"Moot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to be settled before I go," Benjulia proceeded. "Here are some papers, which I have received from your lawyer, Mr. Moot. They relate to a slander, which your ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... helped her and been good to her. Was it all over? and no more such kindly ministry and delightful sympathy to be ever hoped for any more? Had Pitt forgotten her? It gave Esther pain, that nobody guessed, to be obliged to moot this question; and it busied her a good deal. Sometimes her thoughts went longingly back beyond Pitt Dallas to another face that had always been loving to her; soft eyes and a tender hand that were ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... flitting like a dark, graceful ghost through the city streets, and the sight sent his heart plunging against his side like an inward sledge-hammer. Would one pulse in her heart stir ever so faintly at sight of him? Just as he asked himself the question, and was stepping forward to moot her, feeling very like the country swain in love—"hot and dry like, with a pain in his side like"—he suddenly stopped. Another figure came forth from the shadow of an opposite house, and softly pronounced her name. It was a short ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... me from trying to touch upon the numerous other moot points in divorce, so I will only plead that, when each person has come to a definite and common-sense conclusion, unclouded by sentiment or prejudice, he or she may not hesitate to proclaim his or her conviction aloud, so that the law of the ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... in the office had begun to improve. I had had my salary raised, and I had ceased doing janitor work. I had become more of a clerk and less of an office boy. A number of us "kids" had got up a moot court, rented a room to meet in, and finally obtained the use of another room in the old Denver University building, where, in the gaslight, we used to hold "quiz classes" and defend imaginary cases. (That, by the way, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... his remarkable drama, 'The Satire of the Three Estates'—Monarch, namely, Barons, and Clergy. It is made up in nearly three equal parts of ingenuity, wit, and grossness. It is a drama, and was acted several times—first, in 1535, at Cupar-Fife, on a large green mound called Moot-hill; then, in 1539, in an open park near Linlithgow, by the express desire of the king, who with all the ladies of the Court attended the representation; then in the amphitheatre of St Johnston in Perth; and in 1554, at Edinburgh, in the village of Greenside, which skirted the northern base of ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... writer put it, "a rival to Shrewsbury is brought into condition to do it damage." Another was for complicating it with other new schemes. One of the sternest of all controversies still raged round the moot point whether the line was to run from Oswestry to Newtown or from Newtown to Oswestry, and even private friends fell out as to the exact spot on the proposed route at which the actual work should begin! "Discord triumphs—local prejudice is rampart—personal ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... moot question to the gardener, for if she has a pleasant neighbour, she does not like to raise an aggressive barrier or perhaps cut off the view, yet to a certain extent I like being walled in at least on two sides. A total lack of boundaries is too impersonal,—the eye travels on and on: there is nothing ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... officers in the service of France. My next will be from Paris. Remember me to our friends at A—'s. I am a little heavy-hearted at the prospect of removing to such a distance from you. It is a moot point whether I shall ever return. My health is very ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... in his dungeon cell tames and pets the conventional mouse. To educate Albert, to raise him above his groove in life and develop his soul, appealed to her romantic nature as a worthy task, and as a good way of filling in the time. It is an exceedingly moot point—and one which his associates of the servants' hall would have combated hotly—whether Albert possessed a soul. The most one could say for certain is that he looked as if he possessed one. To ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... before I was old enough to be told anything like this that I began to feel that the moor was in secret my companion and friend, that it was not only the moot to me, but something else. It was like a thing alive—a huge giant lying spread out in the sun warming itself, or covering itself with thick, white mist which sometimes writhed and twisted itself into wraiths. ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... called Hrunting, an ancient heritage. Steel was the blade itself, tempered with poison-twigs, Hardened with battle-blood: never in fight it failed Any who wielded it, when he would wage a strife In the dire battlefield, folk-moot ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... days of Pythagoras down to the present time it has been a moot question whether a vegetable or meat diet was best for man. Each side can present equally strong arguments; each can point to exceptional instances of physical development under the different methods; each can point to ill results that follow rigid adherence ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... on the earth are the tops of very high mountains, the points that have reared themselves nearest to the sun but farthest out of the sheltering blanket of the earth's atmosphere. The actual temperature of the moon's surface by day is a moot point. It may be below the freezing-point or above ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... he preaches" to the student as regards the ensemble of violin and piano will be recalled by all who have enjoyed the 'Sonata Recitals' he has given together with Mrs. Mannes. And as an interpreting solo artist his views regarding the moot question of gut versus wire strings ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... The genuineness of the Prologues of these plays has long been a moot question. The tendency of the more recent investigators has been to hold that all were, at least in ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... could say aught more of him than was said on the prior occasion; viz., that he was the very prince of good fellows, if he should be the "very big-horned Deil himsel." On his second disappearance, the point was no longer a moot one, "Who the devil he could be?" for the very question, as put, decided the question before it was answered. The point was just as lucid as ever was the spring of St Anthony, and no one could be gravelled, where there was not a grain of sand to interrupt the vision. There was not in ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... and think that I have said quite enough for the spuriousness of the Annals never to be hereafter argued as a moot point, but accepted as an established fact. I need not go into further consideration; because further consideration cannot give more weight to what has been put forward. I, therefore, pause, assured that with only these few facts and observations placed ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... had time allowed—and of course there was no knowing what effect the resistance of Dublin might have on the country—it may be a moot point whether it might not have been advisable to separate the two questions of the sentence of death and the actual executions, and one can well imagine the conciliatory effect of a Royal Act of Clemency in the event of maturer ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... that if one well-established rule has been overthrown, another, believed to be quite as wrong and perhaps not so well fortified by time and subsequent cases, may share the same fate. Shall counsel risk advising his client not to prosecute his claim or defence, when another bolder than he, may moot the point and conduct another cause resting upon the same question to a successful termination? The very foundations of confidence and security are shaken. The law becomes a lottery, in which every man feels ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... saw those awful German names staring out at me under my own signature—and in an article espousing the side of France in the Alsace-Lorraine controversy? Perhaps not—unless you understand the feeling of the actual possessor and the aspirant to possession of border and other moot territories. "By their spelling ye shall know them!" is their cry. Later, I happened to be in America when that dear good faithful copy-reader changed my Bizerte to the dictionary's Bizerta in an article on Tunis, and was able to go to the mat with him. I explained that the spelling was ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... reputation, invested him with a certain sun-like quality; but his age, the recession of his locks, and the advancement of his waist were beginning to dim his lustre, so that whether he was moth or candle was becoming a moot point. It was moot to me, watching him and Miss Sabine Monroy at Charleston throughout the month of March. The casual observer would have said that she was "playing him up," as a young poet of my acquaintance puts it; but ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... Jimmy Macleod cram a cross-grained "waler" over an awkward fence, and squeeze the last ounce out of the brute in the run home on the flat. The Tirhoot ladies are in all respects charming; and it must remain a moot point with the discriminating observer whether they are more delightful in the genial home-circles of which they are the centres and ornaments, or in the more exciting stir and whirl of the ballroom. After every gathering hecatombs ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... that you had just to moot the question And say you felt the closing hour had come And we should simply jump at your suggestion And all the Hague with overtures would hum; You'd but to call her up, And Peace would follow like ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... disappeared—and the suspected book on the Therapeutic sect known by the title "On the Contemplative Life." Whether they received this generic name because they are suggestions for the Jewish cause, or because they are written to answer the insinuations ([Greek: kath' hypothesin]) of adversaries, is a moot point. But their general purport is clear: they were an apologetic presentation of Jewish life, written to show the falsity of anti-Semitic calumnies. The Jews are good citizens and their manner of life is humanitarian. The Essene sect is a living proof of Jewish practical ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... a moot point whether 'Letters Written for the Post, and not for the Press,' an anonymous volume which appeared in 1820, and which consists of descriptions of a tour in Scotland, interspersed with dull moral lectures on the conduct of a wife towards her husband, was from his pen. ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... playhouses the itinerant troupes of actors were accustomed, except when received into private homes, to give their performances in any place that chance provided, such as open street-squares, barns, town-halls, moot-courts, schoolhouses, churches, and—most frequently of all, perhaps—the yards of inns. These yards, especially those of carriers' inns, were admirably suited to dramatic representations, consisting as they ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... At the period of his study this was the only law-school in the United States. Many anecdotes of his peculiarities during his residence at the school were related by his preceptors to the young gentlemen from Georgia who followed him in the office in after years. A moot court was a part of the system of instruction, in which questions of law, propounded by one of the professors, were argued by students appointed for the purpose. On one occasion, Cumming was replying to the argument of a competitor, and was so caustic as to be offensive. This was ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... inhabit the fringe of settlements and the deep, quiet places of the country; rebellious to all labour, and pettily thievish, like the English gipsies; rustically ignorant, but with a touch of wood-lore and the dexterity of the savage. Whence they came is a moot point. At the time of the war, they poured north in crowds to escape the conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and petty theft; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies failed, built great fires in the forest, and there ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... —The moot point is did he forget it, J. J. O'Molloy said quietly, turning a horseshoe paperweight. Saving princes is a thank ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... and, as she kept nothing from Vincent, the Atterburys had that sort of interest in Kate that intimate spectators always show in love affairs, where there are no clashing interests involved. It was a moot question, however, between the three, when, after weeks of observation, Mrs. Atterbury declared that Jack was not in love with Miss Boone. "He can't be," she declared. "He doesn't seek her alone; he doesn't make up to her in the evening. Half the time when they come together it is by ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... from Mr Mill, must not be amongst those which are passed over. We mean the law of Causation. What should be described as the complete and adequate notion of a cause, we need not say is one of the moot points of philosophy. According to one school of metaphysicians, there is in our notion of cause an element not derived from experience, which, it is confessed on all hands, can teach us only the succession ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... "The Ash Grove" is but another version of the same tune; but whether the Welsh derived the air from England or vice versa is a moot point. The matter is discussed, at some length, in Chappell's "Popular Music of the Olden Time," p. 665, to which the reader ...
— The Morris Book • Cecil J. Sharp
... against this wall. It has been called by Chaucer's name ever since; but whether the poet's bones still lie in the original grave, where Dryden's coffin was afterwards placed, or were transferred here, is still a moot-point. The modern window above, the gift of an American admirer, contains portraits of Chaucer and his contemporary John Gower. Quite lately another painted glass window, dedicated to the Confessor, ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... again became attorney-general in 1864. A fearless and upright leader, and a good orator, he did much for the moulding of a united Canada. He is also famed as a writer of French lyrics, which were published in 1875, two years after his death. Whether the stamps ever got beyond the proposal stage is a moot point but at any rate a list of ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... want your tonsils out now, won't you?" The question of a tonsilectomy had been a moot one for years. Nancy had always been anxious to have them out, having been told that it was merely a case of "snip, snip, and a day on ice cream." Henry, who regarded tonsilectomy skeptically as a fad, and who knew, furthermore, ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... my object is to state facts, rather than to moot theories, I leave this debatable ground to others, and here close a narrative, compiled with much care, of this interesting and instructive case. I was the rather disposed to examine it critically and report it in detail, because it seems to suggest valuable hints, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... clear about that," said Lord Valentine; "that is the very point at issue. I do not think the great majority are the best judges of their own interests. At all events, gentlemen, the respective advantages of aristocracy and democracy are a moot point. Well then, finding the question practically settled in this country, you will excuse me for not wishing to agitate it. I give you complete credit for the sincerity of your convictions; extend the same confidence ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to settle. first: the uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature, A. D. , Linnaeus declares, I hereby separate the whales from the fish. But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year , sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus's express edict, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... It is a moot point whether Tom-all-Alone's be uglier by day or by night, but on the argument that the more that is seen of it the more shocking it must be, and that no part of it left to the imagination is at all likely to be made so bad as the reality, day carries ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... deserted. Tracey wakened Will by stamping heavily across the floor, and Will mechanically pushed down his spectacles and dipped a pen in ink, slewing the register round for the guest's signature. He says he knew at a glance that The Mysterious Stranger was no travelling man, but this is a moot point, Tracey's memory being minutely accurate and ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... of illegitimacy," added Marindin, "is to be born into a family already containing the full number it is licensed for. This happens particularly in rich families, introductions into which are naturally most sought after. It is still a moot point whether the birth should be legitimatised on the death of one of ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... senate on dies comitiales, and after the 14th the days in January were all comitiales: but another law (lex Vatinia) ordered it to meet every day in February for the business of the legations. If this business was concluded or deferred it remained a moot point whether a magistrate was not still bound or, at least, allowed to summon it for other business (ad ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... it was held that violations of a court's order are punishable as criminal contempt even though the order is set aside on appeal as in excess of the court's jurisdiction or though the basic action has become moot. Finally, the Court held that conduct can amount to both civil and criminal contempt, and the same acts may justify a court in resorting to coercive and to punitive measures, which may be imposed in a ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... shop, or if the latter, what kind of a shop. It is not clear whether it will pay to use that farm land for a building scheme; and, within the domain of agriculture, which of course comprises an immense variety of really different industries, it is often a very moot point indeed whether a certain field should be left under grass, or brought under the plow. Cases of this sort are not phantoms of the imagination; they emerge on every side as concrete problems with which some one or other is ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... own trade. Martin Schongauer was dead, but under that master's brothers Duerer studied and helped to support himself by his art at Colmar and at Basle. Various wood-blocks executed by him at the latter place are preserved there. Whether he also visited Venice now or not is a moot point. Here or elsewhere, at any rate, he came under the influence of the Bellini, of Mantegna, and more particularly of Jacopo dei Barbari—the painter and engraver to whom he owed the incentive to study the proportions of the human body—a study which henceforth became the most absorbing ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... the same quarter is, that Professor Erni of Yale College has been making an interesting series of experiments on fermentation—a process of which the original cause has never yet been satisfactorily explained, and is still a moot-point with chemists. They tell us it is one by which complex substances are decomposed into simpler forms, as some suppose, by chemical action; others, by development of fungi, different in different substances. Among the experiments, it was observed that the yeast ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 - Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 • Various
... has Europe or Asia in his backyard, nor a lifetime of leisure for research, for special learning, on the moot questions of church-scholarship. Progress consists in each man's doing his best to advance the interests of the kingdom of God in his own special sphere. From others he must take something for granted. ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... put me into a Capacity of serving my Country, by adding one to it. 'Tis I, Madam, that have answered that valuable End, said one; but the other insisted 'twas his Operation. Well! said she, since this is a Moot-point, I'll acknowledge him for the Father of the Child, that will give him the most liberal Education. In a short Time after, my Lady was brought to Bed of a hopeful Boy. Each of them insisted on being Tutor, and the Cause was brought before Zadig. The two Magi were order'd to ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... is regeneration, why, then, does not every one who has been baptized in infancy walk with God from his Baptism? Why does not every one lead a pious life? Evidently, such is not the case!" "As a matter of fact, for a hundred years the Lutheran Church has abandoned the moot question of the body of Christ, etc., and has left it to the consciences of its members to decide what they must believe according to Holy Writ. This we may do without deviating from the faith of our Church, since at our ordination, especially in this country, we confess nothing more than that the ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... which by the laws of comedy, Folly is often involved in; he sunk into such a mixture of piteous pusillanimity, and a consternation so ruefully ridiculous and inconsolable, that when he had shook you, to a fatigue of laughter, it became a moot point, whether you ought not to have pitied him. When he debated any matter by himself, he would shut up his mouth with a dumb studious pout, and roll his full eye into such a vacant amazement, such a palpable ignorance ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... composition of these suspiciously cheap luxuries. There were points also connected with the process of their elaboration which had given me an undefinable uneasiness in the refreshment rooms of a hundred railway stations. I was determined to settle these moot points once for all. So I entered the establishment with an eye of as keen a speculation as an exciseman's searching a building for illicit distillery, and I came out of it a more charitable and contented man. All was above board, fair and clean. The meat ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... the artistic skill and taste of our forefathers, and recalls the wonders of old-time. It will be our endeavour to tell of the old country houses that Time has spared, the cottages that grace the village green, the stern grey walls that still guard some few of our towns, the old moot halls and public buildings. We shall see the old-time farmers and rustics gathering together at fair and market, their games and sports and merry-makings, and whatever relics of old English life have been left for ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... of old, and courtly Dames, Kings, Emperors, Popes. Next under these should stand The hands of famous Lawyers—a grave band— Who in their Courts of Law or Equity Have best upheld Freedom and Property. These should moot cases in your book, and vie To show their reading and their Serjeantry. But I have none of these; nor can I send The notes by Bullen to her Tyrant penn'd In her authentic hand; nor in soft hours Lines writ by Rosamund in Clifford's bowers. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... in general, classical comedy was pure comedy—the prose comedy of manners—and classical tragedy admitted no comic intermixture. Whether tragedy should be in rhyme, after the French manner, or in blank verse, after the precedent of the old English stage, was a moot point. Dryden at first argued for rhyme and used it in his "heroic plays"; and it is significant that he defended its use on the ground that it would act as a check upon the poet's fancy. But afterward he grew "weary of his much-loved mistress, rhyme," and went ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Blue Mountains it was customary in the old days, when there were Kings, to have two ceremonies—one carried out by the official head of the national Church, the Greek Church; the other by the people in a ritual adopted by themselves, on much the same basis as the Germanic Folk-Moot. The Blue Mountains is a nation of strangely loyal tendencies. What was a thousand years ago is to be to-day—so far, of course, as is possible under the altered condition ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... in the abortive attempt of Catiline at revolution in 65, is a moot point. He was now aedile, and acquired great popularity by the splendid shows which he gave to the people, and by his restoration of the statue and trophies of Marius. In 64, as president of the quaestio de sicariis, ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... in Biggleswick which deserves mention. On the south of the common, near the station, stood a red-brick building called the Moot Hall, which was a kind of church for the very undevout population. Undevout in the ordinary sense, I mean, for I had already counted twenty-seven varieties of religious conviction, including three Buddhists, a Celestial Hierarch, five Latter-day Saints, ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... of the speed of the automobile on the roads, in France and England, as indeed everywhere else, has been the moot point in all legislation that ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... and laid his theories regarding the interchange of mammalian life between America and Asia during the early Pleistocene period, before Meeteetse Ed, Old Man Rulison, Tubbs, and others, in the same language in which he would have argued moot questions with colleagues engaged in similar research. The language of learning was as natural to McArthur as the vernacular of the West was to Tubbs, and in moments of excitement he lapsed into it as ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... for our seaport soon after nine, carrying the hospital mailbag and as many messages as a village carrier. The life of the driver was far more exciting than his occupation would suggest, and it was always a moot point whether or not he would succeed in getting back the same night. The road was of the usual Belgian type, with a paved causeway in the middle just capable of allowing two motors to pass, and on each ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... Freeman, however, puts it more truthfully in saying: "The circumstances of New England called the primitive assembly (that is, the Homeric agora, Athenian ekklesia, Roman comitia, Swiss landesgemeinde, English folk-moot) again into being, when in the older England it was well-nigh forgotten. What in Switzerland was a survival was in New England ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... to make an impression on him, when this threat seemed to be strictly fulfilled in his case? Two boys had been born to him from this marriage, but both had died soon after their birth. Even within the Catholic Church it had been always a moot point whether the Pope could dispense with a law of Scripture. The divine punishment inflicted on the King, as he thought, seemed to prove that the Pope's dispensation (encroaching as it did on the region of the divine power), on ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... anything. It would have been a hard thing for the most critical of them to have definitely mentioned just what forced this strong impression on their minds, but it was forced upon them very quickly. One of them, a cute and keen observer as he was, of many years experience, decided the moot point, though, and whispered his decision to a grizzled man (the engineer in charge of the whole enterprise upon that section of ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... dwellers on the eastern side of the Andes to reach. Whether this was a masterpiece of policy calculated to discourage lawsuits, or whether it was merely due to Spanish incuriousness and maladministration, is a moot point. *2* The Indians of the missions were not allowed to possess firearms at this period. *3* 'Paraguay', Dr. E. de Bourgade la Dardye; English edition by George Philips junior (London, 1892). The Indians call it Salto de Canandiyu, which, according to Azara, was the ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... the knowledge of civilized man the great river, afterwards called the Amazon, and the country of Brazil. The fleet in which Vespucci took passage left Spain in the month of May, 1499, that commanded by Pinzon left in December; and it is still a moot question whether the first or the second was the first to arrive on the coast of Brazil. But Pinzon sailed beyond Vespucci on that voyage, though he was to be surpassed, the next year, in the generous rivalry that existed for making the ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... first hole (Liege to Loos), hooks at right angles, dents two spectators, and ends up in Aisne Bunker. FERDINAND (canny, cautious type of player) hits a wind-cheating screamer which finished fully forty yards from the tee. Critics differ as to FRANCIS-JOSEPH's shot, and it is still a moot point whether he had a species of fit or was simply trying to follow through. When restored to perpendicular was found to have ball deeply embedded in his person. Disqualified for handling. MEHMED (a left-hander; uses clubs with scimitar-shaped shafts) puts his drive over short slip ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 - 1917 Almanack • Various
... parts of the country; and we notice that at every port where we stop Mrs. MacDonald has friends to visit—a cousin here, and an auntie there. The fancy bag in which you carry your calling cards and little friendly gifts up here is a "musky-moot"; the more formidable receptacle, which gives your friends warning that you may stay a day or two, is a "skin-ichi-mun." Visiting a little on our own account, we note that we have penetrated to a latitude into which the gaudy calendars ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... They had become "upper class" and now their name would be formally recorded in the Stud Book, their money joined to land. Whether this was a little late in the day, and those rewards of the possessive instinct, lands and money, destined for the melting-pot—was still a question so moot that it was not mooted. After all, Timothy had said Consols were goin' up. Timothy, the last, the missing link; Timothy, in extremis on the Bayswater Road—so Francie had reported. It was whispered, too, that this young Mont was a sort ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of the invading germ, so in just the same degree does it adversely influence the functions of the tissues that are to fight against it. To our minds the question thus set up must always remain more or less a moot-point, and while we fully agree that cold undoubtedly checks the growth of septic material, we just as fully believe that warmth serves to place the healthy surrounding structures in a far better condition to maintain a vigorous phagocytosis ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... master, though a tall and tolerably robust fellow, found the feat considerably more difficult than he could have supposed. We swayed from side to side of the school-room, now backwards, now forwards, and for a full minute it seemed to be rather a moot point on which side the victory was to incline. At length, however, I was tripped over a form; and as the master had to deal with me, not as master usually deals with pupil, but as one combatant deals with another, whom he has to beat into ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... the Baron And his daughter; Hiddigeigei Followed both with step majestic. Through the cat's heart then swept omens Of a great, eventful future. All around they looked—but vainly. For the turret's gloomy shadow Covered both the bank and Werner. Like the blowing of the moot, then Like the clanging charge of horsemen, Up it mounted to the terrace, Then died out;—a small boat dimly They ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... story. A cross stood there, at the foot of which, when he was playing the game of cat upon a certain Sunday, the voice came to his soul with its tremendous question, "Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven or have thy sins and go to hell?" There stood the Moot Hall as it stands to-day, in which, during his worldly days, he had danced with the rest of the villagers and gained his personal knowledge of Vanity Fair. There, as he tells us expressly, is the wicket gate, the rough old oak and iron gate of Elstow parish ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... corner of the library while he is holding his moot court; infusing into the dignity of his manner a marked suavity of disposition which never forsook him; or he is perpetrating some appropriate legal joke to his audience, who never played upon his ease ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... which we fixed up a good many moot points, went on to see General d'Amade. Unluckily he had just left to go on to the Flagship to see me. I did not like to visit the French front in his absence, so took notes of the Turkish defences on "V" and had a second and a more thorough inspection ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... against his wife to send him downstairs at the lady's heels. The fellow was a perfect riddle, hard to read as the zebra lines on the skin of a wild jackass—if Providence intended any meaning when she traced them! and it's a moot point: as it is whether some of our poets have meaning and are not composers of zebra. 'No one knows but them above!' he said aloud, apparently ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... as ignorant as their forefathers. I would ask now the foremost of my profound accusers whether they dare affirm that to be licentious, new and dangerous, which Martin Bucer so often and so urgently avouched to be moot lawful, most necessary, and most Christian, without the least blemish. to his good name among all the worthy men of that age and since who testify so highly of him. If they dare, they must then set up an arrogance of their own against all those ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... birds have had more written about them than the bustard, much is unsettled with regard to its economy. A moot point, which will most likely always remain undecided, is whether the British race was migratory or not, though that such is the habit of the species in most parts of the European continent is beyond dispute. Equally uncertain as yet is the question whether it is polygamous or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... collections has it passed? What are the names of the figures portrayed? What are their histories? What the style and cut of their coats, breeches, and beards? How much will it fetch at Christie's? All these are questions to moot; and mooted they will be, by the hour. But in expert conclaves who has ever heard more than a perfunctory and silly comment on the aesthetic ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... paragraph, it was of course necessary to extend protection to as many of her "hands", as were essential to her safe and efficient working. How many were really required for this purpose was, however, a moot point on which ship-masters and naval officers rarely saw eye to eye; and since the arbiter in all such disputes was the "quarter-deck gentlemen," the decision seldom if ever went in favour ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... particular error, we exhibit it in contrast with the established principle which it violates. He who formed the erroneous sentence, has in this case no alternative, but either to acknowledge the solecism, or to deny the authority of the rule. There are disputable principles in grammar, as there are moot points in law; but this circumstance affects no settled usage in either; and every person of sense and taste will choose to express himself in the way least liable to censure. All are free indeed from positive constraint ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... whom I have submitted this brain-wave, says that the first job to employ Snaggs on will be calling on the Bank Manager to arrange about the overdraft which neither of us has so far had the courage to moot. But that, I am afraid, would inspire him with foolish doubts as to the stability of his princely salary. Perhaps it will be best if, before actually engaging Snaggs, I convert myself into a limited company, "for the purpose of acquiring and enlarging ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... is that they are angels who revolted with Satan and were excluded from heaven for their unworthiness, but were not found evil enough for hell, and therefore were allowed to occupy that intermediate space which has been called "the Other World." It is still a moot point with the Irish peasantry, as it was with the Irish saints of old, whether, after being compelled to dwell without death among rocks and hills, lakes and seas, bushes and forest, till the day of judgment, the fairies then have the chance ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... 1898, a joint high commission sat at Quebec and canvassed all moot matters between the two countries, among them that of the Alaska boundary. It adjourned, however, without settling the question, though a temporary and provisional understanding was reached and ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... was an impatient thing for me to hear Betsy working out the afternoon with perpetual chatter and challenge of prices, combating now as a lodger all those points which as a landlady she never would allow even to be moot questions. If any applicant in European Square had dared so much as hint at any of all the requirements which she now expected gratis, she would simply have whisked her duster, and said that the lodgings for ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... not agree to giving up the shirts; loudly declaring that they belonged to the skin; and after some discussion on this moot point, his claim was allowed; and our adventurers were spared the shame of entering the ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... reality' here? We do not know enough about what constitutes 'objective material reality,' nor about what are the laws of prophetic ecstasy and vision, to discuss such a question as that. Nor is there any need to moot it. It does not matter one rush whether bystanders would have seen anything or not. It does not matter in the least whether there was any actual excitation of auditory or visual nerves. It does not matter whether there was anything which people are contented ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... of a very pressing nature on his mind. His saddler had to be seen,—and threatened,—on a certain matter touching the horses' backs. A draught of hounds were being sent down to a friend in Scotland. And there was a Committee of Masters to sit on a moot question concerning a neutral covert in the XXX country, of which Committee he was one. But the desire to punish Slide was almost as strong in his indignant mind as those other matters referring more especially ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... covenant, "and all the people stood to the covenant." The stone connected with the ceremony was regarded as the most sacred attestation of the engagement entered into between the newly-elected king or chief and his people. It was placed in some conspicuous position, upon the top of a "moot-hill," or the open-air place of assembly. Upon it was usually carved an impression of a human foot; and into this impression, during the ceremony of inauguration, the king or chief placed his own right foot, in token that he was installed ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... have been finished in one night! My partner undertook the first canto: I the second: and which ever had done first, was to set about the third. Almost thirty years have passed by; yet at this moment I cannot without something more than a smile moot the question which of the two things was the more impracticable, for a mind so eminently original to compose another man's thoughts and fancies, or for a taste so austerely pure and simple to imitate the Death of Abel? Methinks I see his grand and noble countenance as at the moment ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a moot point whether Jacopo Foscari was placed on the rack on the occasion of his third trial. The original document of the X. (July 23, 1456) runs thus: "Si videtur vobis per ea quae dicta et lecta sunt, quod procedatur contra Ser Jacobum Foscari;" and it is argued (see F. Berlan, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... subject of thought, material for thought; food for the mind, mental pabulum. subject, subject matter; matter, theme, [Grk], topic, what it is about, thesis, text, business, affair, matter in hand, argument; motion, resolution; head, chapter; case, point; proposition, theorem; field of inquiry; moot point, problem &c. (question) 461. V. float in the mind , pass in the mind &c. 451. Adj. thought of; uppermost in the mind; in petto. Adv. under consideration; in question, in the mind; on foot, on the carpet, on the docket, on the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... nature, to historic precedent, and lastly, to inward consciousness or individual character. We have seen that the notion prevalent in Rome, that the living model was wholly discarded, is inaccurate; bearing on this moot point may be here told an anecdote. It is related how one morning, when the artist was engaged on the Tasso frescoes, in the Villa Massimo, he had need of the life for a muscular arm, and so sallied forth into the ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... appear in any analysis, they must be assumed to consist almost entirely of that substance generally in the form of common salt, and be valued accordingly. Sulphate of lime and organic matter though abundant constituents of most manures, add but little to their value, and it is a moot point whether they ought to be taken into consideration, although most persons allow a small value for them. Carbonate of lime, sand, or siliceous matter, and water, of ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... friend to aristocracy, in the sense at least in which that word is usually understood. If it were not a bad habit to moot cases on the supposed ruin of the constitution, I should be free to declare, that if it must perish, I would rather by far see it resolved into any other form, than lost in that austere and insolent domination. ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... escaped unhurt, and the police and the guards chiefly expended their vigour on the spectators of the original disturbance. Whether this had been secretly engineered by the authorities for one of the purposes I previously indicated, must always remain a moot point. In any case it did not incline the Parisians to vote for the Government candidates. Every deputy returned for the city on that occasion was an opponent of the Empire, and in later years I was told by an ex-Court official ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... that money given to the church is taken from the family and impoverishes it to that degree, that time given to the church is grudgingly spared from the pleasures of the home, that it is always a moot question which of the two institutions shall win in the ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... policy of our arming slaves is in my opinion a moot point, unless the enemy set the example. For, should we begin to form battalions of them, I have not the smallest doubt, if the war is to be prosecuted, of their following us in it, and justifying the measure upon our own ground. The contest then must be, who can arm fastest. And where ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... As there are moot points concerning the stones themselves and the conduct of the sport, so the chungke spears differ in the accounts of the early adventurers in this region. The length is variously given as eight, ten, twelve feet. The shape is sometimes represented as a lance or pole heavy in the centre ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... impertinent", save that the poet had chosen in that way to "convey his matter" — told, or "taught," so much more directly and simply by word of mouth. It is impossible to pronounce positively on the subject; the question whether Chaucer saw Petrarch in 1373 must remain a moot-point, so long as we have only our present information; but fancy loves to dwell on the thought of the two poets conversing under the vines at Arqua; and we find in the history and the writings of Chaucer nothing to contradict, a good deal to countenance, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... facile speed, announced that she disapproved of modern methods, had no wish to enter the public arena, and was anxious to abandon a course of dangerous cram. Her favourite subject was composition, and here and here alone, she and Susan ran an even race, it being a moot point each week which would gain the highest marks. Susan's essays were more thoughtful, and were written with an apt and dainty choice of words which was a delight to Miss Drake's literary taste, but a certain primness and conventionality still remained to be ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... abject slave and a young lady who is getting fairly tamed, though at times she still rebels. Both of these young women exercise authority over me all day long until the ownership of my own soul has become a moot question. When my leg is properly spliced again I shall take that freak Susie to New York and exhibit her as the greatest natural curiosity I have been able to ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... in England, and all who had the care and superintendence of christianity, that they should all come to London at Michaelmas, and there should speak of all God's rights. When they came thither, then began the moot on Monday, and continued without intermission to the Friday. When it all came forth, then was it all found to be about archdeacons' wives, and about priests' wives; that they should forgo them by ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... ethnological discussion in the past; and at present influential schools both in England and in continental Europe clamorously insist that all cultural parallels are due to diffusion from a single center. It is inevitable to envisage this moot-problem at the start, since uncompromising championship of either alternative has far-reaching practical consequences. For if every parallel is due to borrowing, then sociological laws, which can be inferred only from independently developing likenesses, are barred. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... use of condiments and stimulating foods. We have used salt so long that our bodies seem adapted to it, and it is usually considered essential to the welfare of domestic stock; therefore it is a moot question as to whether it is advisable for human beings to avoid it altogether. Yet the excessive use of it to which we are prone is certainly harmful. How is this to be avoided? If we eat our food in a hand, I have found that the longer you are without ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... on which men hold warring opinions. We have not even raised the question of laid or wove paper, nor of the intermixture of different series or sizes of types. In short, every phase of the subject bristles with moot points, the settlement of one of which in a given way may determine the settlement of ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... defined the relations established between Church and State, and decreed that in England churchman as well as baron was to be held under the Common law. It was he who preserved the traditions of self-government which had been handed down in borough and shire-moot from the earliest times of English history. His reforms established the judicial system whose main outlines have been preserved to our own day. It was through his "Constitutions" and his "Assizes" that it came to pass that over all the world the English-speaking ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... he used afterwards to say that it was the biggest sum of money he had up to that time earned in one lump. Ralph Dodds, however, did more than this. He released the brakesman from the handles of his engine at West Moot, and appointed him engineman at the High Pit, at good wages, during the time the pit was sinking,—the job lasting for about a year; and he also kept him ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... be trusted to bring out all these doubtful points, had been delayed in anticipation of Mr. Fairbrother's return. His testimony could not but prove valuable, if not in fixing the criminal, at least in settling the moot point as to whether the stone, which the estranged wife had carried away with her on leaving the house, had been the genuine one returned to him from Tiffany's or the well-known imitation now in ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... she had whispered sibilantly, and other people had whispered, in the long intervals of the organ. She had removed him from the church before the collection for the Red Cross, and when they had eaten a sort of dinner she had borne him away to the Russian dancers in the Moot Hall. ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... he WAS Charolais," said Guerchard. "It is quite a moot point. On the whole, I'm inclined to think that he was not. The theft of the motor-cars was a job for a subordinate. He would ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... The poore Pedler, by name Iohn Law, being in the Castle about the Moot-hall, attending to be called, not well able to goe or stand, being led thether by his poore sonne Abraham Law: My Lord Gerrard[R3a] moued the Court to call the poore Pedler, who was there readie, and had attended all the Assizes, to giue euidence ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... eneuch by this time 'at I had broucht her up the stair—an' says she, layin' her han' upo' my airm wi' a clap, as gien her an' me was to be freen's upo' sic a gran' foondation o' dirt as that!—says she, makin' a laich toot moot o' 't,—'He's Lord Lossie's!' says she, an' maks a face 'at micht hae turnt a cat sick—only by guid luck I had nae feelin's. 'An' nae suner's my leddy deid nor her man follows her!' says she. 'An' what do ye mak o' that?' says she. 'Ay, what do ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... Garth. They were, however, in front, where he would sooner have them than behind, and he set off down the valley for Hexham. He found the old Border town, clustering round the tall dark mass of the abbey, strangely picturesque; the ancient Moot Hall and market square invited his interest, but he shrank from wandering about the streets in the dark. Now he had Graham's checks, he must be careful; moreover his knapsack and leggings made him conspicuous, and he went ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... moot the question whether Fleda should not join Marion at her convent. But his wife looked very grave and said that she was too tender and delicate a little thing to be trusted to the hands of strangers; Hugh ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... has been a moot question for a generation past. But even to-day what do we find the general reliance of the American mind in determinating this question? Almost universally the resort is to material agencies! The ordinary, and sometimes the extraordinary American is unable to see that the struggle of a degraded ...
— Civilization the Primal Need of the Race - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Paper No. 3 • Alexander Crummell
... the question whether the Georgia Legislature had the right to rescind a land grant made by a preceding Legislature. On any of three grounds Marshall might easily have disposed of this case before coming to the principal question. In the first place, it was palpably a moot case; that is to say, it was to the interest of the opposing parties to have the rescinding act set aside. The Court would not today take jurisdiction of such a case, but Marshall does not even suggest such a solution of the question, though Justice Johnson does in his ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... evidence to convict her; but the populace cried out, in universal frenzy, that she was guilty, that she should die; and that the barbarians, when they heard of the punishment inflicted on their secret adherent, would retire in dismay from Rome. This also was a moot point of argument, on which I vainly endeavoured to decide; but the Senate and the people were wiser than I; and Serena was condemned to be strangled to-morrow by the public executioner. She was a woman of good report before ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... by their supposed Dipterus has not been confirmed. And as the Old Red Sandstones of Scotland have no true fossiliferous base, but rest on primary rocks both to the south and north of the Grampians, it may be regarded as in some degree a moot point whether the lowest fossiliferous beds to the north be older or newer than those to the south, or, what is quite possible, of the same age. Provisionally, however, I have arranged my paper on the supposition that the Coccostean formation of the north ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... O blinde entencioun! How ofte falleth al theffect contraire Of surquidrye and foul presumpcioun; For caught is proud, and caught is debonaire. This Troilus is clomben on the staire, 215 And litel weneth that he moot descenden. But al-day falleth thing that foles ...
— Troilus and Criseyde • Geoffrey Chaucer
... what the lawyer thought he did not know—that Five Oaks was held by the lawyers to be possibly without those unfortunate limitations which affected all the rest of the estate. It was only a moot-point; but the doubt had led Mr. Jos. Larkin to ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... problem will puzzle weak men without end. Of that fatal and fateful dilemma when a wife or a husband falls victim to the wiles of another, there are, for the delinquent, two and only two horns (and it is a moot question upon which it is preferable to be impaled): Flight—either from the victor or the ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... only playing with Christianity so long as they ignore the question of war. I have lived a longish life and have heard our ministers preach on universal peace hardly half a dozen times. Twenty years ago, in a drawing room, I dared in the presence of forty persons to moot the proposition that war was incompatible with Christianity; I was regarded as an arrant fanatic. The idea that we could get on without war was regarded as ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... text, which is throughout shorter than that in L.U., and the lost opening of L.U. may have been fuller. The author of the Glenn Masain version kept nearer to the old story, adding, however, more modern touches. Where the new character of Bricriu comes from is a moot point; I incline to the belief that the idea of Bricriu as a mere buffoon is a later development. But in neither version is the story, as we have it, a pre-Christian one. The original pre-Christian idea of Flidais was, as in the Coir Annam, that ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... tongues that form, roughly, the segments of a half-circle. Whether the German tongue is split in the middle by N'glili River, so that it forms a flattened broad arrow, with the central prong the river is a moot point. We, in Downing Street, claim that the lower angle of this arrow is wholly ours, and that all the flat basin of the Field of Blood (as they call it) is entitled to receive the shadow which a flapping Union ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... on Jed Water), and from Edgarhope to Soultra Edge. But memorable above all other Border raids recorded in song or story, is that encounter in which 'the Douglas and the Percy met,' and which has inspired perhaps the very finest of the historical ballads of each country. Moot points there are of locality, date, and circumstances; but it is generally accepted that the rhyme known for many centuries in Scotland as The Battle of Otterburn, and the English Chevy Chase are versions, from opposite sides, of one event—a skirmish fought in the autumn ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... the international status of Egypt and Ireland, and much else, had these innovations been compatible with his own special object. But they were not. He was apparently minded to test the matter by announcing his resolve to moot the problem of the freedom of the seas, but when admonished by the British government that it would not even brook its mention, he at once gave it up and, presumably drawing the obvious inference from this downright refusal, applied it to the Irish, Egyptian, and other issues, which were forthwith ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... There, was some doubt as to whether this was a civil or criminal trial, but there was no doubt whatever of the existence of a trial of some kind; neither did there exist any doubt as to the importance of this, the first case the prosecuting attorney had ever tried, outside of moot courts. It was the first speech he had ever made in public, barring college "orations," carefully memorized, and an occasional Fourth of July speech, which might have been better for more memorizing. The attorney for the ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... Canning, delivered fifteen years before, in which that eloquent statesman, a man by no means inclined to a timorous policy, had declared that "no feeling of wounded pride, no motive of questionable expediency, nothing short of real and demonstrable necessity, should ever induce him to moot the awful question of the transcendental power of Parliament over every dependency of the British crown. That transcendental power was an ordinance of empire, which ought to be kept back within the ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... This attempt to discuss moot points upon the stage—to turn as it were the theatre into a debating society—will certainly not succeed. Audiences—especially Haymarket ones—have a taste for being amused rather than reasoned with; besides, those on that side of the question which the author ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... In the Lacoste trial you find the Parisian experts giving an opinion of no greater value than that of Orfila's in the Lafarge case, but find also an element of doubt introduced by the country practitioner, with his common sense on the then moot question of the accumulation, the absorption, and ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... own prophecies is a moot point. It is said that he bought the lease of a house, which expired about twenty-five years after his date for ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... guarantee for life, liberty, or property. It is time, that, in their majesty, the people of the United States should make known to the world that this Government, in its dignity and power, is something more than a moot court, and that the citizen who makes war upon it is a traitor, not only in theory but in fact, and should have meted out to him a traitor's doom. The country wants no bloody sacrifice, but it must and will have peace, cost what it may. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... on this interesting occasion was shifted for sternboard I never inquired. Marryat tells us it was a moot point in his young days. Our captain was an excellent seaman, but had 'doxies of his own. Of these, one which ran contrary to current standards was in favor of clewing up a course or topsail to leeward, in blowing weather. Among the lieutenants ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... chapel on the hill. In front of them was the dark ragged edge of the wood, with a sharp twinkle of steel here and there in its shadows which spoke of these lurking foes. But now there was a long moot upon a horn, and at once a score of russet-clad bowmen ran forward from amid the trees, spreading out into a scattered line and closing swiftly in upon the travelers. In the midst of them, upon a great gray horse, sat a small ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... And that light tentatives have winged Betwixt your Majesty and Russia's court, To moot that one of their Grand Duchesses Should be your Empress-wife. Nought else ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... quoted; on bravery; unmetrical line of; on man's wretched lot; on modesty; on advantages of music; order of different kinds of exercises according to; on intercourse between men and their wives; calls salt divine; epithets applied to liquids by; a moot point in third book of Iliad; essay on life and poetry of; biographical sketch of; the two works of; metre and dialects used by; epithets used by; tropes found in; figures of speech in; various styles used by; on constitution ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the strength of information given by a chart with which they had been furnished. [**] This "open passage" can hardly refer to anything else than Torres Strait. But in that case it is clear that Jansz. cannot have solved the problem, but must have left it a moot point. At all events he sailed past the strait, through which a few months after him Luiz Vaez de Torres sailed from east ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... of opinion among scholars, Elijah was usually questioned as to how the moot point was interpreted in the heavenly academy. (79) Once, when the scholars were not unanimous in their views as to Esther's intentions when she invited Haman to her banquets with the king, Elijah, asked by Rabba bar Abbahu to tell him her real ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... the difference of the two cases lay in the fact, that as to the killing of the body there was no doubt about the matter, whereas mankind differed very widely as to the killing of the soul; and that as long as it remained a moot point whether priests did so or not, it would hardly be practicable or even politic to adopt ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... opened the show in a field by the market-town, which stood in a hollow among the moors. The grass sloped to a river that sparkled in the sun and then vanished in the alders' shade. Across the stream, old oak and ash trees rolled up the side of the Moot Hill, and round the latter gray walls and roofs showed among the leaves. A spire and a square, ivy-covered tower rose above the faint blue haze of smoke. A few white clouds floated in the sky and their cool shadows crept ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... under certain conditions and in a certain order. The matter, and the forces which act upon it, are for the most part known; and if there are any forces engaged in the manifestation of vegetative life yet undiscovered (which is a moot question), we can conceive them as analogous to such forces as heat, electricity, or chemical affinity, with which we are already acquainted. We can thus clearly conceive of the transition from dead matter to living matter. A complex mass which suffers ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... of chairs. One may retain convictions in furniture which is palpably vertebrate; lapped in billowing upholstery it is a moot question; and like many a caller's before him, Shelby's brain tissue became a jelly of flattered complacency. It sufficed merely to simmer in a sense of equality with the silver-haired gentleman at the desk. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... barrister in his native city; where, from his previous reputation, not only as a lawyer well versed in common law, with great knowledge in the practical parts of it, but as a most skilful conveyancer, and great real property lawyer, with a deep knowledge of all its intricacies and moot points, he, at once, obtained considerable practice, and a fine income, which, I believe, by present provincial counsel would be regarded rather as a fiction than reality. He was, moreover, a fluent ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... his successor, Paul the Third, the influence of Contarini and the moderate Catholics secured a more favourable reception of plans of reconciliation. In April, 1541, conferences for this purpose were in fact opened at Augsburg in which Contarini, as Papal legate, accepted a definition of the moot question of justifications by faith which satisfied Bucer and Melancthon. On the other side, the Landgrave of Hesse and the Elector of Brandenburg publicly declared that they believed it possible to come to terms ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... difficult, I fancy, to guess what has attracted him to them. Nearly all of them, we have seen, are on the borderland between folk-tale and romance. It is tales such as these that Mr. Morris wishes to see told in tapestry on the walls of the Moot-Hall of the Hammersmith of Nowhere. It was by tales such as these that he first won a hearing from all lovers of English literature. The story of Jason is but a Greek setting of a folk-tale known among the Gaels as the Battle of the Birds, and in Norse as the Master Maid. Many of the tales ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... that the so-called "caffetannic acid" is the "harmful" substance in coffee, and that it is concentrated in the outer layers of the coffee beans. If these be his precepts, the question of their correctness and of the efficiency of his process becomes a moot one. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... could retire at all times and be hidden. Of all that he experienced within his heart at this time not any part was visible to the brother who was his idle visitor; or perhaps only the least part, and that not until the moot point between them ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... make plain; and that if the men didn't do what was right, it was none o' Mr Wentworth's fault. The young priest indemnified himself in "the district" for much that vexed him elsewhere. There was no question of Skelmersdale, or of any moot point there, but only a quantity of primitive people under the original conditions of humanity, whose lives might be amended, and consoled, and elevated. That was a matter about which Mr Wentworth had no doubt. He put on his surplice with the conviction that ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... again been adopted in this volume, for the same reasons that obtained in the writing of "In the Twinkling of an Eye." The use of the fictional style for the presentment of sacred subjects is ever a moot-point with some people. Yet, every parable, allegory, etc., (not excepting Bunyan's Master-piece) is fictional form. So that the moot-point really becomes one of degree and not of principle—if Bunyan, Milton, and ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... guardianship, loan for use, mortgage, division of a 'family,' partition of joint property, those on the innominate contracts of sale by commission and exchange, and the suit for recovery of an inheritance. Until quite recently it was a moot point whether the lastnamed was properly an equitable action, but our constitution has definitely decided the question in ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... in gardens gay with the homely flowers John Bunyan knew and loved, leads to the village green, fringed with churchyard elms, in the middle of which is the pedestal or stump of the market-cross, and at the upper end of the old "Moot Hall," a quaint brick and timber building, with a projecting upper storey, a good example of the domestic architecture of the fifteenth century, originally, perhaps, the Guesten- Hall of the adjacent nunnery, and afterwards the Court House of the manor when lay-lords had succeeded the abbesses—"the ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... means being safe. Are you safe? Am I safe? Is anybody safe standing in front of that awful law that rules the whole universe, 'Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap'? I am not going to talk about any of the moot points which this generation has such a delight in discussing, as to the nature, the duration, the purpose, or the like, of future retribution. All that I am concerned in now is that all men, deep down in the bottom of their consciousness—and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... genuine oak was cut down at the close of the last century, or was preserved, carefully fenced in and labeled, in an utterly leafless and shattered state, to our generation, is a moot point. Certain it is that the most ardent Shakespearean must abandon the hope of securing for a bookmark to his Merry Wives of Windsor one of the leaves that rustled, while "Windsor bell struck twelve," over the head of fat Jack. He has the satisfaction, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... brownie and such goblins, is of average mortal height, and this would seem to be the case in Brittany. Whether the gorics and courils of Brittany, who seem sufficiently small, are fairies or otherwise is a moot point. They seem to be more of the field spirit type, and are perhaps classed more correctly with the gnome race; we thus deal with them in our chapter on sprites and demons. It would seem, too, as if there might ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... there were five hundred and eighty-five guests. This, I think, may be treated as a moot point. ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... moot question whether Mr. Harrihan resembled his dog, or whether his dog resembled him. That there was a marked similarity admitted of no discussion. If Corp's nose had been encouraged and his lower jaw suppressed, if his intensely emotional ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... the year round. He had the advantage of most admirable instruction, and the resources of a complete library. He listened to the lectures, he studied the text-books, he was drilled in the recitations, he had practice in the moot courts and in the law clubs. He discussed points of law in the boarding-house and on his walks with his companions. He came to know thoroughly the great men who were his instructors, and to understand their mental processes, and the methods ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... therefore only lower the standard of efficiency of the entire command. He discounted the integration after the Battle of the Bulge, saying that it succeeded only because it came at the end of the war and during pursuit action. "It still remains a moot question," Caffey concluded, "as to whether the Negroes in integrated units would have fought in a tough attack or defensive battle." Curiously enough he went on to say that until Negroes reached the educational level ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... matter; matter, theme, noemata [Gr.], topic, what it is about, thesis, text, business, affair, matter in hand, argument; motion, resolution; head, chapter; case, point; proposition, theorem; field of inquiry; moot point, problem &c (question) 461. V. float in the mind, pass in the mind &c 451. Adj. thought of; uppermost in the mind; in petto. Adv. under consideration; in question, in the mind; on foot, on the carpet, on the docket, on the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... you will moot to Peter the scheme for taking a house in town? But I should advise you to be guided by his wishes over that. Still, it would be very delightful to meet during our time of waiting; and that would be the only way. I won't come down here again until I can declare myself. ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... it is a moot point how far the money lent by the Jews was actually the King's in the first instance, there is no doubt that the Exchequer treated the money of the Jews as held at the pleasure of the King. There was a special Exchequer of the Jews, presided over ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... manuscript extant, namely, the Cathach Psalter, now in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy. Whether the essential and peculiar features of this ornamentation are purely indigenous, as Professor Westwood contends, or whether they are of Gallo-Roman origin, as Fleury argues, is a moot point, calling for complicated discussion which would be ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... It was a moot question amongst the departmental lawyers as to whether John Lexman was not guilty of a technical and punishable offence for prison breaking, but this possibility did not keep T. X. awake at nights. The circumstances of the escape had been carefully examined. ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... would say that it does not lie so much in hostile critics or feeble health, as in a careless habit of writing, and a peevish vanity which causes him to shut his eyes to his faults. The question of original capacity I will not moot; one may think very highly of the honorable baronet's talent, without rating it quite so high as he seems ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray |
