"Prescriptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... followed the chief waiter with my eyes, I could not help thinking that the garden in which he had gradually blown to be the flower he was, was an arduous place to rise in. It had such a prescriptive, stiff-necked, long-established, solemn, elderly air. I glanced about the room, which had had its sanded floor sanded, no doubt, in exactly the same manner when the chief waiter was a boy—if he ever was a boy, which appeared improbable; and at the shining ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... past the trimly kept garden attached to it, two young girls were employed in attiring a third, who was to represent Maid Marian, or Queen of May, in the pageant then about to ensue. And, certainly, by sovereign and prescriptive right of beauty, no one better deserved the high title and distinction conferred upon her than this fair girl. Lovelier maiden in the whole county, and however high her degree, than this rustic damsel, it was impossible to find; and though the becoming and fanciful ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... few model boroughs already possessed. The governing body was to consist of a mayor, aldermen, and councillors, together forming a town council. The councillors were to be elected directly by ratepaying occupiers, with a saving for the prescriptive rights of existing freemen. They were to hold office for three years; the aldermen were to be elected by the councillors for six years, with a provision for retirement by rotation. The mayor was to be elected annually by the town council. The elementary powers of local government, such as ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... set its flesh agreeably creeping with a peroration compounded equally of German spies and pro-German ministers. The campaign throve in the south, but slackened in the midlands and stopped short in the north. At the same time Lord Crawleigh's prescriptive right to the "leader" page of all daily papers met with a challenge from certain disrespectful sub-editors who first mislaid him among foreign telegrams and later buried him ignominiously in small type. It was when a thoughtful exegesis on "The War and Indian Home Rule," extending over ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... singular as his life was whimsical. He went one night to the club, and was surprised to find his seat occupied by a tall dark-browed man, who smoked a meerschaum of prodigious size in solemn silence. Numerous hints were thrown out to the stranger that the seat had by prescriptive right and ancient custom become the property of my uncle; he either did not or would not understand them, and continued to keep his possession of the leather-backed chair with the most imperturbable sang-froid. My uncle in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... there is no such thing as rank and station which impose a sort of prescriptive style on people of certain income. The consequence is that all sorts of furniture and belongings, which in the Old World have a recognized relation to certain possibilities of income, and which require certain other accessories to make them in good keeping, are ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the Parisian public, who, from long habit, considered that they had a sort of prescriptive right to this favourite promenade, the axe was laid to the celebrated arbre de Cracovie and other venerable trees, and their stately heads were soon levelled to the ground. Every one murmured as if these trees had been his own private property, and cut down ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... fortitude we may overcome them; but it will not do to war with the general tenor of education. We may blame, despise, regret as we please, but customs long established, and habits long indulged, assume an empire despotic, though their power is but prescriptive. Opposing them is vain; Nature herself, when forced aside, is not ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... antique abodes of venerable crime, those wild barbaric piles, in which old age palliates and almost hallows infamy! giving it somewhat the same prescriptive sanctuary as Milton bestows on the Palace of his Pandemonium! That cruel slinking flood, the only firmament the stone vaulted pits below were conscious of! Each looked as malignant and dangerous as they could, beneath the triumph of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... Society was formed, and maintained its integrity one year. However, as the justice of such discrimination on the ground of sex was questionable, and some women and many men refused to unite with a Society thus prescriptive, the Constitution was amended, and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... labor to diffuse their views of Christianity in the various districts of the island; and the emigrant population are usually in attendance on their teaching. The census is an imperfect index of actual strength, the smaller sects exerting proportionately more influence. When the claims of prescriptive authority are finally exchanged for a reliance on moral power these discrepancies will disappear, and a vast apparatus, already supplied by the state and private zeal, will bring within reach of every colonial family some form of Christian ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... Fronde; the official collective genius of France brought to shame by the artful stupidity of a single individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks through the general suffrage, seeking its true expression in the prescriptive enemies of the public interests until it finally finds it in the arbitrary will of a filibuster. If ever a slice from history is drawn black upon black, it is this. Men and events appear as reversed "Schlemihls," ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... grandfather's will controverted. My father!—To be sure, my dear, I could not expect that my father would do all I wish should be done: and a will to be executed by a father for a daughter, (parts of it, perhaps, absolutely against his own judgment,) carries somewhat daring and prescriptive in the ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... been accustomed to command. Even in the nursery, as the eldest child and only son of his parents, he had ruled his five sisters with that prescriptive mastery which sex and primogeniture confer. At school he had pursued his career of disciplinarian first as "dowl-master," then as captain of teams, then as prefect with powers of the rod over senior boys his superiors in weight. Continuing at the ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... the bride and bridegroom, and guide them through the complicated ritual of the wedding ceremony, taking the couple on their knees if they are children, and otherwise sitting behind them. The barber has a prescriptive right to receive the clothes in which the bridegroom goes to the bride's house, as on the latter's arrival he is always presented with new clothes by the bride's father. As the bridegroom's clothes may be an ancestral heirloom, a ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... there is any and what prescriptive power or privilege in said House to imprison its members for ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... over Palestine. Although still conducted by the priests and Levites and under the eye of the Sanhedrim or senate, the Jewish religion had lost much of its earlier character. Like philosophy, it was vexed with contending sects. Strict observance of the Mosaic law and the performance of prescriptive rites and duties were in the main regarded as the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... church of his time and country. Mine was in defending the whole of the national church of my own time and my own country, and the whole of the national churches of all countries, from the principles and the examples which lead to ecclesiastical pillage, thence to a contempt of all prescriptive titles, thence to the pillage of all property, and ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first washing their faces. But in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of one of the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... was not supposed to be under the necessity of advising with them, nor, according to an opinion long and ostentatiously proclaimed, was he in these early days under the smallest obligation to follow their advice after it had been given. This, however, was merely the prescriptive view, and it derived no sanction from the Constitutional Act itself, which incidentally refers to the Executive Council as being appointed "within such Province, for the affairs thereof." On the other hand, the Executive Councillors themselves were not legally or constitutionally ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... lbs. of salt. The same salt-pans are worked from century to century by the same "paludiers" or their descendants. The proprietors may change, but the workmen remain, considering the salt-pans their prescriptive inheritance. For payment, they receive one-fourth of the salt. The dress of the paludier is a smock-frock of irreproachable whiteness, with pockets, white shoes, gaiters, and linen breeches, an enormous black flap hat turned up on the ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... up and down by a groom during the time, and as soon as his work was over he remounted and rode off again, not to be seen till the following week unless one of his parishioners died, and he could get no one else to perform the funeral service. He seemed to think that the Misses Schank had a prescriptive right to labour in the parish; but he was excessively indignant when on one or two occasions a dissenting minister came to preach in a barn; and he declared that, should so irregular a proceeding be repeated, he would proceed against him as far as the law would allow. My kind friends' ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... have admitted some aerial agents, or what is called machinery. It is true that the spirits cannot be said to accelerate or retard the events; but surely they may be allowed to show a sympathy with the fate of those, among whom poetical fancy has given them a prescriptive ideal existence. They may be further excused, as relieving the narrative, and adding ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... his will being absolute alike in the highest affairs and in the humblest details of private life. The highest form of legislation was an imperial decree, whether promulgated in general terms or to meet a special case. In either form it was the law of the land, and no privilege or prescriptive right could be pleaded against it. All officers of state, all judges and magistrates, hold their offices entirely at the imperial pleasure. They can be dismissed, degraded, punished, without reason ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... machinery can be conceived more clumsy for effecting the deliverance of a distressed hero than the introduction of a mad woman, who, without knowing or caring about the wanderer, warns him by a song to take care of the ambush that was set for him. The maniacs or poetry have indeed had a prescriptive right to be musical, since the days of Ophelia downwards; but it is rather a rash extension of this privilege to make them sing good sense, and to make sensible people ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... the Native Americans went into council. This organisation, which had elected a mayor of New York in 1844, suddenly revived in 1854; and, in spite of its intolerant and prescriptive spirit, the movement spread rapidly. Mystery surrounded its methods. It held meetings in unknown places; its influence could not be measured; and its members professed to know nothing. Thus it became ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... nothing to say against all this—far from it; but the only person who felt left out in the cold was his own wife, who seemed to see this enthusiastic crowd gradually establishing, as it were, a prescriptive right of way between herself and her husband, and treading under foot the very flowers that should have grown only for their own two selves in the intimacy of their home. She became gradually a less animated, but was still, he thought, an interested listener, when he came home ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... to find fault with in the grey he had chosen? They turned over the tailor's pattern sheet. Daring, in the art of dressing, is the prescriptive right of the professional just as it is in writing. Owen was a professional dresser, whereas he, Harding, was but an amateur; and that was why he had chosen a timid, insignificant grey. At once Owen discovered a much more effective cloth; and he ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... of the young girl has its drawbacks. She is—I say it with all reluctance—irreverent, from her forty-dollar bonnet to the buckles in her eighteen-dollar shoes. She talks flippantly to her parents and men old enough to be her grandfather. She has a prescriptive right to the society of the man who arrives. ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... master of perennial youth. He held himself extremely upright, and his shrewd, steady eyes had lost none of their clear shining. Thus he gave an impression of superiority to the doubts and dislikes of smaller men. Having had his own way for innumerable years, he had earned a prescriptive right to it. It would never have occurred to old Jolyon that it was necessary to wear a look of doubt or ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... salon offers a sort of compromise between the freedom of the philosophical coteries and the frivolities of the purely fashionable ones. It included the most noted of the men of letters—those who belonged to the old aristocracy and a few to whom nature had given a prescriptive title of nobility—as well as the flower of the great world. Her sarcastic wit, her clear intelligence, and her rare conversational gifts added a tone of individuality that placed her salon at the head of the social centers of the time in ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... God, which is one with the supreme intelligence, is revealed to man through the conscience. But the conscience, which consists in an inappellable bearing-witness to the truth and reality of our reason, may legitimately be construed with the term reason, so far as the conscience is prescriptive; while as approving or condemning, it is the consciousness of the subordination or insubordination, the harmony or discord, of the personal will of man to and with the representative of the will of God. ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
