above the brown earth that hid him from her view. She wrote heart-broken verses in his memory, and many more she poured forth in unwritten ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... bullets—away went X.'s propeller and his machine was hurled upside down; immediately Y. and Z. rose. By marvellous pilotage X. managed to right his crippled machine and began, of course, to fall; promptly Y. and Z. descended. It is, I believe, an unwritten law in the Air Service never to desert a comrade until he is seen to be completely "done for"—hence Y. and Z.'s hawk-like swoop from the clouds to draw the fire of the battery from their stricken ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... intelligence of the people begin to reach from nation to nation. Mr. Beecher's visit is the most notable expression of this movement of national life. It marks the nisus formativus which begins the organization of that unwritten and only half spoken public opinion recognized by Mr. Cobden as a great underlying force even in England. It needs a little republican pollen-dust to cause the evolution of its else barren germs. The fruit of Mr. Beecher's visit will ripen in due time, not only in direct results, but in opening ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... of the unwritten laws of the cuisine that Prudence was never to be disturbed when engaged in this delicate operation. She maintained that it destroyed the symmetry of the peel, and I dare say she was right. Consequently she looked at me reproachfully as I entered, ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... prevailing party, or the one who is the best "mixer," secures the office regardless of qualifications. Sharing the fortunes of other political offices, the county superintendency frequently has applied to it the unwritten party rule of "two terms and out," thus crippling the efficiency of the office by frequent changes of administration ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... has been already said, so much identify their lives with that of the tribe, that each of their acts, however insignificant, is considered as a tribal affair. Their whole behaviour is regulated by an infinite series of unwritten rules of propriety which are the fruit of their common experience as to what is good or bad—that is, beneficial or harmful for their own tribe. Of course, the reasonings upon which their rules of propriety are based sometimes are absurd in the extreme. Many of them originate in superstition; ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... of dress there is a striking resemblance between the garb of these country people and that of the highly educated and refined. It is an acknowledged principle, or rather, I should say, an unwritten law, in these days—at all events as far as men are concerned—that to be well dressed all that is required of us is not to be badly dressed. Simplicity is a sine qua non; and we are further required to abstain from showing bad taste in the choice of shades and colours, and to wear nothing that ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... Nothing the blood to fire, the cheek to pale: My life is in my books: the record there, A truthful photograph, is all I choose To give the world of self; nor will excuse Mine own or others' failures: glad to spare From blame of mine, or praise, both friends and foes, Leaving unwritten what God only knows." ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of Cadman as the unparallelled comrade for field work. In fact, he had learned many of the little niceties of the open from the much-travelled American artist and writer—finished performances of comradeship, a regard for the unwritten things, reverence for those rights which never could be brought to the point of words, but which give delicacy and delectation to hours together between men. Skag never ceased to delight in the silence and self-control of the Dane. The ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... rigidity of their constitutional rules of law, which separate too sharply the executive and the legislative branches of government. Like their neighbours the Canadian people have based their system on English principles, but they have at the same time been able to keep pace with the progress of the unwritten constitution of England, to adapt it to their own political conditions, and to bring the executive and legislative authorities to assist and ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... terrace after dinner with her in the moonlight. When the ladies retired he came into the smoking room, drank a whisky and soda, said that Miss Queenborough was really a very charming companion, and apologized for leaving us early, on the ground that his sermon was still unwritten. My good cousin, the squire, suggested rather grimly that a discourse on the vanity of human ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... 'Suspiria' intended by the author, we have only nine that received his final corrections, and even with those now recovered, we have only about one half of the whole, presuming that those which are lost or remained unwritten would have averaged about the same length as those we have. To those who have studied the 'Suspiria' as published, how suggestive many of these titles will be! 'Count the Leaves in Vallombrosa'—what phantasies would that have conjured up! The lost, the apparently wasted of the leaves from ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... where Polaris makes a somewhat sharper angle with the horizon, there is law, also, but much of it is unwritten. And one of the unwritten statutes is that which maintains the inherent right of a man to avenge his own ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... tradition current in Scotland, wherein certain beasts, brought from a lake, as in this tale, play much the same part as is here described." The volume of the Cambro-Briton now referred to was published in 1821 and apparently the writer, who calls himself Siencyn ab Tydvil, communicates an unwritten tradition afloat in Carmarthenshire, for he does not tell us whence he obtained the story. As the tale differs in some particulars from that already given, I ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... over the car, flickering like the tongue of a snake, seeming to cover every passenger at once. Beneath its deadly insistence, hands were upraised one after the other. Resistance at that moment meant instant death. The unwritten law of the West had to be obeyed. He "had the ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... nearer and nearer, We know not what freight she may hold; Hope stands at the helm there to steer her, Our hearts are courageous and bold. Sail in with new joys and new sorrows, Sail in with new banners unfurled, Sail in with unwritten to-morrows, Sail in with new tasks for ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... opinions, or rather in the practice, of their ancestors. The honors of sacrifice were reserved for the supreme deity; they acknowledged, in rude hymns, their obligations to the air, the fire, the water, and the earth; and their priests derived some profit from the art of divination. Their unwritten laws were rigorous and impartial: theft was punished with a tenfold restitution; adultery, treason, and murder, with death; and no chastisement could be inflicted too severe for the rare and inexpiable guilt of cowardice. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... and to this end I have inscribed certain words upon his namepaper. To everyone this person will now return the paper which has been entrusted to him, folded so that the nature of its contents shall be an unwritten leaf to all others. Nor shall the papers be unfolded by any until he is within his own chamber, with barred doors, where all, save the one who shall find the message, shall remain, not venturing forth until daybreak. I, ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... than thou: Save only the divine light in thine eyes— Save but the soul in thine uplifted eyes. I saw but them—they were the world to me. I saw but them—saw only them for hours— Saw only them until the moon went down. What wild heart-histories seemed to lie unwritten Upon those crystalline, celestial spheres! How dark a woe! yet how sublime a hope! How silently serene a sea of pride! How daring an ambition! yet how deep— How fathomless a capacity ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... obliteration equally over their precise or their straying footprints, that would have done them good to heed and to remember; and when morning broke upon a world of week-day labor, it was covered as far as their eyes could reach as with a clear and unwritten tablet, on which they might record their lives anew. Near the wreck of the broken bridge on the Warensboro turnpike an overturned buggy lay imbedded in the drift and debris of the river hurrying silently towards the sea, and a horse with fragments of broken and icy harness ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... understood and accepted by the banker or post-office clerk as a personal identification, and will save the automobile chauffeur many an annoyance, if he has erred through lack of familiarity with many little unwritten laws ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... more than sufficient—we had to contend against thousands of blacks, aboriginal natives armed by the British and taken up in their ranks. We naturally felt indignant at the adoption of coloured races in the British army; for we regarded it as an unwritten agreement between the respective Governments that no blacks were to be involved in the war. It was to be white versus white, Boer versus Briton. Hence, when the natives became embroiled in the ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... law, an unwritten law which permits one to have lovers, even though it be shameful, because [sarcastically] it does not ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant |
