"Imitator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it secures the failure of the imitator and also aids that of the unlucky author who is imitated. As soon as a new thing appears in literature, many people hurry off to attempt something of the same sort. It may be a particular trait ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... the wildest extravagance. The habitual dignity, which long converse with the greatest minds has imparted to him, will display itself in all his attempts, and he will stand among his instructors, not as an imitator, but a rival. ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... 1899 Secretary to the Post-office. In spite of all this administrative work his books show that he was a wide, general reader, apart from his special historical studies. He wrote in an agreeable literary style, with Macaulay undoubtedly as his model, although he was by no means a slavish imitator. His "History of Twenty-five Years" seems to me to be written with a freer hand than the earlier history. He is here animated by the spirit rather than the letter of Macaulay. I no longer noticed certain tricks of expression which one catches ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... borrowed any project of canalization from the Greeks. We own we should entertain very great doubts whether Periander had ever uttered so much as a random phrase about cutting through the isthmus of Corinth, were it not that there are some historical grounds for believing that he was a professed imitator of Egypt. He had a nephew named Psammetichus, who must have been so called after the father of Nekos.[1] All projects for making canals in Greece had a foreign origin, from the time Periander imitated Egyptian fashions, down to the days of the Bavarian regency, which talked about making ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... himself in the atmosphere of a Coleridge, a Wordsworth, a Keats, a Rossetti, a Beranger, and often his form insensibly glides into that of the precursor whose spirit he for the moment assimilates. He is by no means a mere imitator. His feeling is his own; but his genius seems to be rather assimilative than strictly creative. Scores of his poems have the beauty and the value of the literature written by the great poets, when they were not ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... Calverley is by common consent the king of metrical parodists. All who went before merely adumbrated him and led up to him; all who have come since are descended from him and reflect him. Of course he was infinitely more than a mere imitator of rhymes and rhythms. He was a true poet; he was one of the most graceful scholars that Cambridge ever produced; and all his exuberant fun was based on a broad and strong foundation of Greek, Latin, and ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... had been accountable for the roar at the other end of the house? An imitator? A double? Gerald suspected a masked-ball device intended to intrigue. He gave it no more thought, but proceeded, started on that line by the episode, to reflect on the singularity, yes, the crassness, of Mrs. Hawthorne's ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... levies on Pope's imitator. In Dress the Man of Taste's aim seems to have been to emulate his own footman, and at this point comes in the already quoted reference to velvet "inexpressibles"—(a word which, the reader may be interested to learn, is as old as 1793). ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... duplicate them, he replied that he did not have any military books, and never had any, except the West-Point text-books. No doubt Grant might have profited from some additional study, but none at all was far better than so much as to have dwarfed his mind into that of an imitator of former commanders. ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... Kaiser's Turcophile policy acquired a new significance owing to the spread of a Pan-Islamic propaganda which sent thrills of fanaticism through North-West Africa, Egypt, and Central Asia. At St. Helena Napoleon often declared Islam to be vastly superior to Christianity as a fighting creed; and his imitator now seemed about to marshal it against France, Russia, and Great Britain. Naturally, the three Powers drew together for mutual support. Further, Germany by herself was very powerful, the portentous growth of her manufactures ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... or CALIARI, called PAUL VERONESE (1528-1588), was born at Verona, but as he lived mostly at Venice, he belongs to the school of that city. He was an imitator of Titian, whom he did not equal; still he was a fine painter. His excellences were in his harmonious color, his good arrangement of his figures in the foreground, and his fine architectural backgrounds. He tried to make his works magnificent, and to do this he painted festive ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... romantic war, are but ill disposed to permit a foreigner even to approve or imitate them, without finding some fault with his ultramontane presumption. I can easily enter into all this, knowing what would be thought in England of an Italian imitator of Milton, or if a translation of Monti, Pindemonte, or Arici,[285] should be held up to the rising generation as a model for their future poetical essays. But I perceive that I am deviating into an address ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Launfal (1848). The New England poets in general looked back to Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, and other members of the romantic school of poets. Lowell was a great admirer of Keats, and in early life, like Whittier, was an imitator of Burns. ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... of his first master, Murillo's cousin, saw that work he said: "It is all over with Castillo! Is it possible that Murillo, that servile imitator of my uncle, can be the author of all this grace ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... of achievement in decorative art; that fine feathers may do much for the literary bird, at least. The style of a writer like Irving—a mere loiterer in the field of letters—is at best a creditable product of artifice. To him even so much credit has not been always allowed; the clever imitator of Addison—or, as some sager say, of Goldsmith—has not even invented a manner; he ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... example of Virgil, who represents the same ladies [G. 4. 336] in attendance on Cyrene; and has not only reduced the list, but added some slight touches illustrating their occupations and private history: a liberty permissible to an imitator, ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... Murray's "English Grammar," or Lennie's "Principles of English Grammar;" which last work, in fact, the learned gentleman preferred, though he pretends to have mended the code of Murray. But, certainly, Lennie never supposed himself a copyist of Murray; nor was he to much extent an imitator of him, either in method ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Miliarini and the sculptor Santarelli. The left arm was broken, the right hand damaged, and the hair unfinished, as may be seen to-day; Santarelli restored the arm. The statue is like the work of a poor imitator. A work by Michael Angelo may easily have been destroyed in troublous times, but can never have been lost and forgotten. He has always had lovers in every age; unlike the primitives and the quattrocentisti, he has never been out ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... music, his immediate disciples were few. Salieri (1750-1825), an Italian by birth, was chiefly associated with the Viennese court, but wrote his best work, 'Les Danaides,' for Paris. He caught the trick of Gluck's grand style cleverly, but was hardly more than an imitator. Sacchini (1734-1786) had a more original vein, though he too was essentially a composer of the second class. He was not actually a pupil of Gluck, though his later works, written for the Paris stage, show the influence of the composer of 'Alceste' very strongly. The greatest ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... a deliberate imitator of the man who wrote the Dialogue Between an Awd Wife, a Lass, and a Butcher. All that has been said about the trenchant realism of farmlife in the dialogue of 1673 applies with equal force to the dialogues of 1684. The later ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... imitator of Michael Angelo, and one of his best imitators; but when his works are compared with those of the great master, or with the masterpieces of the fifteenth century, we see a decline in them. In religious subjects Giovanni was not at home; his most successful ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... introduced a real and momentous innovation by appointing special judges to administer a more regular justice than that which was administered in the local courts of the earls and bishops, or even in the national assembly. In this respect he was the imitator, probably the unconscious imitator, of Charlemagne, and the precursor of Henry II., the institutor of our Justices in Eyre. The powers and functions of the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, lie at first enfolded in the same germ, and are ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... back of the razor several times over the throat of Gringalet, he pretended to cut it. The confounded ape was such a good imitator, so wicked, and so malicious, that he comprehended what his master wished; and, to prove it to him, shook his chain with the left paw, threw his head back, and pretended to cut his throat. 'That's it, Gargousse— that's it,' said Cut-in-half stammering, shutting ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... to the corruption of Roman manners by Hellenic contagion; conversely the scholars began to demoralize their instructors. Gladiatorial games, which were unknown in Greece, were first introduced by king Antiochus Epiphanes (579-590), a professed imitator of the Romans, at the Syrian court, and, although they excited at first greater horror than pleasure in the Greek public, which was more humane and had more sense of art than the Romans, yet they held their ground likewise there, and gradually ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... pretended source and the sham Oriental disguise make the work an unworthy member of that group of feigned Oriental letters begun by G.P. Marana with "L'Espion turc" in 1684, continued by Dufresny and his imitator, T. Brown, raised to a philosophic level by Addison and Steele, and finally culminant in Montesquieu's "Lettres Persanes" (1721) and Goldsmith's "Citizen of the World" (1760).[22] The fourth letter is a well-told Eastern adventure, dealing ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... one of the most noted appears to have been Will Pinkethman, who flourished under William and Mary, and won honourable mention from Sir Richard Steele, in "The Tatler." Cibber describes Pinkethman as an imitator of Leigh, an earlier actor of superior and more legitimate powers. Pinkethman's inclination for "gamesome liberties" and "uncommon pleasantries" was of a most extravagant kind. Davies says of him that he "was in ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... even at his lowest level, is more than an imitator of imitations.[6] Abridgment, selection, combination, are the necessary instruments of his craft; and by their aid he introduces harmony and order into the confused multiplicity of sensuous images. He substitutes for the primary outward aspect of things a new view, in which thought ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... their legs in it; but either on the water or under it, every movement is characterized by the most consummate dexterity, and facile agility. The most expert waterman that sculls his skiff on the Thames or Isis, is but an humble and unskillful imitator of the dabchick. In moving straightforward (under water?), the wings are used to aid its progress, as if in the air, and in turning it has an easy gliding motion, feet and wings being used, as occasion requires, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... teacher, a corrector of morals, a censor of vice, and a commender of virtue. In this consists the superiority of the Fable over the Tale or the Parable. The fabulist is to create a laugh, but yet, under a merry guise, to convey instruction. Phaedrus, the great imitator of Aesop, plainly indicates this double purpose to be the true office of the ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... should expect. But how shall we further analyse them, and where does the imitator begin? Imitation of the essence is made by syllables and letters; ought we not, therefore, first to separate the letters, just as those who are beginning rhythm first distinguish the powers of elementary, and then of compound sounds, and ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... judgment applies of necessity to all great work in art. It does not apply to merely good work, for that is nearly always imitative, and therefore not much provocative of imitation. It happens sometimes that an imitator, to the undiscerning reader, may even seem better than the man he mimics, because he has a modern touch. But remember, in his time the ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... from Professor Chamberlain's above-mentioned treatise why it is that Panaumbe ("on the lower course of the river") does the clever things, while Penaumbe ("on the upper course of the river") is the stupid imitator who comes to grief. It is simply the expression of the dislike and contempt of the coast Ainos, who tell the stories, for the hill Ainos further up the rivers. It is needless to mention here the many touches of Aino ideas, morals, ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... the Veery (Turdus Wilsonii) are our peers of song. The Mocking-Bird undoubtedly possesses the greatest range of mere talent, the most varied executive ability, and never fails to surprise and delight one anew at each hearing; but being mostly an imitator, he never approaches the serene beauty and sublimity of the Hermit-Thrush. The word that best expresses my feelings, on hearing the Mocking-Bird, is admiration, though the first emotion is one of surprise and incredulity. That so many and such various notes should proceed from one throat ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... Robert Lloyd, the friend and imitator of Churchill—an ingenious but improvident person, who died of grief at his ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... Monte" are attributed to Gaudenzio Ferrari, whereas it is only in two or three out of some five-and-forty that any statues are believed to be by Gaudenzio. He thinks the famous sculptor Tabachetti—for famous he is in North Italy, where he is known—was a painter, and speaks of him as "a local imitator" of Gaudenzio, who "decorated" other chapels, and "whose works only show how rapidly Gaudenzio's influence declined and his school deteriorated." As a matter of fact, Tabachetti was a Fleming and his name was Tabaquet; but this is a detail. Sir Henry Layard thinks that "Miel" was also "a local ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... is that "As it fell upon a day" is miles above anything else of Barnfield's, and is not like anything else of his, while it is very like things of Shakespere's. The best thing to be said for Barnfield is that he was an avowed and enthusiastic imitator and follower of Spenser. His poetical work (we might have included the short series of sonnets to Cynthia in the division of sonneteers) was all written when he was a very young man, and he died when he was not a very old one, a bachelor country-gentleman in Warwickshire. Putting ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... questions of this nature. Accident, perhaps, had drawn his attention to the style of Henry VIII.; but, with reference to the general subject, he had received implicitly and unquestioned the conclusions of authorities who have represented Shakspeare as the greatest borrower, plagiarist, and imitator that all time has brought forth. This, however, did not shake his faith in the poet's greatness; and to reconcile what to some would appear contradictory positions, he proposes the fact, I might say the truism, that the greatest man is not the most original, but the "most indebted" man. This, in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850 • Various
... read in the works of il divino Aretino, we may doubt; but it is easy to see that this Scourge of Princes, the very type of the emancipated Italian of the sixteenth century, might have a vague and dazzling attraction for his little eager English imitator. ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... were to be compared to a confessed impostor; but Joan of Arc might have been the reality which the Nun attempted to counterfeit; and the history of the true heroine might have suggested easily to the imitator the outline of her part. A revolution had been effected in Europe by a somnambulist peasant girl; another peasant girl, a somnambulist also, might have seen in the achievement which had been already accomplished, an earnest of what might be done ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... to some extent an imitator of these two men, and it may be he learned something from their pictures about hats. However that may be, we see how the hat here proves very effective in bringing the head into harmonious relation with the whole composition. The brim describes a diagonal line parallel with the line ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... judges and obtained posts of honor in the galleries of Europe. Even when detected, their owners do not always repudiate their spurious treasures. They give their collections the benefit of doubts or of public ignorance. The most noted imitator of this class was Micheli of Florence. In view of his success and the use for a time made of his works, he must rank as a forger, though they are now in esteem solely for their intrinsic cleverness. Some still linger in remote galleries, with the savor of authenticity about them. A Raphael of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... translation of the greater part of the Odyssey, without any design of publication, but merely as an exercise for style. Montesquieu was a constant student of Tacitus, of whom he must be considered a forcible imitator. He has, in the manner of Tacitus, characterised Tacitus: "That historian," he says, "who abridged everything, because he saw everything." The famous Bourdaloue re-perused every year Saint Paul, Saint Chrysostom, and Cicero. "These," says a French critic, "were the sources of his masculine ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... 'Tapski' was a name given to Shaftesbury in derision, and vile defamers described the abscess, which had originated in a carriage accident in Holland, as the result of extreme dissipation. Lines by Duke, a friend and imitator of Dryden: ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... for the worms to feed on. Wherefore also thou hast denied the God of all, and called them gods that are not, the inventors of all wickedness, in order that, by wantonness and wickedness after their example, thou mayest gain the title of imitator of the gods. For, as your gods have done, why should not also the men that follow them do? Great then is the error that thou hast erred, O king. Thou fearest that we should persuade certain of the people to join with us, and revolt from thy hand, and place themselves in that hand that holdeth all ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... the Laws, Stallbaum finds some sort of authority. There is no real ground for doubting that the work was written by Plato, merely because several words occur in it which are not found in his other writings. An imitator may preserve the usual phraseology of a writer better than he would himself. But, on the other hand, the fact that authorities may be quoted in support of most of these uses of words, does not show that the diction is not peculiar. Several of them seem to be poetical ...
— Laws • Plato
... born at Bologna in 1638. She early exhibited the most extraordinary talent for painting, which was perfectly cultivated by her father, Gio. Andrea Sirani, an excellent disciple and imitator of Guido. She attached herself to an imitation of the best style of Guido, which unites great relief with the most captivating amenity. Her first public work appeared in 1655, when she was seventeen years of age. It is almost incredible that in a short life of not more than twenty-six ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... a simple barbarian he was only a poor imitator of the vices and dregs of a perishing civilization. But in proof that virility was still a characteristic of the Frank in Gaul, we are told that while the Church and the offices of State were filled by Romans or Gallo-Romans, the army at this time ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... Commissioner. He was a man to whose talents posterity has scarcely done justice. Unhappily for his fame, it has been usual to print his verses in collections of the British poets; and those who judge of him by his verses must consider him as a servile imitator, who, without one spark of Cowley's admirable genius, mimicked whatever was least commendable in Cowley's manner: but those who are acquainted with Sprat's prose writings will form a very different estimate of his powers. He was indeed a great master of our language, and possessed at once the eloquence ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... fair creations rise! And the quickened mass obeying Heaves its mountains; From its fountains Sends the gentle streams a-straying Through the vales, like Love's first feelings Stealing o'er a maiden's heart; The Creator— Imitator— From his easel forth doth start, And from God's glorious ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... and above all, his imagination, served by senses always on the alert, preserved for some years an astonishing freshness of direct vision. If his art was due to Flaubert, it is no more belittling to him than if one call Raphael an imitator ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... the close of his first "voyage beyond seas," in the year 1493, or thereabouts. This small settlement failed, as is well-known, and the bones of the Genoese mariner who founded it have been mouldering in dust for centuries. Sir Walter Raleigh—the gallant imitator of Columbus, treading so successfully in his footsteps as to illustrate the old adage of the pupil excelling the master, the original expounder, indeed, of the famous "Westwards Ho!" doctrine since preached so ably by latter-day enthusiasts—has ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... fresh a century hence. No one of the arts has had fewer great masters. A new composer, therefore, has a right to claim our attention. If, perchance, we discover that he has the gift of genius, and is not merely a clever imitator, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... James Graham, an humble imitator of the celebrated Cagliostro, commenced giving his sanatary lectures, which he illustrated by the dazzling presence of his Goddess of Health, a character which, for a short time, was sustained by Emma Harte, afterwards the celebrated Lady Hamilton, wife of Sir William Hamilton, ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... is one of the Heroes of the 'Dunciad', and was a bookseller. Lord Fanny is the poetical name of Lord HERVEY, author of 'Lines to the Imitator of Horace'.] ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... more orangs which up to 1922 have been exhibited in the Zoological Park, two stand out with special prominence, by reason of their unusual mental qualities. They differed widely from each other. One was a born actor and imitator, who loved human partnership in his daily affairs. The other was an original thinker and reasoner, with a genius for invention, and at all times impatient of training and restraint. The first was named Rajah, the ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... to a raven "Croak," and to a hen raven, "Droop thy tail and turn it this way as a lucky sign," is an imitator of the ways of the ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... was bound to warrant the reasonable gifts of his ancestor to the grantees and their heirs; /3/ and if the effects of the ancestor were insufficient to pay his debts, the heir was bound to make up the deficiency from his own property. /4/ Neither Glanvill nor his Scotch imitator, the Regiam Majestatem, /5/ limits the liability to the amount of property inherited from the same source. This makes the identification of heir and ancestor as complete as that of the Roman law before such ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... spite of its strongly marked Michelangelesque mannerism, both as regards feeling, facial type, and design, I cannot regard the bas-relief, in its present condition at least, as a genuine work, but rather as the production of some imitator, or the rifacimento of a restorer. A similar impression may here be recorded regarding the noble portrait-bust in marble of Pope Paul III. at Naples. This too has been attributed to Michelangelo. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... reconcile mankind to the gods, who are undoubtedly best to the best. It is against nature that good should hurt good. A good man is not only the friend of God, but the very image, the disciple, and the imitator of Him, and a true child of his heavenly Father. He is true to himself, and acts with ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Rochefide, and M. and Mme. Fabien du Ronceret gave him contracts. His decline and that of the monarchy coincided. He was no longer in vogue during the July government. On motion of Chaffaroux he received twenty-five thousand francs for the decoration of four rooms of Thuillier's. Lastly Crevel, an imitator and grinder, utilized Grindot on rue des Saussaies, rue du Dauphin and rue Barbet-de-Jouy for his official and secret habitations. [Cesar Birotteau. Lost Illusions. A Distinguished Provincial at Paris. A Start in Life. Scenes from a Courtesan's Life. Beatrix. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... arts and cast aside the religion. This rationalistic art is the art commonly called Renaissance, marked by a return to pagan systems, not to adopt them and hallow them for Christianity, but to rank itself under them as an imitator and pupil. In Painting it is headed by Giulio Romano and Nicolo Poussin; in Architecture by ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... perfect imitator of that Great, Wise, Good Teacher, clothed with all His faith and all His virtues, how the circle of Life's ills and trials would be narrowed! The sensual passions would assail the heart in vain. Want would no longer successfully ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... see, as he would have done, had he lived a few years longer. This passage resembles Cic. de Orat. 3, 2, 8, too closely to be mere coincidence. Imitator tamen, id quod uni Tacito contigit, auctore suo ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... was a travelling preacher. He lived in the same village as William Dawson, and was a member of his class. He was a disciple of Dawson in every respect, but in no respect a servile imitator. He was a man and not a slave. And he had much of Dawson's sense, and much of Dawson's power, though little or nothing of Dawson's natural dramatic manner. He was a fountain pouring forth a perpetual ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... the cause of his notoriety, they are not the utterances upon which his true merit is based. He would be infinitely more valuable as a songster, if he were incapable of imitating a single sound. I would add, that as an imitator of the songs of other birds he is very imperfect, and in this respect has been greatly overrated by our ornithologists, who seem to vie with one another in their exaggerations of his powers. He cannot utter the notes of the rapid singers; he is successful only in his imitations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... of bill of complaint, begun many years since, and drawn up by snatches, as the several occasions offered. I had no thoughts of publishing it, till it pleased some persons of rank and fortune (the authors of "Verses to the Imitator of Horace," and of an "Epistle to a Doctor of Divinity from a Nobleman at Hampton Court") to attack, in a very extraordinary manner, not only my writings (of which, being public, the public is judge), ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... with your argument, and establish it beyound cavil that he is a mere imitator with an appearance of genius. The concise grand style of the eighteenth century is lacking; you show that the author substitutes events for sentiments. Action and stir is not life; he gives ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... seem slower in coming, but when it does come it outrivals in permanency all the so-called successes gained by other methods. To look at the methods of others is always a mistake. The successes of to-day are not given to the imitator, but to the originator. It makes no difference how other men may succeed—their success is theirs and not yours. You cannot partake of it. Every man is a law unto himself. The most absolute integrity is the one and the only sure foundation ...
— The Young Man in Business • Edward W. Bok
... new Swedish generalissimo, with fresh troops and money. This was Bernard Torstensohn, a pupil of Gustavus Adolphus, and his most successful imitator, who had been his page during the Polish war. Though a martyr to the gout, and confined to a litter, he surpassed all his opponents in activity; and his enterprises had wings, while his body was held by the most ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... contemporary of Tibullus, born 51 B.C., was on the contrary the most eager of all the flatterers of Augustus,—a man of wit and pleasure, whose object of idolatry was Cynthia, a poetess and a courtesan. He was an imitator of the Greeks, but had a great contemporary fame. He showed much warmth of passion, but never soared into the sublime heights of poetry, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... not be a curious searcher of the Sacrament, but a humble imitator of Christ, submitting his sense ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... was born at Corinth, seems to have been a close imitator of Diogenes, the founder of the sect. Having come to Rome to study under Apollonius, he was banished to the islands, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... what I mean by being natural. When I say that an actor is natural, I mean that he appears to act in accordance with his ideal, in accordance with his nature, and that he is not an imitator or a copyist—that he is not made up of shreds and patches taken from others, but that all he does flows from interior fountains and is consistent with his own nature, all having in a marked degree the highest characteristics of the ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... clear of the error, we find it introduced in a note, as supplementary to the information regarding Blair given in his Essay on English Poetry by his editor, Mr. Cunningham. It is demonstrable, however, that the Scotchman could not have been the imitator. As shown by a letter in the Doddridge collection, which bears date more than a twelvemonth previous to that of the publication of even the first book of the Night Thoughts, Blair, after stating that his poem, then in the hands of Isaac ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Then he looked at it, and said, "This goes too fast." He opened it, put back the hand, and again adjusted it to his side. A few moments passed, and he took it in his hand once more. "Oh!" said the imitator, "now it goes too slow. What a trouble it is! How can it be remedied?" He winds it again with the regulator; then closes it, and applies it gracefully to the ear. "This movement is wrong, still;" and he wound it with the key in another ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... imagination, and spurn the conventional limitations set by rule and custom, his ambition. Such fanciful and symbolical titles as "Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces," "Titan," etc., which Jean Paul adopted for his singular mixtures of tale, rhapsody, philosophy, and satire, were bound to find an imitator in so ardent an apostle as young Schumann, and, therefore, we have such compositions as "Papillons," "Carnaval," "Kreisleriana," "Phantasiestuecke," and the rest. Almost always, it may be said, the pieces which make them up were composed under the poetical ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... dressmaker, and entirely lacked the fit and finish of Etta Mountjoy's dresses, besides being in direct contrast to the delicate, harmonious colors which the latter wore—a contrast which her admirer and would-be imitator was quick to perceive when her own brilliant coloring had been selected and it was too late to change. The disappointment made her cross, and inclined her still more to look for flaws in Katie, whom she ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... faithful copy. Were man's Sabbaths to be kept as enjoined, and in the Divine proportions, it would scarcely interfere with the logic of the "reason annexed to the fourth commandment," though in this matter, as in all others in which man can be an imitator of God, the imitation should be ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... saw the performance of his imitator, the preacher could not help laughing himself, and the Orang-outang, after a good deal of time had been spent in catching him, was put out of church, and the services went ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... written in an easy, nonchalant manner, which helps to mitigate its severity. Thoreau could not have liked very well being called an imitator of Emerson; but the wit of it is inimitable. "T. never purloins the apples from Emerson's trees; it is only the windfalls that he carries off and passes for his own fruit." Emerson remarked on this, that Thoreau ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... but for his ears. In all things noble which he attempted, his own meanness shone most conspicuous. His airs, words, and actions, were the airs, words, and actions of born slaveholders, and, being assumed, were awkward enough. He was not even a good imitator. He possessed all the disposition to deceive, but wanted the power. Having no resources within himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he was forever the victim of inconsistency; and ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... Berlin, which planted the German commercial flag everywhere, and which provided a large part of the bone and sinew of the Teutonic world-wide exploitation campaign, was based upon it. With finance as with merchandising, the German is a prize imitator. ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... are all themselves in every phrase that they utter. But they are studied in earnestness and sincerity. Unquestionably he is the greatest of Shakespeare's successors in the romantic drama, perhaps his only direct imitator. He has single lines worthy to set beside those in Othello or King Lear. His dirge in the Duchess of Malfi, Charles Lamb thought worthy to be set beside the ditty in The Tempest, which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father. "As that is of the water, watery, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... He wore his make-up both on and off the stage, and copied, so far as he could, Ling's style of work. His fame reached this country and the New York Clipper published, in its Letter Columns, an article stating that Ling Look was not dead, but was alive and working in England. His imitator had the nerve to stick to his story even when confronted by Kellar, but when the latter assured him that he had personally attended the burial of Ling, in Hong Kong, he broke down and confessed that he was a younger brother ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... brother's circumstances, but most of the rules which he lays down are of general application. The authenticity of this treatise has been called in question by Eussner, who ascribes it to a clever imitator, partly on the ground of coincidences of expression with Cicero's speech in Toga Candida; but his arguments are refuted by Prof. Tyrrell (Cicero's Correspondence, i. ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... influence on our manners and our passions, it is of such great consequence, I shall here venture to lay down a rule, which may inform us with a good degree of certainty when we are to attribute the power of the arts to imitation, or to our pleasure in the skill of the imitator merely, and when to sympathy, or some other cause in conjunction, with it. When the object represented in poetry or painting is such as we could have no desire of seeing in the reality, then I may be sure that its power in poetry or painting is owing to the power of imitation, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... South America," said he, "comes wholly from an unscrupulous man, named Francisco Lopez, who has contrived to make himself Dictator of Paraguay. Lopez is an imitator of Napoleon Bonaparte. He has an insatiate ambition to conquer all South America and found an empire there, much as Napoleon sought to conquer Europe and establish a great French empire. Napoleon is Lopez' model. He has plunged ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... Rue presented himself as an imitator of celebrated histrionic personages, including Macready, Forrest, Kemble, the elder Booth, Kean, Hamblin, and others. Taking him into the green-room for a private rehearsal, and finding his imitations excellent, Barnum engaged him. For three nights he gave great satisfaction, but early in the fourth ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... the originality of Lord de Tabley’s work, it is obvious that every poet must in some measure be influenced by the leading luminaries of his own period. But at no time would it have been fair to call Lord de Tabley an imitator; and in the new poems in this volume the accent is, perhaps, more individual than was the accent of any of his previous poetry. The general reader’s comparatively slight acquaintance with Greek poetry may become unfortunate for modern poets. Often and often it ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... concentrated all the excellences of the rhetorical schools of the day. Seneca became the model for literary aspirants to copy. But he was a dangerous model. His lack of connexion and rhythm became exaggerated by his followers, and the slightest lack of dexterity in the imitator led to a flashy tawdriness such as Seneca himself had as a rule avoided. He was too facile and careless a composer to yield a canon for style. The reaction came soon. Involved, whether justly or not, in the Pisonian conspiracy of 65 A.D., he was forced to commit suicide. He died as the Stoics ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... making them disgorge their ill-gotten gains. Moslem historians are unanimous in his praise. Europeans find him an anachorete couronne, a froide et respectable figure, who lacked the diplomacy of Mu'awiyah and the energy of Al-Hajjaj. His principal imitator was Al-Muhtadi bi'llah, who longed for a return to the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... Vigilantius who asserts that prayers and intercessions must cease after death. "If the apostles and martyrs while still in the body are able to pray for others ... how much more may they do so now.... One man, Moses, obtains from God pardon for 600,000 men in arms; and Stephen, the imitator of his Lord, begs forgiveness for his persecutors; shall their power be less after they have begun to ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... Gushingtons say) that you like the Carlyle. I have ordered the second Number and will send it to you when I have read it. Some People, I believe, hesitate in their Belief of its being T. C. or one of his School: I don't for a moment: if for no other reason than that an Imitator always exaggerates his Model: whereas this Paper, we see, unexaggerates the Master himself: as one would wish at his time ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... it met with much credence, particularly abroad. There was, however, no foundation for the opinion: Let us render to Caesar that which is Caesar's due. Bonaparte was a creator in the art of war, and no imitator. That no man was superior to him in that art is incontestable. At the commencement of the glorious campaign in Italy the Directory certainly sent out instructions to him; but he always followed his own plans, and continually, wrote ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... will never do,—I thought not," said Madame de Balzae, who was a wonderful imitator of the fly on the wheel; "my celebrity, and the knowledge that I loved you for your father's sake, were, I fear, sufficient to destroy your interest with the Jesuits and their tools. Well, well, we must repair the ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the boy—a humble imitator of the great George Washington—who hacked to death a choice tree. When asked who did it, jolly, gushing and truthful, said, "I did it, pap." The old man seized and gathered him, stopping the whipping occasionally to get breath and wipe off the perspiration, would remark: "And ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... reads upon the mind of the child is sufficiently appalling, but it is not to be compared with the influence on his character. Henry Churchill King says: "It is his susceptibility to the faintest suggestion that makes the child so marvelous an imitator." The significance of this truth lies not only in the fact that he responds to the example in manners and morals of those about him, but equally, and perhaps even more exactly, to the heroes who live within the covers of his books. If the dangers are great, our response must be as forceful and ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... contemporaries, and the men of succeeding ages. Some condemned his introductions, as having nothing to do with the works themselves; found fault with the minute details of the speeches introduced in the narrative; and called him a senseless imitator, in words and expressions, of the earlier Roman historians, especially of Cato. Others praised him for his vivid delineations of character, the precision and vigour of his diction, and for the dignity which he had given to his style by the use of ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... Science always recognized this relation? Has not indeed every theory of modern times taken its departure from this very position, that Art should be the imitator of Nature? Such has indeed been the case. But what should this broad general proposition profit the artist, when the notion of Nature is of such various interpretation, and when there are almost as many differing ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... made him paint, together with his tedious allegories, some incomparable portraits and nudes. He thought he was serving official Classicism, which still boasts of his name, but in reality he dominated it; and, whilst he was an imitator of Raphael, he was a powerful Realist. The Impressionists admire him as such, and agree with him in banishing from the art of painting all literary imagination, whether it be the tedious mythology of the School, or the historical anecdote of the Romanticists. ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... he was somewhat subject to extempore bursts of passion, which were rather unpleasant to his favorites and attendants, whose perceptions he was apt to quicken, after the manner of his illustrious imitator, Peter the Great, by anointing their shoulders ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors, that expos'd them : even those, are now offer'd to your view cur'd, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived the'. Who, as he was a happie imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers. But it is not our province, who onely gather his works, and give them you, to praise him. It is ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... thing, alike in tone and phrasing. A week or two previously a certain statesman had written to the same effect in reply to calumnious statements, and Richard consciously made that letter his model. The statesman had probably been sounder in his syntax, but his imitator had, no doubt, the advantage in other points. Richard perused his composition several times, and sent ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... be ascribed to Italy in the last third of the sixteenth century. The most successful imitator of Tasso was Giovanni Battista Guarini (born 1537) in The True Shepherd (II Pastor Fido). One quotation will shew how he outvied Aminta. In Act I, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... have learned from the Greeks, and the moderns of Europe from both. From a few examples of this sort, we learn to consider every science or art as derived, and admit of nothing original in the practice or manners of any people. The Greek was a copy of the Egyptian, and even the Egyptian was an imitator, though we have lost sight of the model on which he ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... passage it would surely seem that there was nothing in nature but minute neatness and superficial effect: nothing great in her style, for an imitator of it can produce nothing great; nothing 'to enlarge the conceptions or warm the ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... originals by those who are not deeply versed in the matter. The points of failure in these imitations may be cited as the scroll and sound-hole. The former lacks ease, and seems to defy its author to hide his nationality. The scroll has ever proved the most troublesome portion of the Violin to the imitator. It is here, if anywhere, that he must drop the mask and show his individuality, and this is remarkably the case in the instance above mentioned. A further difference between Amati and Jacobs lies ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... of the sceptic. Those who love the poets of prettinesses, of artificial measures, and dainty trifles have at the present day an almost embarrassing wealth of choice. But Mr. Browning in his own sphere had no rival and no imitator. No other so boldly faces the problems of life and death, no other like him braces the reader as with the breath of a breeze from the hills, and no other gives like him the assurance that we have to do with a man. His last public ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... thunder at us as if somehow we were responsible, "Bah! He is a weak imitator of Bulwer, that is all, and he has not Bulwer's power of construction. He is not Bulwer. No. He is a ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... exact reproduction are such that the disciple is on the same level as the creator, and so it is with their fruits. These are useful to the imitator, but are not of such high excellence as those which cannot be transmitted as an inheritance like other substances. Among these painting is the first. Painting cannot be taught to him on whom nature has not conferred the gift of receiving such knowledge, as mathematics ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... was imitation of everything that struck me, not by its beauty but by its strangeness, and not wishing to confess myself an imitator I resorted to exaggeration in order to appear original. According to my idea, nothing was good or even tolerable; nothing was worth the trouble of turning the head, and yet when I had become warmed up in a discussion it seemed as if there was no expression in the French ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... for which there is no example, and one which will find no imitator. It is to exhibit a man in the whole truth of nature; and the man whom I shall reveal is myself. Myself alone; for I verily believe I am like no other living man. In this book I have hidden nothing evil and added nothing good; ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... everything but immortality. It sounds harsh, but let us admit it; he was at best a great imitator, however noble the objects of his imitation. A recent writer has tried to put him in the class with "John Rogers, the Pride of America," but this is manifestly unfair. As an artist he ranks rather with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... about Queen Victoria. Man named Joyce, something or other, often used to dine at the Palace. And he was an awfully good imitator—really clever, you know. Used to imitate the Queen. 'Mr. Joyce,' she said, 'I hear your imitation is very amusing. Will you do it for us now, and let us see what it is like?' 'Oh, no, Madam! I'm afraid I couldn't do it now. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... of boldness crowd a thousand memories of such ineptitude. On the other hand, nothing but solid work and conscientious inspiration could enable any workman, however able, to follow Ferrari in the path struck out by him at Saronno. His cupola has had no imitator; and its only rival is the noble pendant painted at Varallo by his own hand, of angels in adoring anguish ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... a more suitable English title) is by no means universally regarded as a creation of Giorgione's hand and brain, and several modern critics have been at pains to show that Campagnola, or some other Venetian imitator of the great master, really produced it.[49] In this endeavour Crowe and Cavalcaselle led the way by suggesting the author was probably an imitator of Sebastiano del Piombo. But all this must surely seem to be heresy when we stand before the picture itself, thrilled by the ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... or rather our free imitator, had arranged these stanzas in his head, and while he was yet hammering out a rhyme for dwindle, the task of the sibyl was accomplished, or her wool was expended. She took the spindle, now charged with her labours, and, undoing the thread ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... St. Bennet the whole order of psalmody had not yet been fixed with precision in the Psalter and the Antiphoner: it was the incomparable Pope Gregory of holy memory, himself a zealous observer of the rule of St. Bennet and an imitator of his monastic perfection, who afterwards regulated the arrangement of it under the direction of ...
— St. Gregory and the Gregorian Music • E. G. P. Wyatt
... sentiment by such interrogative phrases as, "See here now!" "Ain't you lettin' on?" "Ain't de little man gwine leetle too fur jes' dar?" "Hadn't my little man better rein up his horses now?"—just by way of keeping his juvenile imitator in the beaten track of the impossible, within the orthodox ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... eidem regi asserunt, quod nullam personam, quantumcunque [B II b] sibi noxiam, voluit aliquoties mulctari. Quod etiam in quam multis liquet personis, quibus valde fuerat gratiosus et misericors imitator effectus illius qui ait: Misericordiam volo, & nolo mortem peccatoris, sed magis ut convertatur & vivat. qui etiam, ut apostolus ait, Omnium hominum salutem affectabat. nec mirum. Quoniam etiam non ...
— Henry the Sixth - A Reprint of John Blacman's Memoir with Translation and Notes • John Blacman |
