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Desuetude   Listen
noun
Desuetude  n.  The cessation of use; disuse; discontinuance of practice, custom, or fashion. "The desuetude abrogated the law, which, before, custom had established."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Desuetude" Quotes from Famous Books



... pamphlet to "innocuous desuetude," or to permanent banishment from among the intellectual stores of a library, merely because it is innocent of a stiff cover, is to despoil the temple of learning and reject the good things of Providence. What great and influential publications have appeared in the world in ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... essential that the college should continue and develop the practical work of the school in various ways, such as advanced exercises and lectures in the foreign idiom, special conversation classes, and the like—if only for the simple reason that a language that is not used soon falls into desuetude and is forgotten. But assuredly the so-called elementary, intermediate, and advanced courses in French and Spanish (as given in college) do not fall under that head. They exist in the college by tolerance ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... communities. When King Offa ruled in Mercia, about a hundred and fifty years later, he restored Christianity, and under its protection the nunnery of St. Columba was restored and its doves flourished again. In process of time this religious house again fell into desuetude; but before it disappeared it had achieved a great name for good works, and in especial for the piety of its members. If deeds and prayers and hopes and earnest thinking leave anywhere any moral effect, Mercy Farm and all around it have almost the right to be ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker

... of a city; and if we remember how persistent was the custom of human sacrifice among ancient races at the foundation of buildings, we shall be led to the conclusion that the ceremony described by the Greek historian was a survival of a very ancient usage, which had not yet fallen entirely into desuetude at the Achaemenian epoch. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... lowered the tastes of society. In 1733-4, when Lord Chancellor Talbot's elevation to the woolsack was celebrated by a revel in the Inner Temple Hall, the dulness and disorder of the celebration convinced the lawyers that they had not acted wisely in attempting to revive usages that had fallen into desuetude because they were inconvenient to new arrangements or repugnant to modern taste. No attempt was made to prolong the festivity over a succession of days. It was a revel of one day; and no one wished to add another to the period ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson

... customs, may cease to have a significance, and they may be modified or allowed to fall into desuetude. There is, however, much conservatism, as all who are familiar with legal usage know. And laws may fail of their purpose. They may aim to diminish crime, and their undiscriminating severity may foster crime. So ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... of Zanjan which changed the tone of the courtiers and brought near to the Bāb a glorious departure. Not, be it observed, except indirectly, his theosophical novelties; the penalty of death for deviations from the True Faith had long fallen into desuetude in Persia, if indeed it had ever taken root there. [Footnote: Gobineau, p. 262.] Only if the Kingdom of Righteousness were to be brought in by the Bāb by material weapons would this heresiarch be politically dangerous; mere religious innovations did not disturb high Court functionaries. ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne

... has been characteristic of the American people that, without irreverence for law, they have not allowed it to stand in the way of their natural development: they have not, as a rule, driven rough-shod over law, but have quietly allowed undesirable laws to fall into innocuous desuetude. ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... themselves, confined within their own sphere, should discharge their legitimate functions without jostling or jarring with one another; for in this harmony consists the temperance of our government. Alas!" he adds, "how much of all this has fallen into desuetude from its antiquity, or been effaced by ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott

... case, and Pooley was released after undergoing a quarter of his sentence. From that time until my prosecution, that is for nearly a whole generation, the odious law was allowed to slumber, although tons of "blasphemy" were published every year. This long desuetude induced Sir James Stephen, in his "Digest of the Criminal Law" to regard it as "practically obsolete." But the event has proved that no law is obsolete until it is repealed. It has also proved Lord Coleridge's observation that there is, in the case of ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote

... in the town where the church is situated to whose service he is attached; then to be present at the Canonical hours when Mass is said; finally to sit on the meetings of the Chapter on certain fixed days. But to tell the truth, their part has almost fallen into desuetude. The Council of Trent speaks of them as the 'Senatus Ecclesiae,' the Senate of the Church, and they then formed the necessary Council of the Bishop. In these days the prelates do not ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... it happens that after an existence of nearly twenty years of almost innocuous desuetude these laws are brought forth—apparently the repealed as well as the unrepealed—and put in the way of an Executive who is willing, if permitted, to attempt an improvement in the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland

... such stimuli to a lively and ingenious fancy, there was always the chance that one might pick up some priceless treasure at an auction sale, some rare work of art dim with desuetude and the disrespect of ignorance: jewellery of quaintest old-time artistry; a misprized bit of bronze; a book, it might be an overlooked copy of a first edition inscribed by some immortal author to a forgotten love; or even—if one were in rare luck—a picture, its pristine brilliance faded, the ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... fills us with amazement. We wonder that any human beings could have been so callous. The result of this historic alteration is that even in the Mother Church herself, where ascetic discipline has such a fixed traditional prestige as a factor of merit, it has largely come into desuetude, if not discredit. A believer who flagellates or "macerates" himself today arouses more wonder and fear than emulation. Many Catholic writers who admit that the times have changed in this respect do so resignedly; ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... Campbell; "is there no such thing as the desuetude of a law? Does not a law cease to be binding when it is not enforced? I appeal ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman

... me allude to a very curious custom, observed only in St. Michael's church, and even there beginning to fall into desuetude. The Scotch, who are alike noted for snuff and religious austerity, are equally devoted to footstools. In many families, where economy is the rule, one footstool—they are mere little wooden benches—serves both for the fireside and the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... was never allowed to extend its strong arm over the labor contract. Even that famous first precedent of "government by injunction" discussed by us above (page 74) was resisted in early times, the precedent was not followed, it fell into complete desuetude, and it remained for the case of Springhead Spinning Company v. Riley,[1] decided as late as 1868, to extend the injunction process to the prohibition of a strike. And in more recent labor cases it has been found that the line between prohibiting a man from leaving his employment, ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... to say the desuetude, that the novella fell into for several centuries is very curious, and fully as remarkable as the modern rise of the short story. It began to prevail in the dramatic form, for a play is a short story put on the stage; it may have satisfied ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... Neild very clean and orderly through the exertions of Mrs. Widdows, the keeper. Mrs. Widdow's salary was 63 pounds per annum. She had resolutely put down the cuckstool, and the whipping-post was becoming in a complete state of desuetude. A pump in the men's yard was used as a place of occasional punishment for the stubborn and refractory. The prisoners were without any instruction, secular or religious. No chaplain attended. The ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian

... intuition, unbidden into being from the illusive depths of some perverted intellect, to rage for a while through the medical world with a death roll deadly as the plague and as suddenly to pass into desuetude and disappear behind the impregnable ramparts of "prescriptive right" and "privilege"—terms which in plain parlance mean to the masses in cold actual fact, the absolute negation of all right—the domination of arbitrary, ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann

... whom Girbal commanded, sword in hand, stood in single file. On the other side shone the white plates of some old shakos of the time of Lafayette—five or six, no more—the National Guard having fallen into desuetude at Chavignolles. Peasants and their wives, workmen from neighbouring factories, and village brats, crowded together in the background; and Placquevent, the keeper, five feet eight inches in height, kept them in check with a look as he walked ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert

... curious fact that the custom which now created such violent excitement gradually passed into desuetude. At present there are few places [629:1] where the eating of the Paschal lamb is continued. But otherwise the practice for which Victor contended eventually prevailed, as the Roman mode of celebration was established by the authority of the Council of Nice. What ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... leather covering richly ornamented, and occasionally its interior was divided into compartments; but whatever the details of its construction it was always readily portable. Towards the end of the 17th century the name fell into desuetude, and was replaced by "coffer" (q.v.), which probably accounts for its misuse by the French romantic writers of the early 19th century. They applied it to almost any antique buffet, cupboard or wardrobe, and its use has now ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... woman is at heart a decadent. Otto Weininger certainly thought so. I have always regretted that the male sex was precluded by prejudice from following their example. I regret somewhat acutely the desuetude of the periwig. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross

... falling into desuetude is the waits, who originally were musical watchmen, who had to give practical evidence of their vigilance by playing on the hautboy, or flageolet, at stated times during the night. In the household of Edward IV. there is mentioned ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton

... of the present generation may find it difficult to understand. The truth is that some invidious privileges of peerage which have since been abolished, and others which have since fallen into entire desuetude, were then in full force, and were daily used. No gentleman who had had a dispute with a nobleman could think, without indignation, of the advantages enjoyed by the favoured caste. If His Lordship were sued at law, his privilege enabled him to impede the course of justice. If a rude word were spoken ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... the town was the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, which, after having fallen into desuetude for many years, has been revived in a form appropriate to modern needs, and housed in a worthy building, formally opened by Sir Francis Blake on November 2nd, 1910. The site on which the new Grammar School ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry

... merchant) against all traversers in covin and trespassers acting in contravention of bylaws and regulations, all resuscitators (by trespass and petty larceny of kindlings) of venville rights, obsolete by desuetude, all orotund instigators of international persecution, all perpetuators of international animosities, all menial molestors of domestic conviviality, all recalcitrant violators ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... than the rich delight which comes of passing time with a literary gem. Lamb pictures "The South Sea House" as it was when he knew it thirty years earlier—he speaks of it as forty years. There is a presentation of the old place, fallen more or less completely upon days of desuetude, with some wonderfully-limned portraits of the officials. Here is the deputy-cashier, ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold

... thing; but England had to put up with it. Now, in the case of Madagascar, the formalities had originally been observed, but by neglect they had fallen into desuetude ages ago. England should have snatched Madagascar from the French clothes-line. Without an effort she could have saved those harmless natives from the calamity of French civilization, and she did not do it. Now it is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... decompose, decorous, dedicatory, deduction, deferential, deficiency, deglutition, dehiscence, delectable, delete, deleterious, delineate, deliquescent, demarcation, demimonde, demoniac, denizen, denouement, deprecate, depreciate, derelict, derogatory, despicable, desuetude, desultory, deteriorate, diacritical, diagnosis, diaphanous, diatribe, didactic, diffusive, dilatory, dilettante, dipsomania, dirigible, discommode, discretionary, discursive, disintegrate, disparity, dispensable, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... Free Trade League bristled up at this resurgence of the protectionist champions, but Disraeli was too wise to invite a renewal of that contest which the voice of the nation had settled, and the subject was left to lapse into innocuous desuetude for half a century. Representing but a minority in Parliament, the ministry could maintain itself but a few months. December, 1852, found the Whigs again in power, where they remained until 1859, Disraeli using his talents the while to build up and consolidate the Tory opposition and ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... small, could be observed by but three or four persons at once. It was Mr. D'Almeida, a French physicist, who toward the same epoch solved the problem in a most admirable manner, and we cannot explain why his process (that required no special apparatus) fell into the desuetude from which Mr. Molteni has just rescued it and obtained ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various

... two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of old observances, this custom of solemnizing our proper birth-day hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand any thing in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of a New Year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... my lord, thy servant Akkullanu. Peace be to the king, my lord. Nabu and Marduk be gracious to the king, my lord. In the long desuetude of the customary rights of Ashur, regarding which the king, my lord, sent word to his servant, saying, "Who among the magnates have not complied, have not given, be it much or little (their default)," ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns

... learned doctor of medicine, able to give a name to all diseases from which men have imagined that they suffered, and to invent new ones for those who are tired of vulgar maladies. But all their learning is forgotten, their cares and controversies are laid aside, in "innocuous desuetude." The Summer School of Sociology is assembled. The Medical Congress is ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke

... into death or desuetude while her children are young, it certainly is the bounden duty of some member of her family to support her until her children are old enough to go to school, for no one can take her place in the home before that period. Moreover, ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... appointments of the palatial supper-hall, within twenty-four hours the lacerating indignation of Mr. Watterson and the trenchant raillery of Mr. Bryan had let the tumid pretentiousness all out of it, and it had collapsed into a flaccid and "innocuous desuetude." The "star-eyed goddess" turned her back upon it, the "wild-orbed anarch" snapped his fingers at it, and even everyday Mrs. Grundy laughed it to scorn. Projected with the most alluring and satisfying expectations, the feast has dwindled to the memory of ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... de l'an," as the French call the first day of January, is indeed the principal day of the year to those who still keep up the custom of calling and receiving calls. But in New York it is a custom which is in danger of falling into desuetude, owing to the size of the city and the growth of its population. There are, however, other towns and "much country" (as the Indians say) outside of New York, and there are still hospitable boards at which the happy and the light-hearted, the gay and the ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... It is not only one of the "show places", which every traveller from afar is supposed to visit as something of a duty, but it is a place that conveys impressions of beauty and restfulness in a way that few others can. It remains ancient without having lapsed into a state of desuetude that leaves everything to the imagination; it is a living whole far from any of the garishness that belongs to contemporaneity. Whether seen from the outside on the west, where the warm red brick, the varied roofs, the clustered decorative chimneys suggestive of the Tudor time make a rich and ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold

... it arose out of the custom of slaying slaves on the death of a chief, in order that they might accompany and serve him on his journey to the other world. We have pointed out several reasons for believing that this practice was formerly general, and that it has fallen into desuetude, but is hardly yet quite extinct. It is obvious that since the soul of the dead man is regarded as hovering in the neighbourhood of the body for some little time after its death, it would be felt that the despatch of a companion soul was not a matter of immediate urgency; and ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... Harmony Jail, in miserly holding. Bare of paint, bare of paper on the walls, bare of furniture, bare of experience of human life. Whatever is built by man for man's occupation, must, like natural creations, fulfil the intention of its existence, or soon perish. This old house had wasted—more from desuetude than it would have wasted from use, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... the present time." The same words might be applied to Sousa's marches with equal justice. They have served also for dance music, and the two-step, borne into vogue by Sousa's music, has driven the waltz almost into desuetude. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... repeated impressions. In reading Hakluyt's Voyages, we are almost startled now and then to find that even common sailors could not tell the story of their wanderings without rising to an almost Odyssean strain, and habitually used a diction that we should be glad to buy back from desuetude at any cost. Those who look upon language only as anatomists of its structure, or who regard it as only a means of conveying abstract truth from mind to mind, as if it were so many algebraic formulae, are apt to overlook the fact that its being alive is all that gives it poetic value. We do not ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... the request of white immigrants for the exclusion of Negroes from that section, came the demand to solve the problem by enforcing the "Black Laws." Among certain indulgent officials these enactments had been allowed to fall into desuetude. These very demands, however, brought forward friends as well as enemies of the colored people. Their first clash was testing the constitutionality of the law of 1807. When the question came up before the Supreme Court, this measure was upheld.[22] Encouraged by such support, the foes of the Negroes ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various

... fall of the republic indifference spread, the temples were abandoned and threatened to tumble into ruins, the clergy found it difficult to recruit members, the festivities, once so popular, fell into desuetude, and {38} Varro, at the beginning of his Antiquities, expressed his fear lest "the gods might perish, not from the blows of foreign enemies, but from very neglect on the part of the citizens."[21] ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... Richardson fell into desuetude; it is many years since he became the novelist not of the world at large but of that inconsiderable section of the world which is interested in literature. His methods are those of a bygone epoch; his ideals, with one or two exceptions, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... imprimatur in question has fallen into desuetude, it is, as we all know, the commonest of things for the introductions to works of science to occupy some often considerable part of their space with acknowledgments of assistance given by learned friends who ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... in the vicissitudes of the city. After the fall of the Western Empire, about the beginning of the sixth century, when it was finally repaired by Theodoric, it fell into desuetude. The people, owing to the unsettled state of the country, were afraid to move from home. A grievous apathy took possession of all classes; agriculture was neglected, and the drains being stopped up, the line of route was inundated, and the road, especially on the low levels, became ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... Hepsey's demands, but the vestry blustered and scolded, because they had not been consulted in the matter, until Hepsey said she would be glad to receive any contribution they might choose to offer; then they relapsed into innocuous desuetude and talked crops. ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott

... the point that he almost persuaded me, until I had left him and reason returned. It took me some time to recover from the pathos of the thing: a man so long deprived of that simple luxury that he had quite forgotten how it looked, and a set of cows utterly incapable, from desuetude, ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell

... for two years" and that "London is interested in, and not a little intrigued, by the statement." This use of intrigue in the sense of "perplex, puzzle, trick, or deceive" dates from 1600. Then it fell into a state of somnolence, and after an existence of innocuous desuetude lasting till 1794 it was revived, only to hibernate again until 1894. It owes its new lease of life to a writer on The Westminster Gazette, a London journal famous for its competitions in aid of the restoring of the ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser

... orders. The trouble is that they are so situated in life that they cannot hold together, unless they are in a shirtwaist factory and join a labour union. The great majority are confined, one in a house, or in the innocuous desuetude of society, where there is no bond of common interest, but violent feminine competition. They have no issue which unites them; they do not hold together. They do well to hold the men. This keeps them anxious, tearful, deceitful, ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris

... the Beni Amer on the shores of the Red Sea and in the Barka valley, which is the more remarkable as mother-descent has fallen into desuetude under the influence of Islamism. (Hartland, Vol. I. p. ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... in affairs is that of preparation for eventual hostilities, defensive or offensive. Except for the contingency of eventual hostilities, no national establishment could be kept in countenance. They would all fall into the decay of desuetude, just as has happened to the dynastic establishments among those peoples who have (passably) lost the spirit of ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... evidence is directly upon record. The principal facts, however, which enable us to draw an inference of high probability, are associated with so pleasing and so exemplary a custom, though now indeed fallen into great desuetude among us, that to review them compensates for any disappointment which might be felt from the want of absolute certainty in the issue of our research. It was Henry of Bolinbroke's custom[6] every year on the Feast of the Lord's ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler

... "dark circle" went into desuetude, and Spiritualism, as a cult, declined. Accepting the broad conclusion of a life after death, and with no very clear demonstration as to exactly where, or how, the ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck

... AVOCADO PEAR between Fanny and me, a ship's biscuit for the guidman, white bread for the Missis, and red wine for the twa. No salt horse, even, in all Vailima! After dinner Henry came, and I began to teach him decimals; you wouldn't think I knew them myself after so long desuetude! ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... mind that rules and directs us do, if it be relaxed in sleep or drowned in wine or crushed beneath the weight of disease? Nay, as the sword acquires its sheen by usage, and rusts if it lie idle, so the voice is dulled by its long torpor if it be hidden in the sheath of silence. Desuetude must needs beget sloth, and sloth decay. If the tragic actor declaim not daily, the resonance of his voice is dulled and its channels grow hoarse. Wherefore he purges his huskiness by loud and repeated recitation. However, it is vain toil and useless labour[59] for a man to attempt ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius

... fewer to-day than usual—only twelve of them. Of these, eight had only impracticable schemes to propose. In fact, one of them wanted to revive painting, an art fallen into desuetude owing to the progress made in color-photography. Another, a physician, boasted that he had discovered a cure for nasal catarrh! These impracticables were dismissed in short order. Of the four projects favorably received, the first was that of a young ...
— In the Year 2889 • Jules Verne and Michel Verne

... service, utilization, exploitation; necessity, need; utility, avail, advantage, usefulness, service; custom, usage, practice. Antonyms: disuse, obsolescence, desuetude, inutility. Associated Words: obsolescent, obsolete, obsoletism, utilitarian, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... nundinum) was of eight days, the last being the market day on which the citizens rested from agricultural labour and came into town to sell and buy and talk politics. Cf. Pliny, XVIII, 3. This custom which Varro regrets had fallen into desuetude so far as Rome was concerned was in his day still practised in the provinces. Thus the five tenants on Horace's Sabine farm were wont to go every nundinum to the market town of Varia (the modern Vicovaro) to transact public ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato

... sometimes the prophecy of better things. To affect dislike of pie is something. We have no statistics on the subject, and cannot tell whether it is gaining or losing in the country at large. Its disappearance in select circles is no test. The amount of writing against it is no more test of its desuetude, than the number of religious tracts distributed in a given district is a criterion of its piety. We are apt to assume that certain regions are substantially free of it. Herbert and I, traveling north one summer, fancied that we could draw in New England ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... moved rapidly northward on the footway beside the western tracks, and so gained the old station on the west side of Fifty-eighth Street, for years dedicated to the uses of desuetude. Through this he crept, then down the stairs, encountering at the lower landing an iron gate which obliged him to ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph

... of November. On the first night of the feast the tombs of the dead during the past year are adorned with Japanese lanterns. On the second night the remaining tombs are likewise decorated, while on the third night it is the custom, although it is now somewhat falling into desuetude, for the relatives of the dead to launch toy vessels made of straw laden with fruit and coins as well as a lantern. These toy ships have toy sails, and the dead are supposed to sail in them to oblivion until next year's festival. These toy ships, ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... which might interest the student concerns the revival of lace, which transpired so early as 1905. Curiously enough, this dainty adjunct to the attire had fallen into desuetude among women. More curiously still, it remained for the sterner sex to revive it. For it was in that year that the backbone of stiff white collars and cuffs was broken. A material being sought which would weather the existing atmospheric conditions, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... All that eclipsed it having been taken away, you will see the light of day direct. Orisons, rites, bibles, formulas, refract and decompose the sacred light. A dogma is a dark chamber. Through a religion you see the solar spectre of God, but not God. Desuetude and crumbling enhance the grandeur of a temple. As human religion retires from this mysterious and jealous edifice, divine religion enters it. Let solitude reign in it and you will feel heaven there. A sanctuary deserted and in ruins, ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... the silver Collar of SS. belongs to every head of a family of ancient esquirage quality, bearing arms. It is true, the fashion of wearing the collar, whether gold or silver, may be said to have been in desuetude for centuries. But rights of blood never prescribe; and there are strong grounds to believe that there will again be a general revival of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various

... free persons whose services have been made away to another by their own ancestor, it is mancipium—over a wife, it is still manus. The old word, it will be perceived, has not altogether fallen into desuetude, but is confined to one very special exercise of the authority it had formerly denoted. This example will enable us to comprehend the nature of the historical alliance between Contracts and Conveyances. There seems to have been one solemn ceremonial at first for all solemn transactions, and ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

... Bep and Fom, in the midst of a finger conversation carried on politely with a deaf-and-dumb alphabet, had had their attention attracted by the ghastly word-picture made so vivid by their father's voice. So, wearying of the innocuous desuetude of things, it occurred to them to present for Frank's entertainment a bodily representation of what the words meant to their minds. Safe in the obscurity of the table-cloth's circular shadow, down on the floor they wriggled, they prowled, they cowered and gloated and expanded their ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson

... central doorway ... preparatory to a pilgrimage to collect alms at the houses of the leading inhabitants. This old custom, which has been observed for nearly three hundred years, it is safe to say, will not fall into desuetude, for it usually results in each poor widow realising a gold coin." In the north of England first-footing on New Year's Eve is common, and a dark-complexioned person is esteemed as a herald of good fortune. Wassailing exists in ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield

... Chesterfield. It was thronged with elegant ladies and gentlemen. The daughter of the happy household was playing and singing Verdi's "Ah! I have sighed to rest me;" the fond mother was turning the pages; the fond father was sighing and resting up stairs, in a state of innocuous desuetude, produced by the "music" of old Kentucky Bourbon; but he could not withstand the power of the melody below. Quickly he donned his clothing; he put his vest on over his coat; put his collar on hind side ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor

... Ring" before the wedding day; and in those times the priest, previously to the ring being put on, always made careful inquiry whether it had been duly blessed. It would seem to be the wish of certain clergymen, who have of late brought back into use many ceremonial observances that had fallen into desuetude, to revive this ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge

... was originated, that particular corner was called "the infernal box," but the name has fallen into desuetude since the dedication of the fine monument of M. Gamier. Nevertheless, as it is counted a high privilege to be numbered among these select subscribers, changes are rare among them; besides, the members are not, as a rule, men in their first youth. They have seen, within ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... the national spirit and some political life by beginning again the old March parades of the Franks, which had fallen into desuetude under the last Merovingians. Lastly, and this was, perhaps, his most original merit, he understood of what importance, for the Frankish kingdom, was the conversion to Christianity of the Germanic peoples over the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... were buried with the weapons and ornaments they would like to use in the new life which had begun for them. The tomb was then filled in with sand, with which care was taken to mix plenty of red ochre. It is difficult not to conclude that this was a relic of a rite fallen into desuetude. ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac

... value in bringing vividly before me the grand old times when the sovereign and nobles were accustomed to use the Thames as the high street of the metropolis, and join in pompous processions upon it; whereas, the desuetude of such customs, nowadays, has caused the whole show of river-life to consist in a multitude of smoke-begrimed steamers. An analogous change has taken place in the streets, where cabs and the omnibus have crowded out a rich variety of vehicles; and thus ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... well and I had a lucrative business. I had been so busy for several months that all my symptoms had sunk into desuetude. I had almost forgotten that I was an invalid and that I should take care of my precious health, what little I had left, when the thought occurred to me, as it had several years before, that I was working too hard. Then, too, I became a little ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs

... Plays live on his fees from these plays alone; and if he could how long would his post survive the discredit of licensing only pornographic plays? It is clear to me that the Examiner would be starved out of existence, and the censorship perish of desuetude. Perhaps that is exactly what the Select Committee contemplated. If so, I have nothing more to say, except that I think sudden death would be ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw

... German chemist, Victor Meyer, in 1886, but he found it so dangerous to work with that he abandoned the investigation. Nobody else cared to take it up, for nobody could see any use for it. So it remained in innocuous desuetude, a mere name in "Beilstein's Dictionary," together with the thousands of other organic compounds that have been invented and never utilized. But on July 12, 1917, the British holding the line at Ypres were besprinkled with this villainous substance. Its success was so great that the Germans henceforth ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... sham sentiment, sham religion, sham art, sham morality. We have a Parliament that sits and jabbers lengthy platitudes that lead to nothing, while Army and Navy are slowly slipping into a state of helpless desuetude, and the mutterings of discontented millions are almost unregarded; the spectre of Revolution, assuming somewhat of the shape in which it appalled the French in 1789, is dimly approaching in the distance, . . even our London County Council ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... halcyon Georgian and Victorian days the right inherent in every sovereign Government to call upon its subjects for national service sank into forgetfulness, the ancient military obligations of Englishmen fell into desuetude, and voluntarism ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... in recent years by the various tribes now gathered on the reserves. But during these last months of unrest it was suspected by the Police that the ancient uses of these caves had been revived and that the rites long since fallen into desuetude were once more ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor

... of January 13th was employed in the performance of the usual ceremonies on crossing the line, a custom now happily falling into desuetude—I allude to it merely for the purpose of mentioning its unfortunate consequences in the present instance; for, although the whole proceeding was conducted with the greatest good humour, we had soon afterwards to lament the occurrence of a fatal ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray

... apoplexy threatened. His ears showed red as a turkey's wattles. He stumbled on the ill-paved path. What! To be lectured thus by a man whose continued residence on the Islands was a public scandal—a fellow who, past all usefulness, lived on in lazy desuetude, content to take the taxpayers' money while doing nothing in return! And the worst—the gall, the wormwood of it—was that this despised foe had silenced him—nay, had silenced him almost contemptuously. "But wait a bit, my fine fellow!" swore the Lord Proprietor, blundering down the hill. ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... — N. desuetude, disusage[obs3]; obsolescence, disuse &c. 678; want of habit, want of practice; inusitation[obs3]; newness to; new brooms. infraction of usage &c. (unconformity) 83; nonprevalence[obs3]; "a custom more honored in the breach than the observance" ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... wife of Philippe de Valois. Again it is thought to have been a sort of royal attachment to the Abbaye de Royaumont, built near by, by Saint Louis. This quaintly charming manor of minute dimensions was a tangible, habitable abode in 1333, but for generations after appears to have fallen into desuetude. A mill grew up on the site, and again the walls of a chateau obliterated the more mundane, work-a-day mill. The Duc de Bourbon restored the whole place in 1826 that it might serve him and his ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield

... you have nothing to fear. This is the mere revival of an old claim, too vast to be allowed to lapse from desuetude. Your documents you say ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli

... for all to read. Should there be any bardic passage in which Ogham inscriptions are alluded to as if an obscure form of writing, the natural explanation is, that this kind of writing was passing or had passed into desuetude at the time that particular passage was composed; but I have never met with any such. The ancient bard, who, in the Tan-bo-Cooalney, describes the slaughter of Cailitin and his sons by Cuculain, states that there was an inscription to that effect, written ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady

... operative. As he offered a higher rent than the bailiff could elsewhere obtain, and as the bailiff was desirous to get credit with Mr. Carr Vipont for improving the property, by reviving thereon an art which had fallen into desuetude, the bargain was struck, provided the candidate, being a stranger to the place, could furnish the bailiff with any satisfactory reference. Waife had gone away, saying he should shortly return with the requisite ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... jurisdiction of the Pope was abrogated in that kingdom. So when the colonists of Massachusetts established "a Church without a bishop and a State without a king," so much of the Canon Law as relates to diocesan episcopacy also fell into what President Cleveland would call "innocuous desuetude." But they adopted the decalogue of Moses with as much reverence as did their fathers before them. They knew as well as the poet Lowell that "The Ten Commandments will not budge," but that, vitalized by the ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various

... upon the symbol of the lamb, it is a historical fact that for centuries after the beginning of our era, the Christians paid homage to the Lord under the symbol of the fish; but ultimately going into desuetude, the lamb was retained as the distinguishing symbol of the Christian religion until the year 680, at which date another was substituted, as will be ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill

... era of prosperity, the land in front of it to the water's edge, and indeed for a considerable space on all sides had been clear—laid out, no doubt, in grassy lawns, croquet grounds and tennis courts; but in the long years of its desuetude these had reverted to the primitive character of the main portion of the island, to a tangle of undergrowth and shrubbery sprinkled with scrub-oak and stunted pines. In one spot only, a meagre ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance

... ploughs, and the enforcement of labour, which is an old charge against planters, was unknown; and the payment of tribute, common under the old feudal system, and styled furmaish, had been allowed to fall into desuetude. The NATIVE Zemindars or landholders however, still jealously maintain their rights, and harsh exactions were often made by them on the cultivators on the occasions of domestic events, such as births, marriages, deaths, and such like, in the families of the landowners. ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... Orleans there is a famous old saloon called the Sazeraz. For fifty-four years it stood open to the thirsty public. Then the City Council passed a Sunday-closing ordinance, and with the enforcement of this law came the discovery that through innocuous desuetude the hinges of the doors to the Sazeraz had rusted off, while the doors themselves had become so worm-eaten that they had to be replaced by new ones. The sheriff who pounced down on Billy Boyle's in his official capacity must have fancied he had struck a second Sazeraz, for the lock upon the door ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... them a "terrible letting alone." The auctioneer stated on what account they were there, to be sold, asked for bidders, winked his eye and said "no bidders." Our goods were sent back to our store. This law, in the words of a distinguished Statesman, was then allowed to relapse "into innocuous desuetude." No further attempts to enforce it upon colored men ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

... pomp at eleven. Then again, it is said that the monks have allowed the panegyric to drop. That too is not the case; it was not they but the Florentines who were pledged to this pious office, and it is the laity alone who have allowed it to fall into desuetude." ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton

... would have to be summarily set aside for future revision, if not for sweeping rejection. All our ideas of life, materiality, spirituality, animality, vegetability, sensibility, etc., would have to fall into greater or less desuetude, the language disappearing with the ideas. All the words expressing our ideas of a superhuman agency, of God, angels, heaven, revelation, religious doctrines, sentiments, acts of worship, piety, human accountability to divine institutions, rites, ceremonies, etc.,—to say nothing ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... the point was for a time maintained; thereafter the centrifugal tendency in Protestantism resulted in such a wealth of mutually antagonistic sects that the application of the principle became impracticable, and for this, as well as for more fundamental reasons, it fell into desuetude. The condition is as difficult today for the process of denominational fission has gone steadily forward, and as this energy of the religious influence weakens the strenuosity of maintenance strengthens. With our 157 varieties of ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... chimerical stuff—the kind of stuff, that, with youth, takes the place of the recently discarded nursery fiction. I think of the hundreds of women that I have loved, beginning in my early boyhood, passing through my adolescence to the acme of my powers, and even now as I stand on the verge of my desuetude! Surely some one of these many women would have been constant, if women have any constancy in their make-up. Show me a woman howling out her life on my grave, and then I'll believe Bainbridge. But I know all about ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... it had created a substitute for the old ecclesiastical council, that was called together from the neighboring ministers and churches whenever a minister was to be inducted into office. That method was costly and had dropped into desuetude; but the new method of a committee of fellowship saved true Congregational methods and freed the churches from unworthy men. At this session the committee reported that it had adopted a uniform plan of action; but a resolution was passed recommending that each local conference establish its own ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... woman of those whom she holds to be her inferiors cries to Heaven. Her heartless detention of railway porters staggering under their burdens, her browbeating of "tradespeople," cause this observer of fine susceptibilities and an acute sense of the becoming to lament the desuetude of the ducking-stool. The more general outrage, however, apparently common to the sex from Helen of Troy to Florence Nightingale, is, according to our censor, the spite of women towards each other, which mounts into an ecstasy of rudeness when ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis

... this is a right which cannot be abrogated by desuetude, and the sum of one pound per annum is still chargeable for charitable purposes on ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

... akin to it, so far as they survived into the last century, had in reality little or nothing to do with the irreligion and neglect of which the century has been sorely, and not causelessly accused. Rather, they were the relics of customs which had not very long fallen into desuetude. The time had been, and was not so very long past, when the stalls and bazaars of St. Paul's Cathedral did but illustrate on a large scale what might be seen on certain days in almost all the churches of the kingdom. Our forefathers in the Middle Ages drew a broad line of distinction between ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... provision trade, were all deliberately strangled. And besides the loss of wealth to Ireland which was the consequence, one must take into account the fact that traditions of commercial enterprise perished through desuetude, so that in the industrial revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth century Ireland was too severely crippled to derive any benefit from the new order, as to which she was still further handicapped by the ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell

... and dissaffection unto the cause and people of God in these nations. After which they never had a day to prosper; for by contending against malignants, and yet at the same time vowing and praying for the head of malignants they not only had malignants and sectaries to fight with, but also made a desuetude unto their former attainments, and so came to contend with one another, until prelacy proved their utter ruin at last. It is objected that king Charles was a good natured man, and that the extermination ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... where the old false impressions came from. The picture of university work that recent historical research has given us shows us professors and students busy with science in every department, making magnificent advances, many of which were afterwards forgotten, or at least allowed to lapse into desuetude. ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh

... side of Cairo—on the other bank of the Nile, amongst the verdure of the palm-trees, that we must look for the suburb in course of transformation, with its villas of the invading foreigner, and the myriad electric lights along its motor roads. On this side there is no such fear; the peace and desuetude are eternal; and the winding sheet of the Arabian sands is ready always ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... the real representative of the whole body social—the seizure of the means of production in the name of society—is also its last independent act as State. The interference of the State in social relations becomes superfluous in one domain after another and falls of itself into desuetude. The place of a government over persons is taken by the administration of things and the conduct of the processes of production. The State is not 'abolished,' it dies out."[1035] "The representatives ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... fact, to my mind, a house of hewed tulip-logs, with liberal stone chimneys and heavy oaken doors, embowered in an old gnarled apple-and cherry-orchard, always suggests a sort of simple honesty and hospitality long since fallen into desuetude, but once the most marked characteristic of the American people. It is hard to imagine any meanness or illiberality being generated in such a house. Patriotism, domestic fidelity, and spotless honesty used to sit before those broad fireplaces ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various

... marked out by Solon. The illustrious Pericles underwent innumerable attacks both from the orators in the assembly and from the comic writers in the theatre. And among these sarcasms on the political tendencies of the day we are probably to number the complaint, breathed by the poet Cratinus, of the desuetude into which both Solon and Draco had fallen—"I swear (said he in a fragment of one of his comedies) by Solon and Draco, whose wooden tablets (of laws) are now employed by people to roast their barley." ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various

... Voyages, we are almost startled now and then to find that even common sailors could not tell the story of their wanderings without rising to an almost Odyssean strain, and habitually used a diction that we should be glad to buy back from desuetude at any cost." ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... longer the dupe of his own artifice, and cannot deal playfully with truths that are a matter of bitter concern to him in his life. And hence, in the progressive centralisation of modern thought, we should expect the old form of fable to fall gradually into desuetude, and be gradually succeeded by another, which is a fable in all points except that it is not altogether fabulous. And this new form, such as we should expect, and such as we do indeed find, still presents ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... system. Solicitors will be a necessity only so long as they are in the field, but fifty years of life insurance has taught our community its true value and, thanks to the modern press, the institution it is no more likely to fall into desuetude than is Christianity or the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various

... captivated me. The cosy "settin'-room," with a "pie closet" and an upper tiny cupboard known as a "rum closet" and its pretty fire place—bricked up, but capable of being rescued from such prosaic "desuetude"; a large sunny dining-room, with a brick oven, an oven suggestive of brown bread and baked beans—yes, the baked beans of my childhood, that adorned the breakfast table on a Sunday morning, cooked with just a little molasses and a square piece of crisp salt pork in center, a ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn

... Great Charter orders a general summons to be issued through the Sheriff to all direct tenants of the Crown. The provision was probably intended to rouse the lesser Baronage to the exercise of rights which had practically passed into desuetude, but as the clause is omitted in later issues of the Charter we may doubt whether the principle it embodied ever received more than a very limited application. There are traces of the attendance of a few of the lesser knighthood, gentry perhaps of the neighbourhood ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... first Athletic Association of the University. This was the organization responsible for the student fund for the Gymnasium. But successful as the new organization proved in financial matters, it soon fell into the almost inevitable desuetude of so many student undertakings and finally, in 1884, fell "victim of the football and baseball teams which ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw

... Perker said, "put Mr. Pickwick's friends in the students' box. Mr. Pickwick had better sit by me." This useful provision for the instruction of legal probationers has fallen into desuetude—no place is reserved for the students now-a-days. Lord Campbell describes the custom and recalls an incident that occurred when he was sitting in the students' box, ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald

... time no word of him had come to her. Blake had heard. But no word had he said to Kathryn, because of the things that he had heard. A man of the breadth of acquaintance, of the breadth of interests, that was John Schuyler's may not fall to desuetude unwatchful. And Blake heard, at clubs, at theatres, wherever men congregate, of Schuyler, and of the life that was his. And he, as ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne

... ringing, as the young people passed through the quiet streets. The custom of ringing a bell, at that hour, is one which has fallen into desuetude, although, once, almost universal in New England, and may be said to bear some relation to the vesper-bell, in Roman Catholic countries. Its avowed object, indeed, was not, as in the case of the ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... some and regulating the output of others, were making every effort to restrict production, control prices, and monopolize the business." It was obviously necessary that the Sherman act, unless it were to pass into innocuous desuetude, should have the original vigor intended by Congress restored to it by a new interpretation of the law on the part of the Supreme Court. Fortunately an opportunity for such a change presented itself with promptness. A small group of powerful financiers had arranged to ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland

... immediate relations, and of other people's also. Parents are very frequently called the mother of so and so (the child's name being mentioned), or the father of so and so, cf. Ka kmi ka Weri, U kpa u Philip. The actual names of the parents, after falling into desuetude, are often entirely forgotten. The origin of the practice may be that the Khasis, like the Alfoors, were reluctant to mention their parents by name for fear of attracting the notice of evil spirits. The practice of teknonomy, however, is not confined to the Khasis or the Alfoors of Celebes ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon

... The inquisitors were not content with those who denounced themselves. Every possible means was employed to discover heretics, and to assist the object Philip renewed a royal ordinance—fallen into desuetude— allowing to informers the fourth part of the property of those guilty of heresy. This abominable edict greatly increased the zeal and activity of the vile tribe. Pope Paul the Fourth also assisted with eagerness in the object, and issued ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston

... allowed, but it had ceased by long disuse. If any one will run over the pages of Comyn's Digest or any other such book, title "Prerogative," he will find the Queen has a hundred such powers which waver between reality and desuetude, and which would cause a protracted and very interesting legal argument if she tried to exercise them. Some good lawyer ought to write a careful book to say which of these powers are really usable, and ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot

... that nepotism fell into desuetude at the commencement of the eighteenth century; but there was nothing to prevent Pius IX. from bringing it into fashion again, after the example of Pius VI., if he chose; but he does not choose to do so. His relations are of the second ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About

... individual, who for years has never known what rest meant, and who has fidgeted when he could not work, finds himself relaxing, against his will, into a condition of what a celebrated statesman described as "innocuous desuetude." The balminess of the air, which is at once warm and invigorating and bracing, without being severe, brings about a natural feeling of rest. The fascination which this creates soon becomes overpowering. The longer the visitor remains the more completely and hopelessly ...
— My Native Land • James Cox

... on our little home, no man appeared to pay them for us. Had I been condemned to death I would not have expected a man to startup and take my place. Susan B. Anthony—she of the senatorial mind—will be remembered when the politicians of today have long been doomed to 'innocuous desuetude.'" Miss Willard then quoted a few familiar lines ending with the sentence, "And Susan B. Anthony has been ordained of God ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... most honest and thrifty of men, instead of one of the most dishonest and extravagant, he must have found his financial position a very difficult one. He was poorer than Cromwell. The feudal taxation had fallen into desuetude. To revive wardships, etc., was impossible, to recover arrears hopeless. There was nothing for it but scientific taxation. One of his first Acts contains a schedule of taxed articles extending over fifteen double-columned ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell

... unconscious[150] reformation; it is not supposed therefore that the primeval savage detected more pronounced signs of degeneracy in the offspring of one class of union and by the force of public opinion caused such unions to fall into disrepute and ultimately into desuetude. So far as can be seen the method which Mr Morgan had in his mind was this: certain unions resulted in offspring less able to maintain the struggle for existence, and these families consequently tended to die out. Other unions—those of sisters and brothers—on the other hand produced more ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas

... feared or respected in their lifetime. On the other hand, when men have been long dead, and all who knew them have also been gathered to their fathers, their memory fades away and with it their worship gradually falls into complete desuetude. Thus the spirits who receive the homage of these savages were real men of flesh and blood, not mythical beings conjured up by the fancy of their worshippers, which some legerdemain of the mind has foisted into the shrine and encircled with ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... What would become of him in this Paris where he had neither family nor friends? No bond united him to the Saint-Germain quarters now in its dotage, scaling into the dust of desuetude, buried in a new society like an empty husk. And what contact could exist between him and that bourgeois class which had gradually climbed up, profiting by all the disasters to grow rich, making use of all the catastrophes ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... the nineteenth century the snuff-box which once upon a time stood upon the mantelpiece of every club, had disappeared. The habit of snuffing had long been falling into desuetude. The cigar dealt the snuff-box its death-blow and the cigarette was chief mourner at ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson

... which justly belonged to the Emperor. At the same time, his responsibility for the unutterable woe caused by the continuance of the scheme is not a jot diminished. There was a time when the whole system had fallen into comparative desuetude. It was utterly abhorrent to the institutions and the manners of the Netherlanders. Even a great number of the Catholics in the provinces were averse to it. Many of the leading grandees, every one of whom was Catholic were foremost in denouncing its continuance. In short, the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... have made its design, at any rate, almost as familiar now as Boccaccio's tale itself. There are some divergences, however, in the two versions. Boccaccio's tale is a tale of spring; Sir Frederic, the better to carry out his conception of the drowsy desuetude of sleep, and of that sense of pleasant but absolute weariness which one associates with the season of hot days and short nights, has changed the spring into that riper summer-time which is on the verge of autumn; and that hour of late sunset which is on the verge of night. ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys

... however, that there were no tombs within the city. Some appear to have been included by the gradual extension of the walls; others were established in those intervals when the law of the twelve tables fell, as we have said, into desuetude; nor does it appear that these were destroyed, nor their contents removed. Thus both the Claudian and the Cincian clans had sepulchres in Rome, the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... that singular edifice! For the rest, their privileges every way are now much curtailed. That law authorizing a Seigneur, as he returned from hunting, to kill not more than two Serfs, and refresh his feet in their warm blood and bowels, has fallen into perfect desuetude,—and even into incredibility; for if Deputy Lapoule can believe in it, and call for the abrogation of it, so cannot we. (Histoire de la Revolution Francaise, par Deux Amis de la Liberte (Paris, 1793), ii. 212.) No Charolois, for these last fifty years, though never so fond of shooting, has been ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... word "anew" (de nouo) seems to indicate St. Bernard's belief that it was only in comparatively recent times that the usages to which he refers had fallen into desuetude. ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor

... was as ancient, legal, and recognised an order as the order of the nobility; that it had distinct rights and privileges, though for centuries they had been invaded and violated, and permitted to fall into desuetude. He impressed upon the Duke that the parochial constitution of this country was more important than its political constitution; that it was more ancient, more universal in its influence; and that this parochial constitution had already been shaken to its centre by the New ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... reunited the dominions of Kalu, Ur, Orchoe, Erikhi, Larsa,[1] Kullab, Kisik, the dwelling-place of the god Laguda; I have subdued their inhabitants. As to the laws of Sumer[2] and of the town of Harran, which had fallen into desuetude from the most ancient times, I have restored to fresh ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous

... shoot madly from their spheres on such occasions! Well might the devil laugh if such were the case! How he would chuckle to behold globes and seas, and empires, fall into such irreverend antics because some poor earthling, be he kingling or common sodling, goes into desuetude, either by the operation of natural laws, or the sharp application of steel or shot! Verily, it makes precious little difference to the Great Reaper, by what process we finally become harvested. He is sure ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... it all seems to us now, and yet its very simplicity is its sublimest feature, for it was this which compelled the admiration of scientists and practical men of affairs alike, and which gradually forced into desuetude all other systems of telegraphy until to-day the ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse

... great extent, was not entirely unknown in the neighborhood. Several planters thereabouts had attempted it on a commercial scale, in former years, with greater or less success; but like most Southern industries, it had felt the blight of war and had fallen into desuetude. ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt

... corner stood an oak spinning-wheel, more than centenarian in age, fallen into hopeless desuetude, but gay with the strings of scarlet pepper pods hung up to dry, and twined among its silent spokes. On a trivet provided with lizard feet that threatened to crawl away, rested a copper kettle bereft of its top, once the idol of three generations of Darringtons, to ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... glory, and a company of grammarians and commentators of no small merit could always be found in the service of the famous museum and library; but the whole aspect of world-history was rapidly changing. Greece, after her brief day of political supremacy, was sinking rapidly into desuetude, and the hard-headed Roman in the West was making himself master everywhere. While Hipparchus of Rhodes was in his prime, Corinth, the last stronghold of the main-land of Greece, had fallen before the prowess of the Roman, and the kingdom of the Ptolemies, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... the Duke of Norfolk, hereditary Earl Marshal, hoping to re-establish the court, employed Dr. Plott, the learned but credulous historian of Staffordshire, to collect the materials for a history of the court, which, however, was never completed. The court, which had outlived its age, fell into desuetude, and the last cause heard concerning the right of bearing arms (Blount versus Blunt) was tried in the year 1720 (George I.). In the old arbitrary times the Earl Marshal's men have been known to stop the carriage of a parvenu, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... n'existe pas dans l'edition anglaise: elle comprend, outre les mots tombes en desuetude, tous ceux qui offrent, pour le sens ou l'orthographe, quelque difference avec ...
— An Introductorie for to Lerne to Read, To Pronounce, and to Speke French Trewly • Anonymous

... sense the legal mind is. So Purcell played for Father Smith, and inevitably the organ built by Father Smith was thought the finer. This easy way of solving a difficult problem, though it has so much to recommend it to the legal mind, has fallen into desuetude, and is abandoned nowadays, even in that home of absurdities, the Temple. For the coronation of James II., Purcell superintended the setting-up of an extra or special organ in the Abbey; and for this he was granted L34 12s. out of the ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman

... institution would of itself soon pass away. Legislatures passed laws facilitating manumission,[1] many southerners emancipated their slaves to give them a better chance to improve their condition, regulations unfavorable to the assembly of Negroes for the dissemination of information almost fell into desuetude, a larger number of masters began to instruct their bondmen, and persons especially interested in these unfortunates found the objects ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson

... be safely restored to them. The problem of re-arrangement was a difficult one, and it was met in a manner peculiarly English. The practice of granting the conge d'elire to the chapters on the occurrence of a vacancy, which had fallen into desuetude, was again adopted, and the church resumed the forms of liberty: but the licence to elect a bishop was to be accompanied with the name of the person whom the chapter was required to elect; and if within twelve days the person so named had ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude

... received orders to muster 4,000 men and to revive the military shows on the eve of the Feasts of St. John the Baptist and St. Peter the Apostle as accustomed to be held in the days of Henry VIII. These displays had gradually fallen into desuetude; it was now the queen's policy to renew them.(1635) The citizens showed themselves equal to the emergency, and "mustered and skirmished" daily at Mile End and St. George's Field, so that in little more than a month they were in a fit state of discipline and training to appear ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe

... which acted, under the direction of the Senate, as the representatives of international law. It was through them that all treaties and all declarations of war had been made, but it seems probable that this custom had fallen into desuetude after the Punic wars, and that accordingly the college had lapsed into insignificance, if it had not died out altogether. But now as the first step in the rebuilding of the priesthoods Octavian restored ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter

... painful it must be to spend summer after summer in a world of reality, where the truth is so much more thrilling than any possible fiction that people are deprived of the pleasure of invention and the imagination falls into desuetude. At Narragansett every one is veneered for the occasion,—every seam, scar, and furrow is hidden by paint, powder, and rouge; the duchess may be a cook, but the count who is a butler gains nothing by ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... which rendered it penal for them to wear their glibs, and in consequence most of those present had them in full perfection around their heads, over which was worn the barrad or Irish cap, which, however, was then beginning to fall into desuetude. There was scarcely a man of them on whose countenance was not stamped the expression of care, inward suffering, and, as it would seem, the recollection of some grief or sorrow which had befallen themselves or their families. There was something, consequently, ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... celestial 'minions thou hast seen His proudest temples sink into decay, Grim desolation and desuetude; The silent hush succeed the plaintive hymn, The anthem cease to swell in rhythmic praise, Or vaulted dome re-echo with the sound Of pipe, of organ, harp and dulcimer; The voice of sacerdotal eloquence Become as silent as the unborn thought; The fragrant perfume ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King

... population of Heart's Desire at least, the railroad to the camp remained a thing as far distant as ever in the future. Life went on, spent in the open for the most part, and in silent thoughtfulness by choice. Blackman, J. P., now languished in desuetude among the fallen remnants of an erstwhile promising structure of the law; and there being no further occupation for the members of the bar, the latter customarily spent much of the day sitting in ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough

... simplest form or with a complication of additional ornaments, has, as he points out, been at all times popular in connection with this subject. It appeared on the shield of Arnold Ther Hoernen, Cologne, 1477, at Stockholm in 1483, at Cracovia in 1510. That it did not fall entirely into desuetude until the end of the eighteenth century is a very striking proof of what M.Delalain calls "la persistance de la croix." It has appeared in all forms and in almost every conceivable shape. Its presence may be taken as indicating a deference and a submission ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts

... than that the teachers and work at the academy were in some way under his jurisdiction. A little later the Oak Hill district was quietly quashed and its honorable board of education went into "innocuous desuetude." ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger

... would, in like manner, refer every amendment or objection which might be proposed in writing by any member of the House after a measure had left the commissioners' hands. The alteration of bills by a committee of the whole House would cease, not by formal abolition, but by desuetude; the right not being abandoned, but laid up in the same armoury with the royal veto, the right of withholding the supplies, and other ancient instruments of political warfare, which no one desires to see used, but no one likes to part with, lest they should any time be found to ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill

... port; which, also, sees it capable of navigating under water at a speed of from seven to nine knots, with torpedoes ready for use in the tubes and guns of effective caliber mounted on deck. It has, indeed, been asserted that the airplane and the submarine have relegated the battleship to the limbo of desuetude: but as to that the continued control of the seas by Great Britain with her immense battle-fleet, supplemented by our tremendous engines of war, certainly argues for no such theory. What the future may bring forth in the way of submarines, ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry

... important means of religious culture. In Greece dances were connected with many cults, among others with the Dionysiac ceremonies, out of which grew the Greek drama. Among the Hebrews the ancient ceremonial dance appears as late as the time of David,[229] though it was then, perhaps, falling into desuetude, since his wife, Michal, is disgusted at his procedures. The violent movement of the dance excites not only warlike rage but also religious ecstasy, and has been used abundantly for this purpose by magicians, prophets, and mystics; the performer is regarded as a vehicle of ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... and was, required to pay for the powder and shot expended in inducing him to receive the gang on board. In law the exaction was indefensible. Litigation often followed it, and as the century grew old the practice for that reason fell into gradual desuetude, a circumstance almost universally deplored by naval commanders of the old school, [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1511—Capt. Bowen, 13 Oct. 1795, and Admiralty endorsement.] who were ever sticklers ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson

... King of the Year. The Stewards were dressed with laurel leaves and flowers. They carried gilded staves. Ninety cultivators followed in procession to the sound of music, each bearing his own flowers before him. All elegant customs of this nature have fallen into desuetude in England, though many of them are still kept up in other ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson

... obeying an order while yet retaining the command, a way of carrying out what one believes to be an absurd operation while correcting its absurdity, even though it involve one's own death. When in my bureaucratic capacity I have come across some legislative ordinance that has fallen into desuetude because of its manifest absurdity, I have always endeavoured to apply it. There is nothing worse than a loaded pistol which nobody uses left lying in some corner of the house; a child finds it, begins to play with it, and kills ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... habit will soon raise the individual, whose index is near to zero, to the degree in the scale opposite to courage negative; and the possessor of courage negative will rise up to that of courage positive; although, from desuetude, they will again sink to ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat

... but their bodies are weighted with sand-bags and thrown into a stream. The practice which formerly prevailed among the Bishnois of burying their dead in the courtyard of the house by the cattle-stalls has now fallen into desuetude as being insanitary. A red cloth is spread over the body of a woman, and if her maternal relatives are present each of them places a piece of cloth on the bier. After the funeral the mourning party proceed to a river ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell



Words linked to "Desuetude" :   inactivity, inactiveness, inaction



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