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More "Unwritten" Quotes from Famous Books



... handful of sailors escaping in the longboat. Then there were the Spanish pieces, which told of the loss of one of the early explorers. All this, of the vessels named, is a matter of history, and is to be found in the SOUTH PACIFIC SAILING DIRECTORY. But that there was other history, unwritten, I was yet to learn. In the meantime I puzzled why six thousand primitive savages let one ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London

... lot of flub-dub," says the colonel, "about higher laws and unwritten laws. But we've got high enough law written if we ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis

... rules of its own for the guidance of the uninitiated. Every indulgence should therefore be shown to the hunting tyro who innocently commits errors; for in nine cases out of ten it is probable she does so, from ignorance of the unwritten laws which govern the conduct of the experienced hunting man and woman. On this subject Mr. Otho Paget writes: "The lady novice comes in for her share of blame, and though she may not get sworn at, black ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes

... chief subject for consideration to be the choice of a club at which to lunch. There, in the solitude of the deserted smoking-room, where the heat was tempered, the glare shut out, and the very footfall subdued, he thought of the little hotel in University Place. Because human society had mysterious unwritten laws, the woman he loved was forced to steal away from the freshness and peace of green fields and sweeping river, to take refuge amid the noisome ugliness from which, in spite of her courage, her exquisite nature must ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King

... on yer way back—I'll have a little present ready for you." It was an unwritten law that no guest should depart without a gift of some kind. Sometimes it was one of Asia's paintings, again it was a package of sunflower seed, or a bottle of vinegar, and once Lucy had taken home four gourds and a ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan

... hideous growls, which now rose in strength and volume, he seemed to be in quite the mood. Now Tarzan felt no fear of Taug, nor did the unwritten law of the jungle demand that he should flee from battle with any male, unless he cared to from purely personal reasons. But Tarzan liked Taug. He had no grudge against him, and his man-mind told him what the mind of an ape would never ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... written and designed to reform and prevent corruptions and abuses in the affairs of the world (as the Scriptures are in matters of religion), he finds it many times a great obstruction to the advantage and profit of his practice; whereas the Common Law, being unwritten, or written in an unknown language which very few understand but himself, is the more pliable and easy to serve all his purposes, being utterly exposed to what interpretation and construction his interest and occasions shall ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... statutory law based on Anglo-American common law for the modern sector and customary law based on unwritten ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... friend—the only one. He was good to papa," Deleah said, but to herself alone. For in that unhappy household was a law, unwritten, unspoken, but binding none the less, that the name of the husband and ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann

... prevailing party, or the one who is the best "mixer," secures the office regardless of qualifications. Sharing the fortunes of other political offices, the county superintendency frequently has applied to it the unwritten party rule of "two terms and out," thus crippling the efficiency of the office by frequent changes of ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts

... of the Quaker poet there is an unwritten chapter of personal history full to the brim of romance. It will be remembered that Whittier in his will left ten thousand dollars for an Amesbury Home for Aged Women. One room in this home Mrs. Elizabeth ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford

... him love his place. Lord Brentford declared that he could not understand it,—that he should find himself lost in amazement if such a man as his young friend allowed himself to be led into the outer wilderness by such an ignis-fatuus of light as this. Lord Cantrip laid down the unwritten traditional law of Government officials very plainly. A man in office,—in an office which really imposed upon him as much work as he could possibly do with credit to himself or his cause,—was dispensed from the necessity of a conscience ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope

... utter trash in comparison with the story of Alice Bashford, in which, much against my will, I had become a minor character. I had rather prided myself on my ability to see through a plot in the first chapter of the most complicated mystery story, but there were points in this unwritten ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson

... lying before me, a letter I wrote to my father from Benton Barracks, of date March 2, 1862, in which the date of our arrival at St. Louis is given as February 28th. And I well know that we were only two days on the trip. And besides the date given in my letter, I distinctly remember several unwritten facts and circumstances that satisfy me beyond any doubt, that the day we left Carrollton was February 27, 1862. Early in the morning of that day, the regiment filed out at the big gate, and marched south on the dirt road. Good-bye to old Camp Carrollton! Many ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell

... saint replied, his rising anger past: "What can I do?—the law is hard-and-fast, Albeit unwritten and on earth unknown— An oral order issued from the Throne. By but one sin has Woman e'er incurred God's wrath. To accuse Them Loud ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce

... is suggested by an irregularity, of plan. But in architecture on a grand scale, whether it be in a Greek colonnade or a Gothic arcade, we cannot tolerate irregularity of spacing except where some constructive necessity affords an obvious and higher reason for it. Then, again, we find the unwritten law running throughout all architecture that a progress of line in one direction requires to be stopped in a marked and distinct manner when it has run its course, and we find a similarly felt necessity in regard to musical form. The repetition so common ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various

... spoken of love to her, she had a right to share his troubles. The infrequency of his visits to her of late, and something in his manner, made her uneasy and a little bitter. For there was an understanding between them, though it had been unspoken and unwritten. They had vowed without priest or witness. The heart speaks eloquently in symbols first, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... into Mexico on their forays rather than break their treaty with the Americans. They could have easily carried off our stock by killing the few vaqueros kept with them on the range, but refrained from doing so from motives well understood on the frontiers. There is an unwritten law among ranchmen as old as the treaty between ...
— Building a State in Apache Land • Charles D. Poston

... learned in the history of Alexandria under the Romans may wonder that I should have made no mention of the Therapeutai on Lake Mareotis. I had originally meant to devote a chapter to them, but Luca's recent investigations led me to decide on leaving it unwritten. I have given years of study to the early youth of Christianity, particularly in Egypt, and it affords me particular satisfaction to help others to realize how, in Hadrian's time, the pure teaching of the Saviour, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... of this body was an Appius Claudius, son of the haughty patrician of the same name, and equally as haughty as he ever was. The laws of Rome before this time had been in a mixed condition, partly written and partly unwritten and traditional; but now all were to be reduced to order, and incorporated with those two laws that could not be touched—that giving the Aventine to the plebeians, and the sacred law settled on the Roman Runnymede after ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman

... that instrument on the General Government are reserved to the States and to the people; if it has been viewed by them as the first great step in the march of latitudinous construction, which unchecked would render that sacred instrument of as little value as an unwritten constitution, dependent, as it would alone be, for its meaning on the interested interpretation of a dominant party, and affording no security to the rights of the minority—if such is undeniably the case, what rational grounds could have been conceived for anticipating aught but determined ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson

... is to be requited being a kindness, is called gratitude, but when it is an injury, it is called revenge. And these principles are common both to natural and statute law. But there are also other divisions of law; for there is both the written and the unwritten law,—each of which is maintained by the rights of nations and the customs of our ancestors. Again, written law is divided into public law and private law. Public law is laws, resolutions of the senate, treaties; private law is accounts, covenants, ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero

... their eyes. As for the girls, they munched away in silence, no one daring to make a remark, and it was significant of the solemnity of the occasion that not a single girl helped herself to marmalade or jam. By the unwritten laws of the school it would have been considered unfeeling to indulge in such luxuries while the reputation of a companion was at stake. It was a ghastly occasion, and Pixie seemed literally to shrink in stature as she cowered in her chair, glancing ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... Freedom—I was entirely at one with him. All the more do I regret that in society he so effectually concealed his higher enthusiasms, and that, having lived on the vague fame of his "History of Liberty," he died leaving it unwritten. ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... leisurely meal, Terry adding an occasional word whenever the flow of affectionate badgering lagged. Fanny, who had served them since they were children, bustled in and out, redfaced, wholesome, fruitlessly trying to press upon Terry an excess of the over-ample dinner. It was a sort of unwritten law in Crampville that the Sunday dinner should be sufficiently heavy to drive the menfolk to a long ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson

... (Constitution Act); originally, the machinery of the government was set up in the British North America Act of 1867; charter of rights and unwritten customs ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... which, had I guessed that he would do it under heavy shelling, I should have forbidden him to undertake. His type of bravery, though it wears no decorations, is distinguished, more than all other, by the unwritten admiration ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose

... on at a lazy mule-trot, hearing the unwritten annals of the range from one who had seen them enacted at first hand. Pretty soon we passed a herd of burros with mealy, dusty noses and spotty hides, feeding on prickly pears and rock lichens; and just before sunset we slid down the last declivity out upon the plateau ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb

... hunters are hard on us, hearts without pity; They have staked their nets round the fair young city, That the sons of her strength and her virgin daughters Should find not whither alive to flee. And we know not yet of the word unwritten, [Ant. 1. The doom of the Pythian we have not heard; From the navel of earth and the veiled mid altar We wait for a token with hopes that falter, 160 With fears that hang on our hearts thought-smitten Lest her tongue be kindled with no good word. ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... plain limitations of the Constitution could not be overstepped on such a plea, even for the general good. Jefferson was so sensitive to this constitutional objection that he proposed to meet it by an amendment to the Constitution; but it was soon evident that the unwritten law of manifest destiny did not need the appeal to the ballot-box. "The grumblers," Jefferson wrote to a friend soon after the news of the treaty was received, "gave all the credit of the acquisition to the accident of war." "They would see," he added, in records on ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay

... looked at him she was forced to admit that she had never seen him look as he did now. His face, usually serious, had a whole unwritten tragedy in it. And she felt altogether sore and puzzled and ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin

... from the temptation in this country of adapting business methods and ideals to politics rather than political ideals and methods to business. Our eighteenth-century thinkers explained citizenship itself, not as a duty to our neighbours but as the fulfilment of an unwritten contract. Our nineteenth-century legal writers elevated the idea of free contract almost to an industrial ideal; while, in somewhat the same spirit, the gutter journalists of to-day, when they are at a loss for a popular watchword, call for a business government. ...
— Progress and History • Various

... taps—rat, tat, tat! Surprised, Gombauld turned his eyes towards the door. Nobody ever disturbed him while he was at work; it was one of the unwritten laws. "Come in!" he called. The door, which was ajar, swung open, revealing, from the waist upwards, the form of Mary. She had only dared to mount half-way up the ladder. If he didn't want her, retreat would be easier and more dignified than if she ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley

... of the Massachusetts delegates, including those we have named, were informally inducted into the organization, in the parlor of B. F. Stevenson, who at the first national encampment a few weeks later was made provisional Commander-in-chief; the ritual and unwritten work was communicated to the new members, and they were fully empowered to organize posts in Massachusetts, General Devens being appointed provisional Grand Commander of the department. On returning ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various

... victors; very woman, in that she yields to conquer; and after centuries of romance and tragedy, remains, in essence, unconquered still. The old saying, 'Who holds Delhi, holds India,' has its dark counterpart in the unwritten belief that no alien ruler, enthroned at Delhi, shall endure. Hence the dismay of many loyal Indians when the British Government deserted Calcutta for the Queen of the North. And here, already, were her endless, secretive byways rivalling Calcutta suburbs as ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... the common type in one-fourth of the time necessary according to the usual mode of instruction. That its acquisition leads the pupil to the correct pronunciation of every word. That it will present to the missionary a superior alphabet for the representation of hitherto unwritten languages," &c. A similar committee, to whom the question was referred by the House of Representatives in 1852, state that during the past year the system had been tried in twelve public schools, and that, according to the testimony of the teachers, children evinced ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... the history, not only of all its own secrets and secret hopes—for these were of but small value in the eyes of the worldling—but of all those matters which belonged to the little village to which they were trending, and the unwritten lives of every dweller ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... and on either side the deep, untrodden snow made it impossible for a sleigh to turn out without risking an upset. It was an unwritten law of the winter highway that pedestrians must give the right of way to vehicles, particularly those that bore loads. But the Duke of Wellington was subject to no law she did not wish to obey. To turn off the road meant plunging ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith

... ever. It was amusing to witness the air of business with which he opened each morning the three or four journals to which he subscribed. He broke the seals as if he expected to find in their columns something of absorbing personal interest; as, for example, a critique of his unwritten poem, or a resume of the book that he meant some day to write. He read these journals without missing one word, and always found something to arouse his contempt or anger. Other people were so fortunate: their pieces ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... own little unwritten history, handed down from lip to lip through the generations, of tragic, comic, and dramatic events. They are told at weddings and festivals, and rehearsed around winter firesides. And in these oral annals of Glen St. Mary the tale of the union ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... OWEN,—You have written me a beautiful letter. Not one word of it would I have unwritten, and it is a very great grief to me that I cannot write you a letter which would please you as much as your letter pleases me. No woman, since the world began, has had such a lover as I have had, and yet I am putting him aside. What a strange fatality! Yet I ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore

... attributed the savage way in which their master whipped off his host's team from trying to get a second helping, to the weariness of a long journey. For to beat another man's dogs, especially with the long and heavy lash of our Northern whips, is a breach of the unwritten ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... announce to hall and hovel Lord Asterisk's unwritten novel. It's full of wit, and full of fashion, And full of taste, and full of passion; It tells some very curious histories, Elucidates some charming mysteries, And mingles sketches of society With ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various

... through infinite mists of greyness he looks back on the sharp hatreds and wringing desires of his life. Now a leaf seems to have been turned and a new white page spread before him, clean and unwritten on. At last things have ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos

... towns, or of three or four valleys, to preserve the special privilege or for the special needs of each. Hence was formed a habit of self-government, the practice of legislative, judicial and administrative functions, which resulted gradually in a code of written or unwritten laws embodied in the fueros or fors of each province, and the cartas-pueblos of the towns. In form these fueros or charters are often grants from the lord or sovereign; in reality they are only a confirmation ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... Queen's character and disposition, and to give typical instances of her methods in dealing with political and social matters—to produce, in fact, a book for British citizens and British subjects, rather than a book for students of political history. That the inner working of the unwritten constitution of the country; that some of the unrealised checks and balances; that the delicate equipoise of the component parts of our executive machinery, should stand revealed, was inevitable. We have thought it ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria

... of her duties; however much she may suffer, she must present as calm and serene a countenance as a warrior in the hour of danger, and fall, if necessary, upon the spot, with death in her heart and a smile upon her lips. In order to obey this unwritten law, Madame de Bergenheim, after a slight interruption, seated herself at the piano to accompany three or four young girls who were each to sing in turn the songs that they had been ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard

... The inhabitants grew to be proud of their rosy citadel; it was an unwritten law among them that every new house should adapt itself to this tone. For the rest, there was not much building done after his death, with the exception of a few isolated villas that sprang up, despite his old commands, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... cannot." Alfred's value to literature is this: he placed by the side of Anglo-Saxon poetry,—consisting of two great poems, Caedmon's great song of the 'Creation' and Cynewulf's 'Nativity and Life of Christ,' and the unwritten ballads passed from lip to lip,—four immense translations from Latin into Anglo-Saxon prose, which raised English from a mere spoken dialect to a true language. From his reign date also the famous ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... with the speaker! But it is not the British military way, and the unwritten laws of the Service stand firm. So let me only remind you that General Horne led the artillery at Mons; that he has commanded the First Army since September, 1916; that, in conjunction with Sir Julian Byng, he carried ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Ne, which might be called the multiple form, is used whenever more than one person is addressed, even though no word may appear in the sentence indicating how many. This is an idiosyncracy which perhaps would never have been developed, certainly would not be perpetuated, in any except an unwritten language. It is of no effect except in a language always colloquial. The multiple form will be given in this grammar as the first person plural, and, whether indicated or not, the other may ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird

... an arena for set combat between a few distinguished parliamentarians, whose displays were watched by followers on either side, either diffident of their ability to compete, or held silent by the unwritten rule which imposed strict reserve upon a new member. For the greater number promotion had come through slow and steady service ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn

... men possess a code, written or unwritten, that may properly be called moral, we expect of them the judgment that guilt should be punished. But what shall be accounted guilt? What shall be the measure of retribution? Who shall be ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... Fraternity with Subordination to the Wisest and the Best: and of that Equilibrium between the Active Energy of the Will of the Present, expressed by the Vote of the People, and the Passive Stability and Permanence of the Will of the Past, expressed in constitutions of government, written or unwritten, and in the laws and customs, gray with age and sanctified by time, as precedents and authority; which is represented by the arch resting on the two columns, Jachin and Boaz, that stand at the portals of the Temple builded by Wisdom, on one of which Masonry sets the celestial ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... now upon what was afterward done throughout the length and breadth of that peaceful valley of ours, I regret most sincerely that those young men did not violate the unwritten laws and usages which the Indians themselves were ever ready to cast aside when it suited their purpose, and kill the bloodthirsty Brant whether his men showed signs ...
— The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley • James Otis

... This unwritten law which prevails throughout the history of Catholic nations and expresses so forcibly and so persistently the doctrinal principle of which we spoke, justifies the claims of the Catholic Extension and gives ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly

... moving and pathetic in the death of an old language. Permit me to tell you, not as a philologist, a character to which I have no claim, but as an imaginative writer, how the death of an ancient tongue affects me. It is unlike any other form of death, for an unwritten language is even as a breath of air which when it is spent leaves no trace behind. A nation may die, yet its history remains, and that is the tangible part of its past. A city may fall to decay and lie a thousand years under the sands of the desert, yet its relics revivify its life. ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine

... called the following morning, declared their "detestation of these violent proceedings," and promised to suppress them in future. We shall see that one more such outbreak, and one only, was made by a Boston mob. There is here suggested an unwritten, perhaps never to be written, chapter of the history of this time. By what means did the Boston leaders, Samuel Adams chief among them, manage to control the Boston workmen? However it was done, by what conferences and through what reasoning, it is safe to say that the loose organizations of the ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French

... faith and practice are not to be confused, each is separate from the other; the two may unite or the one may be divorced from the other without the integrity of either being affected: this is the unwritten Hindu code which she and hers had ever held; and now, after years of belief in it, to face round suddenly to its opposite—this was more than she could do. She held, as it were, the Truth in her hand, and turned it round ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... always well received, were not always well timed; certainly it was an error of judgment to insert a solo at the cross-roads after she had told us that she hadn't a moment to spare if she was to get home from the ball before the rest of the family. But here again it was a matter of obedience to some unwritten and inscrutable law of pantomime which it is not for us, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various

... facts with reference to an isolated transaction. There are many, very many others of a similar character that I might mention, but I will not. The unwritten and secret history of our border would amaze the civilized world, and would stagger the faith of the most credulous. In the case just mentioned, we find an old man who had passed his threescore and ten, and a youth who had ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones

... the jury startled him by its absurdity. Who does not recall sensational acquittals in which sympathy for the defendant or prejudice against the plaintiff carried away the feelings of the twelve good men and true? For them are the unwritten laws, for them the mingling of justice with race hatreds or with gallantry. And even in the heart of New York a judge recently said to a chauffeur who had killed a child and had been acquitted: "Now go and get ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... of England, heirs of glory, Heroes of unwritten story, Rise, shake off the chains like dew Which in sleep have fallen on you! Ye are ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... profound and far-reaching truth wrapped up in Goethe's simple yet really inexhaustible monition, that if we would improve a man, it were well to let him believe that we already think him that which we would have him to be. The law that noblesse oblige has unwritten bearings in dealing with all men; all masses of men are susceptible of an appeal from that point: for this Mr. Carlyle seems ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... is alive with the bacteria of animalism, under increasing control as it rises, still with the ferocity, rapacity and selfish passions of the gloomy mass at the bottom and forever in revolt. Is this not proved by history, written and unwritten? Is it not proved by the ghastly secrets of individual introspection that men never reveal or admit to others; secrets guarded by a system of conventions so impenetrable and vast that to attempt to personalize it in the sneaking figure of Hypocrisy would be as absurd as to try ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison

... love letters, since he writes to Clara that he has been considering the publication of their correspondence in his "Zeitschrift," though he was probably not serious at this, seeing that he also plans to fill a balloon with his unwritten thoughts and send it to her, "properly addressed ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes

... from the red man's record, even it is moved at times by his fate, and stirred by his persistent, his inevitable romance. For the Indian's record is the background, and not seldom the foreground, of American history, in which his endless contests with the invader were but a counterpart of the unwritten, or recorded, struggles of all ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson

... enough. And, although there were many expressions of welcome spoken and called out to Curly John when he passed into the room and took his seat at the table, nobody in all that throng offered to approach him, for it was an unwritten law of the underworld that a man who reappears for the first time among his associates after imprisonment is left alone to make his own advances when he ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter

... opposed the idea shuddered at the thought of making over to a Romanist Power (?) the poor converts of Protestantism; the peoples who had been peaceful and happy so long under the protecting aegis of Great Britain; the races whom we were bound, by an unwritten contract, not only to defend, but to civilise, to advance in the paths of progress. The colonists feared to part with the old effete possession, lest the French should oppose, as they have done in Senegal, all foreign industry—in fact, 'seal up' the Gambia. A highly respectable ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... ran and swam, and flew, or only grew, possessing that extensive familiarity with things which shows equal sweetness of sympathy and playful penetration. Most refreshing to me was his unstudied lore, the unwritten poetry which common life presents to a strong and gentle mind. It was a great contrast to the subtleties of analysis, the philosophic strainings of which I had seen too much. But I will not attempt to transplant it. May it profit others as it did ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... scholars showed such excellent aptitudes for deception and overreaching, and perhaps no lack of taste for common money-making, that they did not even spare their friends, but used their arts on them. [33] And so an unwritten law was framed by which we still abide, bidding us teach our children as we teach our servants, simply and solely not to lie, and not to cheat, and not to covert, and if they did otherwise to punish them, hoping to make them humane and law-abiding ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon

... bench made of twisted vine was a young girl. She held in her hand a book, but she was not reading it. She was scanning the unwritten pages of some reverie; her eyes, dark, large and wistful, were holding communion with the god of dreams. A wisp of hair, glossy as coal, trembled against a cheek white as ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath

... necessity arose. He was a warrior, whose single prowess might go far in deciding the issue of a hard-fought battle—an orator, discoursing with weighty eloquence on grave questions of state—a judge, whose decisions helped to build up the as yet unwritten code of law. Descending from these high altitudes, he could take up his bow and spear, and go forth to hunt the boar and the stag, or wield the woodman's axe, or the carpenter's saw and chisel. He could kill, ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell

... principal part, and designed to furnish the historical key to the great Elizabethan writings), though now for a long time completed and ready for the press, and though repeated reference is made to it in this volume, is, for the most part, omitted here. It contains a true and before unwritten history, and it will yet, perhaps, be published as it stands; but the vivid and accumulating historic detail, with which more recent research tends to enrich the earlier statement, and disclosures which no invention could anticipate, are waiting now ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... faithfully to the Rock for four days. During whole afternoons he sat there looking out over the Bad Lands. At sunset he returned to camp. Aliris: A Romance of all Time gathered dust. Letters home remained unwritten. Prospecting was left to the capable hands of Old Mizzou until, much to Bennington's surprise, that individual resigned ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White

... been a time when de Florac had set the fashion, and that not only in waistcoats and walking-sticks. He was a fine swordsman, and was even now in some request as second at fashionable duels. None knew more certainly than he every punctilio of those unwritten laws which govern affairs of honour, and, had he been born to even a quarter of the fortune of Tom Pargeter, his record would probably have remained unstained. Unfortunately for him this had not been the case; he had soon run through ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... circle—she could not get her imagination away from it. She began to realize that the mind of mortal man could not get away from the law which produced it. She began to understand dimly, as one begins to understand any great truth, that everything around her obeyed that unwritten fundamental law of love, expressed it, sounded it, down to the leaves of the trees casting their flickering shadows on the silver field of moonlight, and the long-drawn chorus of the insects of the summer night. She thought ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... The Board does not recognize the so-called unwritten law as a justification for the ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... becoming in this very modern world, and as only showing a silly deference if exhibited at all. Respect was, in truth, the chief of all virtues here inculcated—respect for age, for old dogs are no longer to be challenged; respect for strength and the great unwritten laws; respect for sex; respect for those who had shown themselves to be the better men; respect for such as neither fought nor swore but held their ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry

... began fingering the unwritten leaves of the diary, wondering if the time would ever come when they would hold the record of other engagements. Nearly a third of the pages were still blank. How many nice things she could think of that she would like to be able to write thereon. Maybe they ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston

... pursued and at the brink of the hill, overtaken. The stake was too large for the young artist to risk its loss by adhering to the unwritten rules of combat. He released Rachel, whirled about, and as the foremost descended on him, ducked, seized the man about the middle, and pitched him head-first down into the valley. The second, the tall Nubian that wore the striped ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... to vaticinate a reign of socialistic terror for the immediate future. We have to recognize that man cannot be other than what he makes himself; and he makes himself in obedience to immutable although unwritten laws, whereof he only of late years became dimly conscious. It is well, then, while reflecting on the lessons of some deeply studied epoch in world-history, to regard the developments with which we have been specially occupied, no less than the ephemeral activity of each particular ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... relate that caused certain effects to develope themselves, and it is our only aim to cause others to moralize—to lead inquiring minds into certain directions by revealing something of the heretofore unwritten past. ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle

... one piaster an hour. We frequently shared with them our frugal, and even scanty meals; and in turn they assisted us in our purchases and arrangements for lodgings, for their word, we found, was with the common people an almost unwritten law. Then, too, they were of great assistance in crossing streams where the depth would have necessitated the stripping of garments; although their fiery little steeds sometimes objected to having an extra rider astride their haunches, and a bicycle across ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... that night England had not yet given her decision. During the last twenty-four hours I had been asked this question a score of times. The people of Paris were getting impatient of England's silence. Englishmen in Paris were getting very anxious. If England did not keep her unwritten pledge to France, it would be dangerous and a shameful thing to be an Englishman in Paris. Some of my friends were already beginning to feel their throats ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... of ten and twelve. Each clique had its leader. By an unwritten law I was included among those who rallied around Phoebe, most of whom she had "learned" at some time or other, as she was now "learning" me. The luncheons were divested of their newspaper wrappings and spread over the ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson

... surprised at the distinction of the contributors to The Brooklyn Magazine. Each number contained a noteworthy list of them, and when an article by the President of the United States, then Rutherford B. Hayes, opened one of the numbers, the public was astonished, since up to that time the unwritten rule that a President's writings were confined to official pronouncements had scarcely been broken. William Dean Howells, General Grant, General Sherman, Phillips Brooks, General Sheridan, Canon Farrar, Cardinal Gibbons, Marion Harland, Margaret Sangster—the most prominent men and women of the ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok

... why Nat Burns was not at the fire, as usual attempting to make himself leader of the battle without doing much of the work, and now the reason was apparent. He preferred to pursue his courting under the eyes of the village rather than to obey the unwritten law of service. And he was with ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams

... vows of celibacy, denunciation of pleasures innocent in themselves, intellectual monopoly of interpretation of things past or present, written or unwritten, are travesties of common sense, which is to me the Voice within. Not being a philosopher, I do not classify it, but I listen to it, because I believe it to be the Voice of God. That is the first point which I have no fear in putting ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... to hammer at that all day, and some evenings, too. But it's an unwritten law that a fellow must have some fun; so I'll take an afternoon off now and then, to come round ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells

... under constant control and hence never straying. The first Texas herds to arrive naturally traveled north to the dead-line, and, choosing a range, went into camp until frost relieved them. It was an unwritten law that a herd was entitled to as much grazing land as it needed, and there was a report about Miles City that the quarantine ground was congested with cattle halfway from ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams

... as they may seem. As man progressed in civilisation, and grew to be definitely gregarious, hospitality became more a matter of course. But even then it was not above suspicion. It was not hedged around with those unwritten laws which make it the safe and eligible thing we know to-day. In the annals of hospitality there are many pages that make painful reading; many a great dark blot is there which the Recording Angel may wish, but will not be able, to wipe ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... of whom reached to years of discretion: at every stage backwards his sires and gammers thus doubled and doubled till they became a vast body of Gothic ladies and gentlemen of the rank known as ceorls or villeins, full of importance to the country at large, and ramifying throughout the unwritten history of England. His immediate father had greatly improved the value of their residence by building a new chimney, and setting up an additional ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy

... faces, as first one and then another caught sight of a wife or a sister in the crowd waiting to greet and accompany the brave hearts to the warmth of their humble homes. I felt that while these crews' sufferings and the courage and resolution they had shown remained unwritten, only half of the very stirring and manful story had been recorded. The narrative, as related to me by the coxswain of the lifeboat, is a necessary pendant to the tale told by the mate of the wrecked ship; and as ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor

... numberless flirtations. But with all her folly she has ever had the sense to keep within the conventionalities of her own fashionable 'coterie,' which is the only world she knows anything about, and whose unwritten laws are her only creed and religion. Her disappointed suitors can justly charge her with cruelty, silliness, ignorance, and immeasurable vanity, but never with indiscretion. She has to perfection the ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... Mrs. BRIGHAM YOUNG? What becomes of the Fenian money? When will Cuba be free? we would willingly answer, but our correspondent cannot expect us to solve problems which are as old as BARNUM said JOYCE HETH was. He should be able to see such things as others see them. They are the unwritten law, and PUNCHINELLO does not propose to ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various

... prefixed is that of the visit which the Prince of Wales paid to the tomb of Washington: carrying home thence, as one of the most distinguished of his hosts said, 'an unwritten treaty ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... was no altar in this chapel,—but at its eastern end where the altar might have been, was a dark purple curtain against which blazed in brilliant luminance a Cross and Seven-pointed Star. The rays of light shed by this uplifted Symbol of an unwritten Creed were so vivid as to be almost blinding, and nearly eclipsed the summer glory of the sun itself. Awed by the strange and silent solemnity of my surroundings, I was glad to be hidden under the folds of my enshrouding white veil, though I realised ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... therefore on a basis of written law. Except in one particular, no institutions anterior to the Twelve Tables were recognised at Rome. The theoretical descent of Roman jurisprudence from a code, the theoretical ascription of English law to immemorial unwritten tradition, were the chief reasons why the development of their system differed from the development of ours. Neither theory corresponded exactly with the facts, but each produced consequences ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

... his playthings, soiled, broken, and all. She gathered flowers to fling above the brown earth that hid him from her view. She wrote heart-broken verses in his memory, and many more she poured forth in unwritten ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee

... man!" Every one looked to that point,—"I see a man of Tarsus; and he says, Make mention of me!" It must not be supposed that the discourses of "Uncle Ebenezer," with these abrupt appeals and sudden starts, were unwritten or extempore; they were carefully composed and written out,—only these flashes of thought and passion came on him suddenly when writing, and were therefore quite natural when delivered—they came ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... portraits—paintings of ancestors who have rendered themselves famous in one way or another. Such paintings have their unwritten stories, repeated by word of mouth from one generation to another, thereby preserving the family history which is looked back upon with pride ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs

... the Speaker who decides when a member is entitled to the floor, and no motion or speech can be made except by a member who has been duly recognized by the chair. There are a number of unwritten rules in this regard, but in the last analysis the Speaker may recognize only persons whom he desires to have speak. Thus Congressmen who are not of the Speaker's party may be kept from making themselves heard upon important measures. When a bill is before the House, the chairman of the committee ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson

... hidden under a fallen tree-top and one day, while the doe was gone, he fell upon the helpless fawn, which, according to the unwritten law of the forest, was ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes

... afterwards that we fully comprehended all that Ala had done in that simple act; but I will tell you now what it meant. By the unwritten law of this realm of Venus, she, as queen, had the right to interpose between justice and its victim, and such interposition was always expressed in the way which we had witnessed. It was a right rarely exercised, and probably few then present ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss

... is an unwritten law that policemen should be Irish. I enjoy Greeks in classic literature or in restaurants, but not as policemen. There is a saying in the city that when Greek meets Greek they go together to get a job on the Market Street Railways. But when they get upon the police ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey

... opinions, or rather in the practice, of their ancestors. The honors of sacrifice were reserved for the supreme deity; they acknowledged, in rude hymns, their obligations to the air, the fire, the water, and the earth; and their priests derived some profit from the art of divination. Their unwritten laws were rigorous and impartial: theft was punished with a tenfold restitution; adultery, treason, and murder, with death; and no chastisement could be inflicted too severe for the rare and inexpiable guilt of cowardice. As the subject ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... perpetual, but annual or temporary, and not to receive their authority but by election, and certain persons to have voices only in that election, and the like; these are busy and curious frames, which of necessity do presuppose a law precedent, written or unwritten, to guide and direct them: but in monarchies, especially hereditary, that is, when several families or lineages of people do submit themselves to one line, imperial or royal, the submission is more natural and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... in an unbreakable web of prejudice, after the conditions favoring their acquirement have in great part ceased to operate. These preconceptions of national solidarity and international enmity have come down from the past as an integral part of the unwritten constitution underlying all these modern nations, even those which have departed most widely from the manner of life to which the peoples owe these ancient preconceptions. Hitherto, or rather until recent times, the workday experience of these peoples has ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... containing presumeably an application for her hand, in the generous offer of his own. Her reply to a pursuer of that sort was easy. Comedy, after the barbaric attack, refreshed her wits and reliance on her natural fencing weapons. To Westlake, the unwritten No was conveyed in a series of kindly ironic subterfuges, that, played it like an impish flea across the pages, just giving the bloom of the word; and rich smiles come to Emma's life in reading the dexterous composition: which, however, proved so thoroughly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... over-acted carelessness, "Anybody who likes," he said, "can feed my rabbits," and he disappeared, with a jauntiness that deceived nobody, in the direction of the orchard. Now, kingdoms might totter and reel, and convulsions change the map of Europe; but the iron unwritten law prevailed, that each boy severely fed his own rabbits. There was good ground, then, for suspicion and alarm; and while the lettuce-leaves were being drawn through the wires, Harold and I conferred seriously ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame

... of the earlier bishops are taken from Bishop Stubbs' "Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum." Of the bishops between 1609 and 1845 there was only one (Peter Gunning) who was not translated to Ely from some other see. It is now an unwritten law that the Bishop of Ely should be a Cambridge man. For at least two centuries and a half this rule has been followed, if we except Francis Turner; and he, though of New College, Oxford, had been Master of S. John's, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting

... has its own laws,—the common and unwritten law of the forecastle, of which Admiralty Courts take infrequent cognizance, and the law of the quarter-deck, which is to be read in acts of Parliament and statutes of Congress. The sea has its own customs, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... written laws to be administered. The place of these was taken by public opinion and tradition, that is, by the ideas handed down from one generation to another and constantly discussed around the camp-fire and the council-fire. Every decent Indian was singularly obedient to this unwritten code. He wanted always to do what he was told his fathers had been accustomed to do, and what was expected of him. Thus there was a certain general standard ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson

... testimonial. But don't worry. America can turn out millions just like me, and Oxford can have as many of them as she can hold. On the other hand, how many of YOU can be turned out, as per sample, in England? Yet you choose to destroy yourself. You avail yourself of the Unwritten Law. And you're right, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... tiny fire of distaste fanned itself alive in Allen's brain. Why in the name of World Government did every other girl who made first play with him have to be protected? But there was his out. By unwritten social code he could declare the date off. Except that he had grown to increasingly hate the spiteful practice of 'protection'. It meant Nedda had peeved some local lothario who, along with other males in his clique, was going to damn ...
— DP • Arthur Dekker Savage

... expansions of the first or were based upon Johnson's opposition to reconstruction or upon his speeches in criticism of Congress. Nothing could be said about his control of the patronage, though this was one of the unwritten charges. J. W. Schuckers, in his life of Chase, says that the radical leaders "felt the vast importance of the presidential patronage; many of them felt, too, that, according to the maxim that to the victors belong the spoils, the ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming

... late Warden of Merton undertook the preparation of this volume he invited the assistance of Dr. Fotheringham in the portions dealing with foreign affairs. At the time of the late Warden's death in 1903 three chapters (x., xii. and xviii.) were unwritten, and one (xx.) was left incomplete. It was also found that the volume had to be recast in order to meet the plan of the series. The necessary alterations and additions have been made by Dr. Fotheringham, who has been scrupulous in ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick

... in silence the profundity of the point of view thus presented to him, and, according to his habit, quickly made it part of his practice. For his first weeks at school he kept very silent, absorbing its traditions and the unwritten laws made by the boys themselves, on the nice observance of which hung ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... enable the learner to read the common type in one-fourth of the time necessary according to the usual mode of instruction. That its acquisition leads the pupil to the correct pronunciation of every word. That it will present to the missionary a superior alphabet for the representation of hitherto unwritten languages," &c. A similar committee, to whom the question was referred by the House of Representatives in 1852, state that during the past year the system had been tried in twelve public schools, and that, according to the testimony of the teachers, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... Prince of Denmark. The old dreary looking castle still stands there. From Elsinore I went to Copenhagen, and occupied myself for a few days in visiting the wonderful museums. There I saw, in the Northern Antiquities Collection, the unwritten history of civilisation in the stone, bronze, and iron tools which have brought the world to what it is now. This museum is perfectly unrivalled. I saw there the first section of kitchen-middens—that is, the refuse of oyster shells, fish-bones, and other stuff thrown out by the ancient ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... rarest of his great qualities, gave a generous and authoritative testimony to the merit of these attacks upon his father, and his father's creed, which Macaulay himself lived to wish that he had left unwritten. ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan

... distance, Arnold of Brescia sadly contemplated Rome's disgrace and the evil state of the Roman people. The yet unwritten words of Saint Bernard were already more than true. They are worth repeating here, in Gibbon's strong translation, for they perfect the picture of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... generation from the circumstances narrated. It ceases to be reliable when it has been transmitted through more than two hands. In the case of a great and startling event, like a destructive convulsion of nature or a protracted war, the authentic story, though unwritten, of the central facts, at least, is of much longer duration. There may be visible monuments that serve to perpetuate the recollection of the occurrences which they commemorate. Institutions may exist—popular festivals ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... has remained so long unwritten as that which tells the story of the Mormons. There are many books on the subject, histories written under the auspices of the Mormon church, which are hopelessly biased as well as incomplete; more trustworthy works ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... his reading at his son's entrance. He muttered a welcome through the clouds, but he did not raise his eyes. Jimmy took the other arm-chair, and began to smoke silently. It was the unwritten law of the den that soothing silence rather than aimless chatter should prevail. It was not until a quarter of an hour had passed that Mr. Crocker dropped ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... more wonderful gift developed in him when he got home to his native country. Though the tones of Scotch humour were much less refined, and its utterances at that early period could be scarcely more than the jests and unwritten ballads of the populace, yet his early acquaintance with them must have lingered in the young Prince's mind, acquiring additional zest from the prepossessions of exile and the longing for home. And when the polished singer of the King's "Quhair" found himself again in his native land he seems to ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... independent nation, and a free nation, began at Plymouth and at Jamestown. The Constitution only made articulate the spirit which had been growing for more than a century, and it still left an unwritten law set up by custom, habit, and characteristics most aptly nourished to the ends reached in 1776, 1787, and 1789. While our written constitution was made, we still retained the common law of England as the basis of our own, and, like England, proceeded gradually to build upon this broad ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle

... novel still remained unwritten. Perhaps she had not yet "absorbed" the "local color"; perhaps inspiration was tardy. At all events she had not written a word. But she was beginning to realize the possibilities; deep in her soul something was moving that would presently ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer

... which might be called the multiple form, is used whenever more than one person is addressed, even though no word may appear in the sentence indicating how many. This is an idiosyncracy which perhaps would never have been developed, certainly would not be perpetuated, in any except an unwritten language. It is of no effect except in a language always colloquial. The multiple form will be given in this grammar as the first person plural, and, whether indicated or not, the other may be understood as being the same ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird

... cleaned house in September and April. She started with the attic and worked her purifying path down to the cellar in strict accordance with Article I, Section 1, Unwritten Rules for House Cleaning. For twenty-five years she had done it. For twenty-five years she had hated it—being an intelligent woman. For twenty-five years, towel swathed about her head, skirt pinned back, sleeves ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber

... when that unhappy country had been separated from France and Italy after the Treaty of Verdun in 843, Carlovingian law and the ancient German law books fell into disuse. The law again rested on unwritten customs, on the decisions of the judges and their assessors, and on agreements of the interested parties (feudal services and tenures). Not till the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was any record made of the rules of law which had arisen; many laws of cities on various matters and in various ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker

... that they are doing wrong, even when it it very difficult for parents to believe that they do not intend wrong-doing. As we have seen from our analysis of truthfulness, the child may very often lie without a qualm of conscience, and he may still more readily break the unwritten rules of courtesy, asking abrupt and even cruel questions of strangers, and haul the family skeleton out of its closet at critical moments. Such things cannot be wholly guarded against, even by the exercise of the utmost wisdom, but the habit of reasoning things out ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne

... self-abnegation is the first of her duties; however much she may suffer, she must present as calm and serene a countenance as a warrior in the hour of danger, and fall, if necessary, upon the spot, with death in her heart and a smile upon her lips. In order to obey this unwritten law, Madame de Bergenheim, after a slight interruption, seated herself at the piano to accompany three or four young girls who were each to sing in turn the songs that they had been ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... the Rock for four days. During whole afternoons he sat there looking out over the Bad Lands. At sunset he returned to camp. Aliris: A Romance of all Time gathered dust. Letters home remained unwritten. Prospecting was left to the capable hands of Old Mizzou until, much to Bennington's surprise, that individual ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White

... his ungrammatical gibberish. He had sailed (among other places) much among the islands; and after a Cape Horn passage with its snow-squalls and its frozen sheets, he announced his intention of "taking a turn among them Kanakas." I thought I should have lost him soon; but, according to the unwritten usage of mariners, he had first to dissipate his wages. "Guess I'll have to paint this town red," was his hyperbolical expression; for sure no man ever embarked upon a milder course of dissipation, most of his days being passed in the little parlour behind Black Tom's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... already said, so much identify their lives with that of the tribe, that each of their acts, however insignificant, is considered as a tribal affair. Their whole behaviour is regulated by an infinite series of unwritten rules of propriety which are the fruit of their common experience as to what is good or bad—that is, beneficial or harmful for their own tribe. Of course, the reasonings upon which their rules of propriety are based sometimes are absurd ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... were alone together—that was the joy of it all, so much alone together; for Swift Wing did not live with them, and, like Breaking Rock, she watched her daughter's life, standing afar off, since it was the unwritten law of the tribe that the wife's mother must not cross the path or enter the home of her daughter's husband. But at last Dingan had broken through this custom, and insisted that Swift Wing should be with her daughter ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... his death or abdication. This method might be sufficiently accurate if the exact duration of each reign were known as well as the exact sequence of the reigns. But no such precision could be expected in the case of unwritten history, transmitted orally from generation to generation. Thus, while Japanese annalists, by accepting the aggregate duration of all the reigns known to them, arrive at the conclusion that the first Emperor, Jimmu, ascended the throne in the year ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... there are those who will say that cats are not in misery when they give vent to those soul-stirring passages from unwritten opera, under the currant bushes, but we cannot but think that they are in the most crushing misery which it would be a charity to put them out of, or they would not chew their words so, and expectorate imaginary tobacco juice, mingled with hair and ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck

... different. The bugaboo of strict propriety seems to take mysterious ascendancy. We still dine together, but it is done in the most proper evening dress. It seems to be the law—unwritten but unalterable—that Hawkins and I shall display upon our respective bosoms something like a square foot of starchy ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin

... excellent school for the future politician. The dust might accumulate upon his law books: he was learning unwritten law in the hearts of these countrymen. And yet, even at this time, he exhibited a certain maturity. There seems never to have been a time when the arts of the politician were not instinctive in him. He had no boyish illusions to outlive regarding the nature and conditions of public life. His perfect ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... is unwritten; the great deeds are undone; in no biographical dictionary will you find the name of our cousin the curate. Is his life, therefore, lost? Have his powers ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis

... once condemned, was ever permitted to come back. The condemnation was for all time. Furthermore, it was part of the Chief's unwritten code, that no one who transgressed the law could ever make atonement, or ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay

... of Glory, Heroes of unwritten story, Nurslings of one mighty mother, Hopes of her, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... Russian boy who called himself Orloff had the look in his eyes of one who has seen things upon which eyes never should have looked. He smoked constantly and ate, apparently, not at all. Among these there existed a certain unwritten code and ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber

... are certain unwritten laws which have more influence in some cases as to the guilt of a murderer than any on the statute books," said the Gouverneur Faulkner with a very great slowness, so that the poor human dog might comprehend him. "If you ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess

... subversion they erected their commonwealth, and by its virtue lifted the world out of its orbit and assigned a new course to history. Here or nowhere we have the broken chain, the rejected past, precedent and statute superseded by unwritten law, sons wiser than their fathers, ideas rooted in the future, reason cutting as clean as Atropos. The wisest philosopher of the old world instructs us to take things as they are, and to adore God in the event: "Il faut toujours etre content de ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... over this, as they never failed to be promptly informed by the numerous agents whom they employed in France. It was under these sad circumstances that the year 1813 closed. We will see in future what were the consequences of it, and in fact the history, until now unwritten, of the Emperor's inner life at Fontainebleau; that is to say, of the most ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... confounded by the unexpected suddenness of the attack, Rablay backed two or three paces, and, blinded by the rush of blood from his forehead, drew out his handkerchief. No one stirred. It was part of the unwritten law in Garotte to let every man in such circumstances play his game as he pleased. For a moment or two the Judge mopped his face, and then he started towards his assailant with his round face puckered up and out-thrust hands. He had scarcely moved, however, ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris

... changed. His machine must be kept a secret as long as he could. The machine was his, James Quincy Holden's property by every known and unwritten legal right of direct, single, uncluttered inheritance. The work of his parents had been stopped by their death, but it was by no means finished with the construction of the machine. To the contrary, the real work had only begun with the completion of the first working model. ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith

... keep her by you. If she grew worse you would be justified in putting her, as we say, under restraint, or in the care of those best fitted to look after her, but even then you would remain her husband. That is the unwritten law of our and of ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison

... contribution to the public opinion of the day, whether our contribution be a raindrop or a Niagara. We are responsible for what we say and what we leave unsaid, for what we do and what we leave undone, for what we write and what is unwritten. We are responsible for the errors we have committed and for those we have taken no part in overthrowing. So, whether we realize it or not, we are consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally, directly or indirectly, according to our opportunities ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... civilized or barbarous, has such a code of its own. Without it social life would be impossible, for no man would know what to expect of his neighbors, nor be able promptly to interpret the words and actions of his fellow-men. It is in obedience to an unwritten law of this kind that an American takes off his hat when he goes into a church, and an Asiatic, when he enters a mosque, takes off his shoes; that Englishmen shake hands, and Africans rub noses. Where etiquette is well understood and well adapted to the persons whom ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... towns on the sea-board, but they left the clans of the interior comparatively untouched. Their life centred around the family. The Government counted for little or nothing; for was it not the symbol of the detested foreign rule? Its laws were therefore as naught when they conflicted with the unwritten but omnipotent code of family honour. A slight inflicted on a neighbour would call forth the warning words—"Guard thyself: I am on my guard." Forthwith there began a blood feud, a vendetta, which frequently ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... works—Landseer, Frith, Phil Morris, Mueller, Ansdell, Ansdell and Phillip, Hefner, Weiser, Creswick, Sant, John Wilson, Junr., Solomon, and Henry O'Neil—the latter artist's "Return of the Wanderer" being in a conspicuous position. As Sir Robert points them out, he seems to see an unwritten story on every canvas. He singles out the Mueller as his greatest treasure, for it was the last and possibly the best work the artist ever chronicled with his brush, and he died ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... once more—half a penknife, a bunch of keys, but not a farthing. Suddenly I dive into my pocket and take the papers out again. It was a mechanical movement, an unconscious nervous twitch. I selected a white unwritten page, and—God knows where I got the notion from—but I made a cornet, closed it carefully, so that it looked as if it were filled with something, and threw it far out on to the pavement. The breeze blew it onward a little, and then it ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun

... the red man's story; far and wide He searched the unwritten annals of his race; He sat a listener at the Sachem's side, He tracked the ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt

... uncompromising degree. With him there is no need of further speech, and to this end I have inscribed certain words upon his namepaper. To everyone this person will now return the paper which has been entrusted to him, folded so that the nature of its contents shall be an unwritten leaf to all others. Nor shall the papers be unfolded by any until he is within his own chamber, with barred doors, where all, save the one who shall find the message, shall remain, not venturing forth until daybreak. ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah

... chapel,—but at its eastern end where the altar might have been, was a dark purple curtain against which blazed in brilliant luminance a Cross and Seven-pointed Star. The rays of light shed by this uplifted Symbol of an unwritten Creed were so vivid as to be almost blinding, and nearly eclipsed the summer glory of the sun itself. Awed by the strange and silent solemnity of my surroundings, I was glad to be hidden under the folds of my enshrouding white veil, though I realised that I was in a sort of secret recess ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... apt to be taken in by mediums or even by spirits. Yes; but this only imposes the ordinary obligation of keeping one's eyes open. I know spiritualists who believe in every medium qua medium, and others who accept as unwritten gospel the idiotic utterances of a departed buccaneer or defunct clown: but these people are so purely exceptional as simply to prove a rule. Do not accept as final in so-called spiritual what you would not accept in avowedly mundane matters. Keep your eyes open and your head cool, and you will ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... then, the demeanor of one who knows that he is doomed alone to unwritten responsibilities. He lagged, with tragic ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... each other guiltily. They had no desire to spread scandal, no desire to be ill-natured. Who would have? And to outsiders no word was breathed, unwritten law ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... originally expressed, we see revealed, in the reconstruction of a language that no longer exists, the material objects and habits of thought and life of a people who passed away before history began,—so imperishable are the unconscious embodiments of mind, even in the airy and unsubstantial forms of unwritten speech! By this process, then, we learn that the Aryans were a nomadic people, and had made some advance in civilization. They lived in houses which were roofed, which had windows and doors. Their ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... difficult for us to understand how so many good things are blocked, not only in the Federal Government, but in the separate States, by the written constitutions. In Great Britain the Constitution consists of unwritten principles embodied either in Parliamentary statutes or in the common law, and yields to any Act which Parliament may pass, and the judiciary can impose no veto on it. This is one reason why England is so far ahead of the United States in labour legislation. Miss ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence

... being more intricate than any ordinary bath, took a long time, and when it was over, and Ourieda a perfumed statue of ivory, the cooling-room was entered for the dyeing of the bride's hair. The girl's face showed how she disliked the process; but it being an unwritten law that the hair of an Arab bride must be coloured with sabgha, she submitted. After the first shudder she sat with downcast eyes, looking indifferent, for nothing mattered to her now. Since Manoeel would never see it again, and perhaps it would soon lie deep under earth in a coffin, she cared ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson

... from England, and originated there in custom. It is often called the unwritten law, because unwritten in origin, though there are now many books describing it. Its principles originated as habits of the people, five hundred, eight hundred, years ago, perhaps some of them back in the time when the ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks

... before the fact and the first settlers of the west after the fact had their part, witting or unwitting, willing or unwilling, written or unwritten, along with George Rogers Clark and his men, who seized the British forts in that territory during the Revolution (and thus gave standing to the claim for its transfer), and along with the men of the Atlantic colonies who sacrificed ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... dappled deer was hidden under a fallen tree-top and one day, while the doe was gone, he fell upon the helpless fawn, which, according to the unwritten law of the forest, ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes

... head as he puffed thoughtfully at his pipe. Perhaps he was thinking of the night when Jones had threatened him with death and laughed at his helplessness. "According to the 'unwritten law' which is made to cover so many lawless acts, I have the power to deal with them as I think fit," he answered. "And I must confess I was sorely tempted to take the law into my own hands when I knew the mutineers ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger

... will there receive the rewards of patriots. Scores who were here despised for cowardice, will there receive the plaudits that await the brave. Legions who have perished in ignominious cells, will there be found crowned heroes. For who knows the yet unwritten record of the horrible war between the States, but the heroes who perished ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott

... Golconda. We believe that Woman should associate freely with man, and we believe that it is for the preservation of her rights. She should become acquainted with the metaphysical designs of those who condescended to sing the siren song of flattery. This, we think, should be according to the unwritten law of decorum, which is stamped upon every innocent heart. The precepts of prudery are often steeped in the guilt of contamination, which blasts the expectations of better moments. Truth, and beautiful dreams—loveliness, and delicacy of character, ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain

... the door disturbed these pleasant thoughts and he frowned. There was an unwritten law at the Vicarage that save for the most urgent of reasons he should never be interrupted at ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell

... the three great compromises which postponed the Rebellion. All the leading men and all the striking events of our history would contribute something to the interest and value of the work. Why go to antiquity or to the Old World for subjects, when such a subject as this remains unwritten? ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... adoption or rejection of the latter. The trilingual rule is followed, delegates addressing the assembly either in French, German, or English, as they prefer, each speech being followed by a brief resume in the other two languages from the interpreter. In the commissions, by an unwritten but generally accepted custom, French and German are the only languages used. (Latterly the representatives of the United States of America, with the individualistic courage that becomes them, have shown a disposition to rebel against this custom and defy it; ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... "Unwritten law, chivalry, all the rest of that rot? I am well aware that the Southern trigger-finger is none too steady, where lovely woman is concerned," he admitted, with a faint sneer. "But when one plays for high stakes, Miss Eustis, ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler

... poems one would never suspect that they were produced in an age of turmoil. To be sure, one finds a few poems on slavery (sentimental effusions, written on shipboard to relieve the monotony of a voyage), but these were better unwritten since they added nothing to the poet's song and took nothing from the slave's burden. Longfellow has been criticized for his inaction in the midst of tumult, but possibly he had his reasons. When everybody's shouting is an excellent time to hold your tongue. He had his own work to do, a work for ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... unsteadily, but his father smothered a sigh and watched him with curious solicitude. The unwritten law that Christopher had learnt so well had been very heavily infringed, and Charles Aston had no liking for the man who had infringed it, though he was his ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant

... three times across the room. Then he turned to Armisted, who also had risen, looked at him more coldly than before and said: "But the man— would it not be better that he—could not the country spare him better than it can spare you? Or are the Armisteds opposed to 'the unwritten law'?" ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce

... when the Ninth National Convention of women to demand their legal rights was in session in New York, there were only three white women in the now rich and beautiful city of Denver. Still another ten years of wild border life, of fierce vicissitudes, of unwritten tragedies enacted in forest and mine, and Colorado was organized into a territory with a population of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... cherished the memory of Robert Seymour, but that to a certain extent the claim has a foundation of fact to rest upon; for who will deny that had not Seymour communicated his idea to Chapman, and Chapman introduced the artist to Dickens, the "Pickwick Papers" themselves would have remained unwritten. In this sense, but in this sense only, therefore, Robert Seymour was the undoubted originator of "Pickwick." He was an artist of great power, talent, and ability; and it seems to us that those only detract from ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... to see daylight. What exactly was the trouble I didn't understand, but it was evidently something to do with the good old Artistic Temperament, and I could believe anything about that. It explains everything. It's like the Unwritten Law, don't you know, which you plead in America if you've done anything they want to send you to chokey for and you don't want to go. What I mean is, if you're absolutely off your rocker, but don't find it convenient to be scooped into the luny-bin, you simply explain that, ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... vast wildernesses and mighty lakes, has been traditionally invested with a mystery. The very name of Mackinaw, in the Indian tongue, signifies the dwelling-place of the Great Genii, and many are the legends written and unwritten connected with its history. If the testimony of an old Indian chief at Thunder Bay can be credited, it was at old Mackinaw that Mud-je-ke-wis, the father of Hiawatha, lived ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland

... from naturalism into the conventional was through symbolism, and belonged to the time when unwritten thought was first recorded by pictured signs, which then ceased to be merely decoration. We find that the naturalism of the earliest Egyptians and Asiatics was soon entirely absorbed by the effort to express some hidden meaning or mystery, and then to fit the representation to a special place ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... are, in our public and political capacity, cautiously studious not to offend; yielding a prompt obedience to the authorities for the time being, and to the established laws; especially those which are enacted for the benefit of the injured, and such as, though unwritten, reflect a confessed disgrace ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... bought for 4000l.,—half of which, according to Scott's bad and sanguine habit, was borrowed from his brother, and half raised on the security of a poem at the moment of sale wholly unwritten, and not completed even when he removed to Abbotsford—"Rokeby"—became only too much of an idol for the rest of Scott's life. Mr. Lockhart admits that before the crash came he had invested 29,000l. in the purchase of land alone. But at ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton

... temptation in this country of adapting business methods and ideals to politics rather than political ideals and methods to business. Our eighteenth-century thinkers explained citizenship itself, not as a duty to our neighbours but as the fulfilment of an unwritten contract. Our nineteenth-century legal writers elevated the idea of free contract almost to an industrial ideal; while, in somewhat the same spirit, the gutter journalists of to-day, when they are at a loss for ...
— Progress and History • Various

... believed that regulations were made only to oppress; that the men who drafted such a code were idiots, and that those whose duty it became to enforce it were simply spies and tyrants, resistance to whom was innate virtue. He was forever ignoring or violating some written or unwritten law of the Academy; was frequently being caught in the act, and was invariably ready to attribute the resultant report to ill luck which pursued no one else, or to a deliberate persecution which followed him forever. Every six months he had been on the verge of dismissal, ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King

... "abolitionism" that only one man out of the five who voted against the resolution had the courage to sign this protest with him. Lincoln was young, poor, and in need of all the good-will at his command. Nobody could have blamed him for leaving it unwritten; yet he felt the wrong of slavery so keenly that he could not keep silent merely because the views he held happened to be unpopular; and this protest, signed by him and Dan Stone, has come down to us, the first notable public act ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay

... deserted fish-stage, and lonely grave remain, a crumbling commentary of yesterday, a hint of recurring to-morrows. Son succeeds father, race replaces race, but the great Mackenzie flows on, and, as it flows, unwritten history along these banks is ever in the making. Tragedy and triumph, self-aggrandisement and self-obliteration, are here as well as in the noisy world we have left. Lessons these are for us, too, ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... heat and "drouth" we could have loitered in that pleasant shade; but we were due at the Red Lilies "second night out"; and it being one of the unwritten laws of a "nigger-hunt" to keep appointments—"the other chaps worrying a bit if you don't turn up"—soon after four o'clock we were out in the blazing heat again, following the river now along its higher flood-bank through grassy plains ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... I always consider Milton's Macbeth the most fascinating poem—certainly, if play it were, the most fascinating play—ever unwritten. But of this any man may be sure; that (since they were both great poets) one made, as the other would have made, a story of far more value to us than Shakespeare or Milton or any man before or after could have made by ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... his trade, Hindford felt convinced that presently the man would approach Mrs. Errington and be promptly sent about his business. Her negative would, no doubt, be eager enough even upon this exquisite and charitable morning. Wishing devoutly that, being a gentleman, he had not to conform to an unwritten code of manners, Hindford walked away. And, as he walked, he saw continually the back of the beggar with that black coat of the two hills and the ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens

... are usually able to straighten it out. In case the latter are unable to agree on the remedy, the case is referred by them to the assistant superintendent, whose duties, for a certain time at least, may consist largely in arbitrating such difficulties and thus establishing the unwritten code of laws by which the shop is governed. This serves as one example of what is called the "exception principle" in management, which is ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor

... what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... ordinances that are written down. Of course, the Vedas have been reduced into writing, but for all that, they continue to be called the Srutis, as the Common Law of England, though reduced into writing, is still called the unwritten ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... received each one for himself a praise which grows not old, and the noblest of all sepulchers. For the whole earth is the sepulcher of illustrious men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone, but ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... Froude notices, was not written by Cecil and merely signed by the queen, but was her own peculiar and characteristic composition. "Far sooner," she wrote, "would I pass over those murders on land; far rather would I leave unwritten those noyades in the rivers—those men and women hacked in pieces; but the shrieks of the strangled wives, great with child—the cries of the infants at their mothers' breasts—pierce me through. What drug of rhubarb can purge the bile ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... one man was ever known to pull the cord which set in motion a guillotine that took off his own head. But there is much unknown, as well as unwritten, history. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... of all its own secrets and secret hopes—for these were of but small value in the eyes of the worldling—but of all those matters which belonged to the little village to which they were trending, and the unwritten lives of every dweller ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... work was the codification and reformation of the unwritten law of the land. Code Danilo is rude enough, but an advance upon the laws of Vladika Petar. It was printed in Italian as well as Serb. Italian, till the beginning of the present century, was the only foreign tongue that had made any way ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith

... contact with the facts of the outer world are those which quicken a desire for the improvement of the condition of society, the increase of the happiness of men, the amelioration of human destiny. With this unwritten condition of human nature De Maistre, like other men of his mental calibre, is found to have complied. He incurred the suspicion and ill-will of most of those by whom he was immediately surrounded, by belonging to a Reform Lodge at Chambery. The association was one of a perfectly harmless ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley

... rested on its commanding officer. The officers and non-commissioned officers had to be trained from the beginning. In the British army the tradition of the duties of officers and non-commissioned officers,—the interior economy of the regiment—descends from generation to generation as unwritten laws or rules. Certain things are done in a certain way, often differently from other corps, in memory of some event in the history of the regiment. We had no standing orders and no regimental traditions. In a regular regiment a non-com. learns how to "carry on" his ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie

... was wrong of him; it was a distinct contravention of an unwritten law among "Commercials" that no person must be interrogated concerning the nature of his business. The big and the little man, once inside the hostel, which is their club as well, are on an equality. I did not remind my questioner of this—I ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson

... wrong-doers. Right was right and wrong was wrong to him. There was no shading in the meaning. All he asked of men was to ride fast, shoot straight, and deal squarely in any game. He admitted that murder, horse-stealing, and branding another man's calves were subjects for the unwritten law. But in his code this law meant death only after a fair trial, with neighbors for a jury. He was not scrupulous that a judge should be present. His duties were ended when he ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller

... am maharanee," she said, "there will be an end of Gungadhura's swinishness. Moreover, promises will all be kept, unwritten ones as well as written. Gungadhura's contracts will be carried out. Do ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy

... neighbors and their slaves they were masterful and relentless. In their relations with each other they were accustomed to observe the limitations of the law. In deference to the representatives of authority, in respect for precedent and for the observances of unwritten custom, they went beyond their descendants on the frontier. Circumstances in America have greatly changed in a century and a half: the type of American character has changed less. The quieter, longer-settled ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart

... Negroes. In the English Provinces, on the other hand, since teaching the slaves would probably result in their becoming Christians, the colonists naturally were strenuous in their efforts to prevent any enlightenment of the blacks, due to the existence of an unwritten law to the effect that no Christian might be held a slave. Many planters forbade the teaching of their slaves, until finally the Bishop of London settled the difficulty by issuing a formal declaration in which he stated that ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various

... and claimed the coat as belonging to Mrs. Ladley. But she refused to give it up. There is a sort of unwritten law concerning the salvage of flood articles, and I had to leave the coat, as I had my kitchen chair. But it was Mrs. Ladley's, ...
— The Case of Jennie Brice • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... as a law-maker that Yaroslaf is chiefly known. Before his time the empire had no fixed code of laws. To say that it was without law would not be correct. Every people, however ignorant, has its laws of custom, unwritten edicts, the birth of the ages, which have grown up stage by stage, and which are only slowly outgrown as the ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... enjoyment of the cold, he calls out a shrill, wiry zee, zee, zee, that rings merrily from the pines and spruces when our fingers are too numb to hold the opera glasses in an attempt to follow his restless fittings from branch to branch. Is it one of the unwritten laws of birds that the smaller their ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan

... was Nick who at last rose and gave the signal for departure. It was an unwritten law between these two that when one left Aim-sa's presence they both left it. Therefore Ralph followed suit, and they retired ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum

... Ellen Jervis, at least there were no laws written, and unwritten, which demanded of her as a duty that she should become the mother of this child. In that respect she escapes the ignominy reserved for the married mother who produces children that are not ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird









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