"Fictitious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... than the boarded stage and the talking actor. But, by and by, the word of passion is uttered, and the heart beats, and the wooden stage is seen no more, and the actor is forgotten in his griefs or his anger, and the fictitious position is a real life, and the pomp and circumstance of the scene, if not believed in, are no longer questioned. We are not perhaps at Rome, nor is that Mark Antony—for we never knew Mark Antony to recognise him—but this mimic world has assumed an independent life and reality ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... idealizing charm which arises from distance in space or remoteness in time. The novels of Disraeli, Bulwer, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Miss Bront, Mrs. Gaskell, Miss Muloch, and Miss Evans, differing as they do so widely in style, treatment, and spirit, all come under this general division. Fictitious compositions of this class have difficulties peculiar to themselves, but success, when attained, is proportionally great; and from the sympathetic element in man they can secure the interest of their readers, though their plots may be improbable and their characters unnatural. The scene of "Ravenshoe" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... official documents which fell into the hands of the British authorities in the subsequent progress of the war. Every endeavour of the peace party to make itself heard was punished with rigorous, sometimes brutal, severity; fictitious reports, calculated to raise false hopes of foreign intervention, were circulated among the burghers in the field; and every effort was made to prevent a knowledge of the British Government's proposals for the future administration of the new colonies ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... handle a "ouija-board" or a "planchet," or let ourselves write automatically with a pencil.] The result is a "control," who purports to be speaking; and all the resources of the automatist, including his or her trance-faculty of telepathy are called into play in building this fictitious personage out plausibly. On such a view of the control, the medium's will to personate runs the whole show; and if spirits be involved in it at all, they are passive beings, stray bits of whose memory she is able to seize and use for her purposes, without the spirit being any more ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... called the "we sections," and it has been asserted that though the "we sections" are primitive they have been worked into the narrative of a later writer.[1] Furthermore it is asserted that {103} the book was deliberately intended to be a fictitious account of the primitive Church, and that its special purpose was to balance the story of St. Peter with that of St. Paul in such a manner as to completely disguise the fundamental antagonism of the ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... figuratively speaking, for being such an early riser on such a day. Not one of them asked him any questions about his reasons for leaving the Acme; reasons, in the motion-picture business, are generally invented upon demand and have but a fictitious value at best. And since it is never a matter of surprise when any director or any member of any company decides to try a new field, it would seem that change is one of the most unchanging features ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... under the patronage of charitable ladies; but when you throw in ninety-five or one hundred pair of hands depending on their work for their livelihood, the supply must necessarily soon go beyond any demand, even fictitious. It will not do to think of these women like fancy knitters or embroiderers whose work is skilled. Most of them can hardly mend their own clothes, and the utmost that can be expected of them ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ought to say a few words about the relation which existed between the Italian and the Polish composer. Most readers will have heard of Chopin's touching request to be buried by the side of Bellini. Loath though I am to discredit so charming a story, duty compels me to state that it is wholly fictitious. Chopin's liking for Bellini and his music, how ever, was true and real enough. Hiller relates that he rarely saw him so deeply moved as at a performance of Norma, which they attended together, and that in the finale of the second act, in which Rubini ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... outburst Miss Starbrow was not less kind and gentle than before. Once at least every day she would call Fan to her room and speak a few words to her, and then send her away. The few words would even be cheerfully spoken, but with a fictitious kind of cheerfulness; under it all there was ever a troubled melancholy look; the clouds which had returned after the rain had not yet passed away. To Fan they were very much, those few daily words which served to keep her hope alive, while her heart ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... he bent forward so that the moonlight through the glass could fall on his face. It had changed as his voice had now changed, and she saw that she was looking at the man who in those other days of stress and trial had posed as "Gaston Merode," brother to the fictitious "Countess de ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Tiberius, or proposes for your imitation any model outside yourself: yours is a pattern reign. This would have been difficult had your goodness of heart not been innate, but merely adopted for a time; for no one can wear a mask for long, and fictitious qualities soon give place to true ones. Those which are founded upon truth, become greater and better ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... suspending conventional reticences between doctor and patient, to all considerations of mere decorum, for giving proper instruction in the facts of sex. Those who object to it (not counting coarse people who thoughtlessly seize every opportunity of affecting and parading a fictitious delicacy) are, in effect, advocating ignorance as a safeguard against precocity. If ignorance were practicable there would be something to be said for it up to the age at which ignorance is a danger instead of a safeguard. Even as it is, it seems ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... "I have no objection to stories of the right sort. There are some very beautiful stories in the Bible; there are entertaining stories in history; and there are fictitious stories that will do you good and not harm. I shall take care in future that you have plenty of wholesome mental food, so that you will have no excuse for craving such stuff as this," he added, with a glance ...
— Elsie's New Relations • Martha Finley
... cards, which flutter down upon us, twisting and turning, in showers of glittering colors? He but typifies the hand of Fate, which deals to us, brilliant with the hopes that tint them in rainbow beauty, the cards of life's eager game. We gather them up joyfully; but, alas! how rapidly their fictitious beauty fades, and what miserable pasteboard affairs they become to us, as, one by one, we lay them down, and see our treasures dwindling away from us with them, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... marks may be used with technical terms, with slang introduced into formal writing, or with nicknames; but not with merely elevated diction, with good English that resembles slang, with nicknames that have practically become proper names, or with fictitious names from literature. ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... let me alone. Had I captured a city, or rescued a ship's crew, I could not have been made more of than I was for the simple exploit of being a baby. Nobody else was thought of beside me; everybody conspired to do me honour. A fictitious glory settled upon me then, from which I have never escaped. They called me Hannibal. I was not consulted, or I should have opposed the name. It confirmed me in a false position. There was no chance of not being a hero with such a name, and I was in ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... my spirit, and rending the heart out of my bosom, as soon as I assume that it stands not in me as a relation to a higher, real Being,—not a mere resemblance or copy of it in me;—when, in fine, I have within me an empty and fictitious consciousness only. I admit also that I know nothing of 'the Good per se,' or 'the True per se,' that I even have nothing but a vague notion of what such terms stand for. I declare that it revolts me when people seek to obtrude upon me the Will which wills nothing, this empty ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... be found in lonely places and in forests, and to emerge at times in order to indulge in all sorts of sexual excesses, much as the fauns and satyrs of antiquity. The English had a similar hobgoblin in Robin Goodfellow. This fictitious character is represented in priapic attitudes in a number of illustrations of old English ballads. He was doubtless Priapus of ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... it is true that he may increase a want by giving the first loud and clear expression to the low and confused murmurings of discontent; but a grievance that lives and gives violent tokens of its presence, as did that of the Italian allies in the Fregellan revolt, must be real, not fictitious: and when it finds a remedy, as the needs of the poor and the political claims of the knights did under the regime of Caius Gracchus, the presumption is that the disease has been of long standing, and that what it has for a long time lacked was not recognition, but the opportunity ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... things connected with the pagan Sibyls were the apocryphal Jewish and Christian prophecies to which they gave rise. When the sacred oak of Dodona perished down to the ground, out of its roots sprang up a fresh growth of fictitious prophetic literature. This literature emanated from different nationalities and different schools of thought. It combined classical story and Scripture tradition. Most of it was the product of pre-Christian Judaism, and seemed to have been composed in times of great ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... everything violently improbable. To this practise, which he calls dangerous and which began six or seven years before he went to the post-office, he ascribes his power to maintain an interest in a fictitious story and to live in a entirely outside imaginative life. During these seven years he acquired a character of irregularity ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... was fourteen years old—after several years of instruction under the private tutorship of Lachabeaussiere, pere—he was entered under the fictitious name of "Pierre Buffiere," at a private military school in Paris. Here, strong of limb, body, and mind, industrious and aggressive, he remained for four years. Then his father placed him in the Berry regiment ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... book will help to neutralize the ill effects of any poison which children may have swallowed in the way of sham-adventurous stories and wildly fictitious tales. 'The Jolly Rover' runs away from home, and meets life as it is, till he is glad enough to seek again his father's house. Mr. TROWBRIDGE has the power of making an instructive story absorbing ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic
... occasion the former's ball passed through the latter's hat) having detected a discrepancy between his name (assuming he was the person he represented himself to be and not sailing under false colours after having boxed the compass on the strict q.t. somewhere) and the fictitious addressee of the missive which made him nourish some suspicions of our friend's bona fides nevertheless it reminded him in a way of a longcherished plan he meant to one day realise some Wednesday or Saturday of travelling to London ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... which upon their becoming independent had rightfully succeeded to the local sovereignty and jurisdiction of Spain. These adventurers undertook to change the name of the place from San Juan del Norte to Greytown, and though at first pretending to act as the subjects of the fictitious sovereign of the Mosquito Indians, they subsequently repudiated the control of any power whatever, assumed to adopt a distinct political organization, and declared themselves an independent sovereign state. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... the Eagle proceeds to indicate whose are the spirits which compose its eye. These with one exception are all great sovereigns of ancient and recent times. The exception is remarkable. In Hell we found several cases in which mythological or fictitious personages were treated on a footing of absolute equality with those who had a perfect historical claim to the distinction; but the appearance in the Christian Heaven of a man whose very name is preserved ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... post-revolutionary period, was now to be used to the very utmost in indoctrinating the provinces with the idea that not only was the Republic doomed but that prompt steps must be taken to erect the Constitutional Monarchy by use of fictitious legal machinery so that it should not be said that the whole enterprise was a mere plot. Accordingly, on the 10th September, as a sequel to the telegram we have just quoted, an enormous circular message of several thousand ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... in a black serape, might have been stage conspirators hastening to a rendezvous. The cavernous chill and odor which I had before noted as coming from some sarcophagus of larder or oven, where "funeral baked meats" might have been kept in stock, began to oppress me. The hollow and fictitious domesticity of this common board had never before seemed so hopelessly displayed. And Tom, the waiter, his napkin twisted in his hand and his face turned with a sudden dark abstraction towards the window, appeared to ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... attended to, and he does not want to hear that his clergyman is attempting any daring flights. He has a good-natured contempt for clergymen in general because he feels somehow that, like women, they have to be treated with half-fictitious reverence, but that they do not count for much in the ordinary affairs of life; they are a sort of third sex. But, according to the newer psychology, this matter-of-fact Englishman is not what he seems even to himself. His true being is vastly greater ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... back the sob. "I will remain with you, Monsieur, for the present. I was wondering where in the world that copy of Rabelais had gone. I had not seen it since we left the ship Saint Laurent." The lad patted the book with a fictitious show of affection. ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... your kind and careful revision of it, this unfinished work has suggested many questions which, alas, I cannot answer, as to the probable conduct and fate of its fictitious characters, will readily understand my reluctance to surrender an impression seemingly so well justified. I did not indeed cease to cherish it, until reiterated and exhaustive search had failed to recover from the "wallet" wherein Time ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... this in a writer, that he should by one and the same passage continue to move his readers, though they know the trick! Readers, too, that would have turned the cold shoulder to real tales of greater distress, and met suspicion that all was a cheat halfway; but the acknowledged fictitious they yield to at once their whole hearts, throwing to the winds their beggarly stint. Never was there a writer that possessed to so great a degree as did Goldsmith this wondrous charm; and in him it is the more delightful in the light and pleasant allegria ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... a box of old letters and newspapers this morning I came across a little sketch descriptive of our quartette, written last winter for a New York journal. This sketch, or "Pen Portraits," as it was styled, veils our identity under fictitious names, the initials only being preserved, and although it passes over our imperfections and very much exaggerates our accomplishments, still it contains, I think, so much that is characteristic that I will preserve it by copying ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... been subjected, the curbing and jailing of Titanic powers which once sought outlet in significant action. The same mighty force which in its repression drives the men to the brandy-bottle makes the women intoxicate themselves with fictitious narratives of high courage, daring rescues, and all kinds of melodramatic heroism. Extremely amusing is the scene in which Karen Riis (who loves Hans and is beloved by him) goes rowing with her friends Nora and Lisa, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... looked up the dusty street. The fronts of the small frame houses were cracked by the sun, and some were carried up to hide the roof and give the building a fictitious height. A Clover-leaf wagon stood in front of a store, the wheels crusted by dry mud, and the team fidgeted amidst a swarm of flies. Except for one or two railroad hands waiting by the caboose of a freight train, nobody was about. The town ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... followed her entrance. She was unable to tell him the real reason of her visit, and at a loss to invent a fictitious one. ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... our conference in James' office was that the very next day an office downtown was engaged under a fictitious name, and a simple, unsuspicious fellow hired as porter and messenger. After some little negotiation, we obtained particulars of parties banking with the then great firm of Jay Cooke & Company, corner of Wall and Nassau streets. Briefly told, the result was that ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... approach the coast. Viewed from the sea-board the outline of the chain is on either side sharply defined, and forms a prominent and shapely feature in the landscape. From the low-lying central flats of the county the Mendips have a quite fictitious impressiveness. Nowhere does their altitude reach 1100 ft., and their ridge-like summit is nothing but an extended plateau, in places from 2 to 3 m. wide. They have, however, even on the top a certain picturesqueness, for the undulating tableland is relieved by copses, and diversified ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... start, And rule the fancy if you'd rule the heart: By active goodness, by laborious schemes, Subdue wild visions and delusive dreams. No earthly good a Christian's views should bound, For ever rising should his aims be found. Leave that fictitious good your fancy feigns, For scenes where real bliss eternal reigns: Look to that region of immortal joys, Where fear disturbs not, nor possession cloys; Beyond what Fancy forms of rosy bowers, Or blooming chaplets ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... might be seen innumerable rags bleached by the weather out of their original color, small wooden crosses, locks of human hair, buttons, and other substitutes for property; poverty allowing the people to offer it only by fictitious emblems. Lower down in the glen, on the river's bank, was a smooth green, admirably adapted for the dance, which, notwithstanding the religious rites, is the heart and soul of ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... directness I dared, to see if I might penetrate the mask and so foil Kitty in her amiable intentions. This occupation caused me promptly to forget most of the names which I heard, and which I doubt not were all fictitious. As we passed out at the foot of the row I recalled that I had not heard ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... richly recompensed in the following invention. He requires each of the characters in his story to be personated by a living individual; that this individual should, in sex, age, and figure, meet as near as may be the prevalent conceptions of his fictitious original, nay, assume his entire personality; that every speech should be delivered in a suitable tone of voice, and accompanied by appropriate action and gesture; and that those external circumstances should be added which are necessary to ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... made a confidant of this fellow and asked him about the initiation tricks of bankclerks. He was warned against winding combinations, ringing up fictitious numbers on the telephone, and ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... the whole of my voyage with the Sphere into Space, and to the Assembly Hall in our Metropolis, and then to Space again, and of my return home, and of everything that I had seen and heard in fact or vision. At first, indeed, I pretended that I was describing the imaginary experiences of a fictitious person; but my enthusiasm soon forced me to throw off all disguise, and finally, in a fervent peroration, I exhorted all my hearers to divest themselves of prejudice and to become ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... journey homeward. What delight we would take in getting up wanton panics in some dusky part of the wood; scampering like frightened deer; pausing to take breath; renewing the panic, and scampering off again, wild with fictitious terror! ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... ignorance of all nautical matters. They pick up a few worn-out phrases of sea-life, which have long since left the forecastle, and which have been bandied about from one set of landsmen to another, have been dropped by sham-sailors begging on fictitious wooden-legs, then by small sea-novelists, handed to smaller dramatists for the Wapping class of theatres, to be by them abandoned to the smallest writers of pirate and privateer tales for the Sunday press. And stringing these together, with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... steward shook his head, Doctor Emory lighted a big Havana and continued audibly to luxuriate in his fictitious triumph over the other doctor. As he talked, he forgot to smoke, and, leaning quite casually against the chair, with arrant carelessness allowed the live coal at the end of his cigar to rest against the tip of one of Kwaque's twisted fingers. ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... still true to himself. As we use fictitious names, our sympathizing readers will not be able to recognize Colonel Richard Grant, commanding a brigade in the Army of the Potomac, at the present time; but, true to his country in her hour of peril, he has served with ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... of course I never told you, Sophia. You would have run in hysterics to the General. But there was never one among them all who was worth the inconvenience, so I gave it up. I always had more sense than sentiment.' She sighed with regret for the legions of disappointed and fictitious lovers waiting under windows, with which her mind was peopled. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... all; only, let me do it in my own way," Patricia said to him. "Mr. Radnor told me that he had given fictitious names for both of us to the doctor. At first, I was offended because of it, but later, I was glad. The doctor permitted me to assist in the nursing—I ... I told him that I was Richard's wife. Mr. Radnor had already given that impression. ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... the book itself, as will be remembered, the crime is painted as with a brush dipped in blood rather than pigment. The infamous deed is there described in language worthy of one of the greatest realists in fictitious narrative. Henri de Balzac, even in his more sanguinary imaginings, never showed a ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... course of the last three chapters of M'liss I have received some twenty or thirty communications from different parts of the State corroborating incidents of my story, which I solemnly assure the reader is purely fictitious. Some one has lately sent me a copy of an interior paper containing an old obituary of Smith of Smith's Pocket. Another correspondent writes to me that he was acquainted with the schoolmaster in the fall of '49, and that they "grubbed together." The editors of the serial ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... was certainly not appreciated by her who used it. Nothing could much more have astonished or shocked Barbara Polwhele [a fictitious person]—than whom no more uncompromising Protestant breathed between John o' Groat's and the Land's End—than to discover that since she came into the room, she had twice invoked the assistance of ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... source of ruin, misery, and suicide, admitting of no adequate description. I grant that this gambling has arisen from the influence of the 'Goddess' before mentioned; I grant that it has arisen from the facility of obtaining the fictitious means of making the purchases; and I grant that that facility has been created by the system under the baneful influence of which we live. But it is not the less necessary that I beseech you not to practise such ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... observations, comes nearer the earth than the [Symbol: Sun] and is again eftsoons aloft in Jupiter's orb; and [3088]other sufficient reasons, far above the moon: exploding in the meantime that element of fire, those fictitious first watery movers, those heavens I mean above the firmament, which Delrio, Lodovicus Imola, Patricius, and many of the fathers affirm; those monstrous orbs of eccentrics, and Eccentre Epicycles deserentes. Which ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... his pleasure to tempt him to some colouring or distortion of it. Hence the portions of sacred history which have been the constant subjects of fond popular contemplation have, in the lapse of ages, been encumbered with fictitious detail; and their various historians seem to have considered the exercise of their imagination innocent, and even meritorious, if they could increase either the vividness of conception or the sincerity of belief ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... frightful scenes which have just passed. Alas! how little we ought to jest with futurity! I closed my letter to you in high spirits, with some flippant remarks on your taste for the romantic and extraordinary in fictitious narrative. How little I expected to have had such events to record in the course of a few days! and to witness scenes of terror, or to contemplate them in description, is as different, my dearest Matilda, as to bend over the brink, of a precipice holding by the frail tenure of ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... and a fire, and abundance of incidents—some tolerably new in conception, all very pleasant in narration. The good sense, perspicacity and straightforward dealing of the baron, subjugate every one. He unmasks the fictitious viscount, cures his nephew of his electioneering ambition, and the painted dowager of her longing for an invite to the Tuileries; and adopts Froidevaux—whose father had saved his life at Leipsic, and who has himself picked the baron out of a burning house—as his son and heir, thus ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... moonshine that ripens love is now as practical as the sunshine that ripens corn. It was vain to say that sexual chivalry was all rot; it might be as rotten as manure—and also as fertile. It is vain to call first love a fiction; it may be as fictitious as the ink of the cuttle or the doubling of the hare; as fictitious, as efficient, and as indispensable. It is vain to call it a self-deception; Schopenhauer said that all existence was a self-deception; ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... which this narrative will itself unfold as it advances, a fictitious name must be bestowed upon the old Cathedral town. Let it stand in these pages as Cloisterham. It was once possibly known to the Druids by another name, and certainly to the Romans by another, and to the Saxons by another, and to the Normans by another; and a name more ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... inquisitors at Rouen learned, to their dismay, that their victim had escaped, what were they to do? Confess that they had been foiled, and create a panic in the army by the news that their dreaded enemy was at liberty? Or boldly carry out their purposes by a fictitious execution, trusting in the authority which official statements always carry, and shrewdly foreseeing that, after her recantation, the disgraced Maid would no more venture to claim for herself the leadership of the French forces? Clearly, the latter would have been the wiser course. We ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... of 1790, Mrs. Robinson entered into a poetical correspondence with Mr. Robert Merry, under the fictitious names of "Laura," and "Laura Maria;" Mr. Merry assuming ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... relation to the real and actual in our present social condition, maintained throughout its pages. Such a relation is manifested, in very various ways, in every novel of distinguished excellence. The object of all alike is the same—to exhibit and establish, by means of a narrative more or less fictitious, the really true and enduring elements in the complicated or contradictory phenomena of a period or a character. The poetic truthfulness of the immortal Don Quixote lies not so much in the absurdities of an effete ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... not say the story is true, for I did not witness the happenings which it portrays, but the fact that in the telling of it to you I have taken fictitious names for the principal characters quite sufficiently evidences the sincerity of my own belief that ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... have you done to ruin me and my family?" "It was to preserve, not to ruin you," answered Morgiana; "for see here," continued she (opening the pretended Khaujeh Houssain's garment, and shewing the dagger), "what an enemy you had entertained! Look well at him, and you will find him to be both the fictitious oil-merchant, and the captain of the gang of forty robbers. Remember, too, that he would eat no salt with you; and what would you have more to persuade you of his wicked design? Before I saw him I suspected him as soon as you told ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... example of experience in their connection, we create mere chimeras, of the possibility of which we cannot discover any criterion, because we have not taken experience for our instructress, though we have borrowed the conceptions from her. Such fictitious conceptions derive their character of possibility not, like the categories, a priori, as conceptions on which all experience depends, but only, a posteriori, as conceptions given by means of experience itself, and their possibility must either be cognized a posteriori ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... rational to make a serious matter of print and paper as of anything else. But, dry your eyes, love, dry your eyes. I dare say the heroine has got home again long ago, and made it up all round - and if she hasn't, a real home is only four walls; and a fictitious one, mere rags and ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... combed, his clothes brushed, a clean dicky on his neck, and altogether so changed in aspect as to merit the more respectful appellation of Venerable Henry. Joel Doe and Richard Roe came arm in arm, accompanied by a Man of Straw, a fictitious indorser, and several persons who had no existence except as voters in closely contested elections. The celebrated Seatsfield, who now entered, was at first supposed to belong to the same brotherhood, until he made it apparent that he was a real man of ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is a historical person, and this anecdote is true. The surname given to him only is fictitious, as history does not record ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... the truth is," said Mr. Peterkin, "that we represent historical people, and we ought to have been fictitious characters in books. That is, I observe, what the others are. We shall know better ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... Baron Munchausen were written to ridicule Bruce, the Abyssinian traveller, whose adventures were at the time deemed fictitious. Bruce was a most upright, honest man, and recorded nothing but what he had seen; nevertheless, as is always the case, a host of detractors buzzed about him, and he was so much vexed at the impeachment of his veracity, that he let them get their own way. Munchausen, a veritable {118} ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... agreeably united to our bodies, and that, when they are separated, they are from all parts carried together into the air, and from thence return to second generations. And what hinders but that [Greek omitted] twentieth should intimate that this was not a true story, but only probable and fictitious [Greek omitted], and that the lot fell casually [Greek omitted]. For Plato always toucheth upon three causes, he being the first and chiefest philosopher that knew how fate accords with fortune, and how our free-will is mixed and complicated with both. And now he hath admirably ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... in a note, "the value of the Ashrafi changes with each successive ruler. In the reign of Emir Abd el Shukoor, some 200 years ago, it was of gold." At present the Ashrafi, as I have said above, is a fictitious ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... of having an admirable head and a good digestion. Hans Christian Andersen has celebrated him in "The Improvvisatore," and unfairly attributed to him an infamous character and life; but this account is purely fictitious, and is neither vero nor ben trovato. Beppo, like other distinguished personages, is not without a history. The Romans say of him, "Era un Signore in paese suo"—"He was a gentleman in his own country,"—and this belief is borne out by a certain courtesy and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... would ship the box at once to some fictitious personage, and then take the next ship back ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... to be restricted even further, according to Wagner, by the fact, "that the real objections, urged against the theory of Darwin, are almost in every instance based on theoretic considerations, the validity of which can be put to the test only in fictitious cases. This manner of proceeding manifestly leads to the inevitable consequence, that the results thus obtained can claim no decisive weight against Darwinism. A decisive critique can be constructed only ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... informing them only that he should return within the week, he rushed out of the building. A convenient droschky carried him to his apartment, where he gathered together a bagful of clothes, scribbled Ivan a fictitious explanation of his journey, and was soon on his way to the station, where, by a miracle, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... miniature, the microcosm of Rome. Still, it was an awful and imposing spectacle, with which modern times have, happily, nothing to compare; a vast theater, rising row upon row, and swarming with human beings, from fifteen to eighteen thousand in number, intent upon no fictitious representation—no tragedy of the stage—but the actual victory or defeat, the exultant life or the bloody death, of each and all who entered ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... the minute and nerve-destroying precision of their housekeeping; their unnecessary overloading of themselves with tasks futile and fictitious; the determination to "appear" a little better than their neighbors, and, above all, to have their children (their one or two children) particularly spick and span; the long catalogue of folly into which our high-geared, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... into thirty-four chapters. In the first he develops the thought of Aristotle, that music is inherent in human nature. He there renders the text of a decree which the Ephori of Sparta rendered against Timotheus of Miletus, but which better critics have regarded as fictitious. The second chapter establishes that there are three sorts of music: the worldly, which is universal harmony; the human, which has its source in the intelligence, which reunites and co-ordinates the elements; finally, the third kind is artificial, made by instruments ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... Stethson, another man, a tall, fat-cheeked countryman, Vickers, and a dried up little party, in a Grand-Army-of-the-Republic suit, Parthenheimer. Mrs. Tarbell had the names down pat, and scrutinized each prospective witness carefully, as if warning him that it would be no use for him to give a fictitious name in the hope of evading his duties, as she would now be able to pick ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... DRYOPE, a princess of Aechalia, who became a forest nymph. Pholoe, mentioned in l. 135, is probably a fictitious ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... crime of her nation. What was it to me? Why should I care for customs and conventionalities which I at heart despised, even outside the levelling influence of love? But under that influence, less did I care to respect them. In the eyes of Love, rank loses its fictitious charm—titles seem trivial things. For me, Beauty ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... strong physique, that is, while he was of the same opinion on many points, fundamentally he was hardly at all like him, for it is temperament far more than ideas that makes a man, and whatever the divisions, fictitious or real, marked between men by intellect, the great divisions between men and men are into those who are healthy and those who are not. Old Euler was not a healthy man. He talked morality, like Jean Michel, but his morals were not the same as Jean Michel's; he had not his sound stomach, his ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... what is Miss Rawlins's love-name, Jack. Most of the fair romancers have in their early womanhood chosen love-names. No parson ever gave more real names, than I have given fictitious ones. And to very good purpose: many a sweet dear has answered me a letter for the sake of owning a name which her godmother ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... until he was about eight years old, when the family priest, that is, we presume, the confessor of his parents, taught him, agreeably to the Jesuit system, the rudiments of Greek and Latin concurrently. This priest was named Banister; and his name is frequently employed, together with other fictitious names, by way of signature to the notes in the Dunciad, an artifice which was adopted for the sake of giving a characteristic variety to the notes, according to the tone required for the illustration of the text. ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... us dwell upon them, in this case I conceive we must have a delight or pleasure of some species or other in contemplating objects of this kind. Do we not read the authentic histories of scenes of this nature with as much pleasure as romances or poems, where the incidents are fictitious? The prosperity of no empire, nor the grandeur of no king, can so agreeably affect in the reading, as the ruin of the state of Macedon, and the distress of its unhappy prince. Such a catastrophe touches us in history as much as the destruction ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to have been the earliest. The incidents of the hunt were related at the return; the experiences of the past were told as a guide to the present; and the first efforts of the imagination are the depicting of fictitious occurrences, tradition and myth, story and history; these make up most of the entertainment of ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... that with the exception of a little gain from the practice of casuistry, religions have contributed nothing towards the building up of a science of ethics. On the contrary, it has been a very potent cause of confusion and obstruction. Fictitious vices and virtues have been created and the real moral problems lost sight of. It gave the world the morality of the prison cell, instead of the tonic of the rational life. And it was indeed fortunate for the race that conduct was not ultimately ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... be, Messrs. Rogers and Moore will easily forgive us for saying that, much as we are astonished at the effrontery with which Lord Byron has acknowledged his lampoon, we infinitely prefer it to the cowardly prudence of the author or authors of the Twopenny Post-bag lurking behind a fictitious name, and "devising impossible slanders," which he or they have not the spirit ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... written as to enlist those sympathies which are common to all classes. Certainly a great deal may be effected in this way, if God gives to any one the power, as I hope he will to many. The power of fictitious writing, for good as well as evil, is a thing which ought most seriously to be reflected on. No one can fail to see that in our day it is becoming ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... her a fictitious air of height, as did also the unbroken line of her blue dressing-gown, with its cloud of misty whiteness at the throat. A shaded lamp in a far corner clashed with the first glimmer of dawn; and in the dimness Evelyn's face showed pale and indistinct, save for two dusky semicircles where her ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... was a little out of sorts, the suggestions of this story began to take the form in his mind of an imaginary case of circumstantial evidence of which he was the victim. His fancy worked up the details of a fictitious case against himself, which he, although perfectly innocent, could meet with nothing ...
— Two Days' Solitary Imprisonment - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... under the name of San-huang, i.e. "The Three Emperors." Although we have no reason to deny their existence, the details recorded concerning them contain enough in the way of improbabilities to justify us in considering them as mythical creations. The chronology, too, is apparently quite fictitious; for the time allotted to their reigns is much too long as a term of government for a single human life, and, on the other hand, much too short, if we measure it by the cultural progress said to have been brought about in it. Fu-hi's period of hunting life must have lasted many generations before ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... the success of "Romeo and Juliet" would appear to have been eclipsed by that of "King Henry VI." The events set out in the trilogy were sufficiently familiar to the people to give the work an interest that is almost fictitious. Criticism has shown that the poet's part in these productions was but small. Some say that Greene and Peele were the authors of the plays, that Shakespeare rewrote them perhaps with a little aid from Marlowe. Certain ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... are exceedingly fond of narrating or listening to tales and stories, whether historical or fictitious. They have their professed storytellers, like the Oriental nations, and these go about, from village to village, collecting an admiring and attentive audience, however oft-told and familiar the matter ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... estimated the usual return as 16 to 20 bushels of wheat per acre; prices varied very greatly, and famine was of frequent recurrence. Leases began to be granted, but they were not effectual to protect the tenant from the entry of purchasers nor against the operation of fictitious recoveries. ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... her of the responsibility he had assumed in giving the sheriff the fictitious Sloane statement. "That is, it's not fictitious, in itself; it's what your father has been saying. But I told Crown, and I'm going to tell the newspaper men, that he says it's all he knows, really. And I hate to do it—because, ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... who may be meditating a similar course, even whilst reading this story, or may be at issue with your parents, because their experience shows them a future which your inexperience cannot show you! Pause and think that Netta is no fictitious character, her story no mere creation of an author's brain, but the portrait and history of one out of hundreds of wilful daughters brought to shame and grief, and bringing all belonging to them to shame and grief by ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... doubt not that material substance is thus projected by the all-embracing Divine Mind; but so also are our own minds projected by it, and therefore the relation between them and matter is a real relation and not a merely fictitious one. ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... frightful plan. This coffin had been prepared for me; the funeral of St. Amand was a sham to mislead inquiry; I had myself given the order at Pere la Chaise, signed it, and paid the fees for the interment of the fictitious Pierre de St. Amand, whose place I was to take, to lie in his coffin with his name on the plate above my breast, and with a ton of clay packed down upon me; to waken from this catalepsy, after I had been for hours in the grave, there to ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... like nothing else in either biography or fiction—and it is both fictitious and biographical. It is the gradual revelation of a strange, unique being. But the revelation does not proceed in an orderly and chronological fashion: it is not begun in the first chapter, and still less is it completed ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... which the whole body is so exquisitely sensible, that the slightest touch gives pain: what some have thus suffered in their persons, this gentleman felt in his mind. The slightest distress, whether real or fictitious, touched him to the quick, and his soul laboured under a sickly sensibility of the miseries of others. Thus disposed to relieve, it will be easily conjectured, he found numbers disposed to solicit: his profusions began to impair his fortune, but not his good-nature; that, indeed, ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... very madness of ambition. The wageslavery we live in is a wicked thing. But there is nothing in which the Scotch are more piercing and poetical, I might say more perfect, than in their Scotch wickedness. It is what makes the Master of Ballantrae the most thrilling of all fictitious villains. It is what makes the Master of Lovat the most thrilling of all historical villains. It is poetry. It is an intensity which is on the edge of madness or (what is worse) magic. Well, the Scotch have managed to apply something of this fierce romanticism even ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... disagreeable as they are in real life; not so sad, indeed, for they want the reality of sadness; but quite as perplexing, and generally less satisfactory. What novelist, what Fielding, what Scott, what George Sand, or Sue, or Duncan, can impart an interest to the last chapter of his fictitious history? Promises of two children and superhuman happiness are of no avail, nor assurance of extreme respectability carried to an age far exceeding that usually allotted to mortals. The sorrows of our heroes and heroines, they are you ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... During fully ten years, Gregorio's management of the estate must have been a systematic fraud upon Veronica Serra, carried on with sufficient skill to evade all inquiry from the cardinal. Gregorio's fictitious reputation as a strictly honourable man had helped him, together with the fact that his wife was the ward's own aunt, which was a strong presumption in favour of her honesty as a guardian. Then, too, it was generally believed that Macomer was a miser, and ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... marriage contract, in which the young man arrogates to himself all kinds of fictitious titles of nobility, has been read to the assembled company (composed, say, of the elite of the noble immigrants at the time of the French Revolution), there is heard suddenly the pipe of the bear-leader, who ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... swarm of facts were invented to meet the difficulty: The victims were insignificant in number; they were slain for no reason connected with religion; the Pope believed in the existence of the plot; the plot was a reality; the medal is fictitious; the massacre was a feint concerted with the Protestants themselves; the Pope rejoiced only when he heard that it was over.[190] These things were repeated so often that they have been sometimes believed; and men have fallen into ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... because the actor had been overcome by a sudden flood of real feeling, whereas he was to render by his art the feeling of a fictitious character and so to communicate this to his audience. Caleb's cue ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... we are not dealing with the fictitious average man, and we firmly believe that many "commuters" wonder deep down in their hearts why it is they get from their gardens so little of the pleasure they anticipated when they came to ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... such associations and veneration are riveted the stronger by seeing the places, and putting my hand upon the spots. I do not speak of that fictitious marble slab up there; but here, among the sandhills by this river, and at the Mount of Olives over which we passed, ...
— A Ride Across Palestine • Anthony Trollope
... This fictitious gaiety and good-humour, though it baffled his hope of extorting from her an acknowledgment of which he might have taken immediate advantage, nevertheless encouraged him to observe, as the chariot passed along the Strand, that the night ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... me with blank astonishment; but, without heeding it, I said calmly, taking from the bureau-drawer the chain of my watch, "Anna, opposite the market, there is a pawnbroker. No one knows us; and, by giving a fictitious name, we can get money, without thanking any one for it." She was satisfied; and, taking a little basket, we went on our errand. I asked of the pawnbroker six dollars, under the name of Mueller and received the money; after which we made ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... one of the most celebrated female writers of the age, in her "Thoughts on the Education of a Young Princess," for supposing that the mind of a child is less likely to be misled by what is avowedly fictitious, than by those high wrought characters of perfection, which they would have little better chance of meeting with in the world, than with the fantastic agents ...
— The Flower Basket - A Fairy Tale • Unknown
... his meeting with Isobel and her husband or of what had followed. Until he was absolutely certain that Pelliter was keeping nothing from him he would not confide the secret of his own treachery to him. For he had been a traitor— to the Law. He realized that. He could tell the story, with its fictitious ending, before they set out for Churchill, where he would give evidence against Bucky Smith. Meanwhile he would watch Pelliter, and wait for him to reveal whatever he might have hidden from him. He knew that if Pelliter was concealing something he was inspired by his almost insane ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... time to perfect his arrangements, so that, when the day arrived, the "Haute Noblesse" presented a most brilliant appearance. Vividly colored transparencies, representing the most sanguinary battle scenes in more or less fictitious surroundings were suspended among the trees; Danish officers were seen in all sorts of humble attitudes, surrendering their swords or begging for mercy, while the Prussian and Austrian heroes, maddened with warlike ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... source for the greater part of it is in a work known as the "Annals of the Four Masters," a compilation put together in the sixteenth century, from documents now no longer existing, and which must unfortunately, be regarded as largely fictitious. Were names, indeed, all that were wanting to give substantiality there are enough and to spare, the beginning of every Irish history positively bristling with them. Leland, for instance, who published his three sturdy tomes in the year 1773, and who is still one of our ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... given her a large crooked pin.[27] Mrs. Gardiner, so the account goes, took the sticks and threw them into the fire. Presto! Jane Wenham came into the room, pretending an errand. It was afterwards found out that the errand was fictitious. ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... youth. Under ordinary circumstances he would have given a fictitious address to this strange sybil with the prophecy of war; for he had accosted her only in the spirit of fun. But here was the key which he had been seeking, the key to all that had brought him to Bleiberg. Intrigue, adventure, or whatever ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... of my story must not be confounded with the "first hermit," Paulus of Thebes, whom Weingarten has with good reason struck out of the category of historical personages. He, with all the figures in this narrative is a purely fictitious person, the vehicle for an idea, neither more nor less. I selected no particular model for my hero, and I claim for him no attribute but that of his having been possible at the period; least of all did I think ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to the sender, Mortimer, at the address he had given on the back of the form, according to the regulations, to inform him that his telegram had not been delivered. It was then discovered that the address given by Mortimer was fictitious. ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... introduced was a necessity at almost any price, they made no move toward lowering rates as new and cheaper methods came into vogue and their output and profits increased. The stocks of our gas companies have been swollen by enormous amounts of water, and upon this fictitious capital they have continually paid enormous dividends. At one time there was a great call for competition in the gas business. The public demanded it, and as usual the demand was supplied. Rival companies were organized, and the ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... a noble descent, mine was one of those everyday appellations which seem, by prescriptive right, to have been, time out of mind, the common property of the mob. In this narrative I have therefore designated myself as William Wilson,—a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the real. My namesake alone, of those who in school phraseology constituted "our set," presumed to compete with me in the studies of the class—in the sports and broils of the play-ground—to refuse implicit belief ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... not hear. He was not thinking: the knowledge that the secret to be discovered was his to use was as a sense in him. He felt it pulsing through his veins and throbbing at his heart. Mrs. Willoughby was forgotten. It had been after all but a fictitious fancy which he had conceived for her, a fancy fostered in the main as balm for his self-respect after his refusal ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... case was this:—the army was going into action——" "What action was it?" inquired Father Phil, with that remarkable alacrity which men of peace evince in hearing the fullest particulars about war, perhaps because it is forbidden to their cloth; one of the many instances of things acquiring a fictitious value by being interdicted—just as Father Phil himself might have been a Protestant only ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... Commander held closer the affection of his troops than in that ill-starred campaign into Maryland, which left the moral victory of a superb fight in McClellan's hands? No, the charm lay deeper still, beyond all the fictitious aids of fortune—somewhere in that serene and noble presence he had met one evening as the gray dusk closed, riding alone on an old road between level fields. After this it was always as a high figure against a low horizon ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... why I give a fictitious reason to your father and to the world in general. I should be committing a moral murder were I to marry you under the circumstances. My love for you, great as it is, is not great enough to conquer the instinctive repugnance ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... the logger, the psychological reaction from hard work, from sordid living, from the indefinable cramping of the spirit that grows upon a man through months of monotonous labor. Town—a pyrotechnic display among the bright lights—one dizzy swoop on the wings of fictitious excitement—bought caresses—empty pockets—the woods again! Yet the logger dreams always of saving his money, of becoming a timber king, of setting himself up in some business—knowing all the while that he ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Fenimore Cooper, "Notions of the Americans: Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor" (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Carey, 1828)—a detailed description, in the guise of letters written by a fictitious Belgian traveler, of the geography, history, economy, government, and ...
— New York • James Fenimore Cooper
... his little dig, as she called it, and silently, mechanically went through with her petty task of hostess in the hall where the women sat, as the drawing-room was still in the hands of the decorators. All the fictitious gayety of the party died out as soon as the sexes separated. The women gathered in a little knot around the fireplaces to smoke and talked about the wind. It got on their nerves, they ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... ideal communistic states imagined by Euemerus and Iambulus in the southern seas owed their geographical positions to the popular interest in seafaring in the Indian Ocean in the age after Alexander. One wonders whether Campanella knew the account of the fictitious journey of Iambulus to the Islands of the Sun, in Diodorus Siculus, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... passed, and still he continued his walk and reverie, without any visible intention of stopping. His face lights up; he rubs his knuckles with ecstacy. He has got it! got it at last. He will have Mortimer arrested; he will have Mortimer's name suppressed, or give the newspapers a fictitious one. This will shield him from Walters, whose heart he will wring some of these days. Ah! that ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... them. The book is not indeed, in any sense, an historical novel like Scott's "Kenilworth," the scene of which is the same, and which was published in 1821, five years before Mrs. Radcliffe's. The story is entirely fictitious. What differences it from her other romances is the conscious attempt to portray feudal manners. There are elaborate descriptions of costumes, upholstery, architecture, heraldic bearings, ancient military array, a tournament, a royal hunt, a feast in the great ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... suspiciously superscribed. "In each of these nine," he would say, "there is no letter, but money only. This parcel is from the W—Street office. These are directed to men that are not called by these names: they are fictitious, and assumed for iniquitous purposes. Those are from thieves to thieves, and hint at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... present supply for the army, and the governor-general immediately set to work to obtain more. Missives and agents were soon seen flying through the country to procure supplies; and Moorshedabad, Patna, Lucknow, and Benares, with all other places where Hastings could put in a claim, whether real or fictitious, were called upon for their contributions. But money would have been of little service in this war without active measures on the part of Hastings. This he saw, and he immediately concluded a peace with Scindia, recalled Popham from the Jumna, and adjusted amicable ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the man in an erroneous manner; that to the versatility of his genius (one of his great gifts, and which ever belong to him) they have added mobility of character such as often, too often, perhaps, influenced his conversation, and tinctured his external fictitious nature. But they have done so without examining his actions, without reflecting that this mobility vanished as it was written, or in the light play of his witty conversation, or the trivial acts of his life. Otherwise they would have been forced to ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... I knew the rocky trail that climbed the mountain to the springs, twisting between giant boulders. I knew the arid garden, deep in the wayside dust, with its hurriedly planted tropical plants, already withering in the dry autumn sunshine, and washed into fictitious freshness, night and morning by the hydraulic irrigating-hose. I knew, too, the cool, reposeful night winds that swept down from invisible snow-crests beyond, with the hanging out of monstrous stars, that too often failed to bring repose to the feverish ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... to Bonaparte and music. "Madame Sans-Gene" is an operatic version of the drama which Sardou developed out of a little one-act play dealing with a partly fictitious, partly historical story in which Napoleon, his marshal Lefebvre, and a laundress were the principal figures. Whether or not the great Corsican could be justified as a character in a lyric drama was a mooted ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the upper part terminates unsightly in an ugly fish below; could you, my friends, refrain from laughter, were you admitted to such a sight? Believe, ye Pisos, the book will be perfectly like such a picture, the ideas of which, like a sick man's dreams, are all vain and fictitious: so that neither head nor foot can correspond to any one form. "Poets and painters [you will say] have ever had equal authority for attempting any thing." We are conscious of this, and this privilege we demand and ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... character; and in order to carry this idea out, he very frequently spoke on the most commonplace topics as a man might be supposed to do who had just dropped from the moon. He thought, also, that there was something aristocratic in this fictitious ignorance, and that it raised him above the common herd of those who could talk reasonably on the ordinary topics of conversation or life. His ambition, the reader sees, was to be considered original. It had besides, this advantage, that in matters where his ignorance is anything but feigned, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... affair; and the captain of a scouting party of frontier men has acquired as actual a military renown as many a victorious leader of thousands. Some of the incidents contained in the following pages will be recognized, notwithstanding the substitution of fictitious names, by such as have heard, from old men's lips, the fate of the few combatants who were in a condition ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... nation. When it was found that no financial crash followed the departure of the wealthiest man in America, all sensible people agreed that our recuperating prosperity as a nation was built on a rock. It had been a fictitious state of things before this. It was an event, which, years before, would have closed one half of the banks, and suspended hundreds of business firms. The passing of $200,000,000 from one hand to another, at an earlier period in our history would ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... was too restless to stay home, yet as she walked the streets on fictitious errands she was afraid of every person she met. She waited for them to speak; waited with foreboding. She repeated, "I mustn't ever see Erik again." But the words did not register. She had no ecstatic indulgence in the sense of guilt which is, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... he also believes that in the outside world the god Apollo exists as an object. Now this is certainly untrue; that is, it does not correspond with fact. There is no such thing as the god Apollo, and science makes a clean sweep of Apollo and Dionysos and all such fictitious objectivities; they are eidola, idols, phantasms, not objective realities. Apollo fades earlier than Dionysos because the worshipper of Dionysos keeps hold of the reality that he and his church or group have projected the god. He knows that prier, c'est ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... conversation by announcing his departure for Perpignan. I feared Narbonne; I now see that he is going there to deliver himself up a prisoner to the Cardinal. Go at once. I add to the letters I have given you the treaty here; it is in fictitious names, but here is the counterpart, signed by Monsieur, by the Duc de Bouillon, and by me. The Count-Duke of Olivares desires nothing further. There are blanks for the Duc d'Orleans, which you will fill up as you please. Go; in a month I shall expect you at Perpignan. ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... entertained a passion, and might wield supreme power, since no successor would be found for Tiberius. The latter detested his nephew as a bastard. Many others also did he banish or destroy for different and ever different causes, for the most part fictitious. ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... spoken after so long an interval. They were intended to be insolent, probably intended to drive him away. But if anything was to be gained by the interview he must not allow himself to be driven away. He had a duty to perform,—a great duty. He was the last man in England to suspect a fictitious heir,—would at any rate be the last to hint at such an iniquity without the strongest ground. Who is to be true to a brother if not a brother? Who is to support the honour of a great family if not its own scions? Who is to abstain from wasting the wealth and honour ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... I took a decided and rapid turn toward recovery. This, I think, was the moment in which I realized most keenly the fictitious importance which my position imparted to me. The fashion of everybody's face was changed; mother, doctors, nurses, servants, all wore an air of victory. When I was carried out on to the terrace at Artenberg, rows ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... extermination, sometimes waged by western rangers, was not without example—that the cruelty and hatred of the pioneer to the barbarous Indian, might originate in exasperation, which even moved the puritans; and that the lamentations, over the fictitious "wrongs" of a turbulent and bloody savage, might have run ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... the occurrence of adverse ones. The sign of most usual occurrence would be lightning—sometimes such an unexpected event as the seizure of a member of the assembly with epilepsy (morbus comitialis)—and we know to what lengths political obstructionists went in later times in the observation of fictitious signs, or even the prevention of business by the mere announcement of their intention to see an unfavourable omen (servare de caelo). The complications and ramifications of the augur's art are infinite, but ...
— The Religion of Ancient Rome • Cyril Bailey
... extended upon a bed from which she would no longer be compelled to rise for the watch and the march and the vigil. Her labor was over. Now came the reaction. Rapidly she yielded. It seemed as though joy had killed her. Not so. A great purpose had given her a fictitious strength; and now, when the purpose was accomplished, the strength departed, and a weakness set in commensurate with the strength—the weakness of ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... They imagine, while they are preparing for their journey, the admiration with which the rusticks will crowd about them; plan the laws of a new assembly; or contrive to delude provincial ignorance with a fictitious mode. A thousand pleasing expectations swarm in the fancy; and all the approaching weeks are filled ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... Mark Wilson a second thought had he not taken her to drive on that afternoon in early May. The drive, too, would have quickly fled from her somewhat fickle memory had it not been for the kiss. The kiss was, indeed, a decisive factor in the situation, and had shed a rosy, if somewhat fictitious light of romance over the past three weeks. Perhaps even the kiss, had it never been repeated, might have lapsed into its true perspective, in due course of time, had it not been for the sudden appearance of the stranger in the Wilson pew. The moment that Patty's gaze fell upon that ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin |
