"Imitator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tastes of the age, and in debt to the bottle merchant. Being at my wits' end for want of money, and seeing what audiences Mathews drew, the idea occurred to me of starting an imitation of the great Imitator himself, in the shape of an "At Home," given by a woman. The one trifling obstacle in the way was the difficulty of finding the woman. From that time to this, I have hitherto failed to overcome it. I have conquered it at last; I have found the woman now. Miss Vanstone possesses youth ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... successful, because it was often reprinted during his lifetime; but this enthusiasm of Jean Paul would hardly carry conviction in France. Who treads in another's footprints must follow in the rear. Instead of a creator, he is but an imitator. Those who take the ideas of others to modify them, and make of them creations of their own, like Shakespeare in England, Moliere and La Fontaine in France, may be superior to those who have served them with suggestions; ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the Celtic illuminator was imaginative rather than realistic, and aimed altogether at achieving beauty by means of color and design. The Book of Kells is the Mecca of the illuminative artist, but it is the despair of the copyist. The patience and skill of the olden scribe have baffled the imitator; for, on an examination with a magnifying glass, it has been found that, in a space of a quarter of an inch, there are no fewer than a hundred and fifty-eight interlacements of a ribbon pattern of white lines edged by black ones on a black ground. Surely this is the manuscript which was shown ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... argument in exquisitely careful metre. His great strength lay in a taste which recognized harmony and fitness instinctively. To us his quality is best translated by the dainty, perfect couplets of his imitator Pope. His talent, essentially French in its love of effect and classification, has strewn the language with clever saws, and his works have been studied as authoritative models by generation ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Bristol, towards the end of the century, were similar indications of intellectual activity. Coleridge and Southey found there a society ready to listen to their early lectures, and both admired Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808), a physician, a chemist, a student of German, an imitator of Darwin in poetry, and an assailant of Pitt in pamphlets. He had married one of Edgeworth's daughters. With the help and advice of Wedgwood and Watt, he founded the 'Pneumatic Institute' at Clifton in 1798, and obtained the help of ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... 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 began to hate as natures not sanctified by the ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... modified male behavior and male moral standards, and she has been a faithful follower, even a stickler for the prevalent moral standards (the very tenacity of her adhesion is often a sign that she is an imitator); but up to date the nature of her activities—the nature, in short, of the strains she has been put to—has not enabled her to set up independently standards of behavior either like or unlike those developed through the ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... 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 History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... he conceived them." But the Preface does not commit itself, I repeat, to the statement that all of these many plays are printed from Shakespeare's own handwriting. After "as he conceived them," it goes on, "Who, as he was a most happy imitator of nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: and what he thought he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... evidence of facts, 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
... have written with the sword, after the fashion of greater men, and requiring no secretary. I now take up the quill to set forth, correctly, certain incidents which, having been noised about, stand in danger of being inaccurately reported by some imitator of Brantome and De l'Estoile. If all the world is to know of this matter, let it know ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... maker, the Lord, the Person who has his source in Brahman; then becoming wise and shaking off good and evil, he reaches the highest equality, free from passions.' The being to which the teaching of Prajpati refers is the 'imitator,' i. e. the individual soul; the Brahman which is ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... an imitator of specific foreign models. His first play, Realidad, was a pure expression of his own genius. But it placed him at once in the modern school which aims to discard the factitious devices of the "well-made" play, and to present upon the stage a picture of life ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... 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; ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... nature, many-sided in his moods. He can find 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 in their ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... use for comparison as standards both the imitated writing and that of the imitator's traced writing. These methods, employed by skilled and experienced examiners, will rarely fail of establishing the true relationship between any two disputed handwritings and more especially where the question of a forged or ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... rejoicing when somebody finds, among the dust and cobwebs of antiquity, something that he himself had slyly hidden there not so very long before. One of them makes verses and takes care to consult Hesychius' Lexicon. Something there immediately assures him that he is destined to be an imitator of AEschylus, and leads him to believe, indeed, that he 'has something in common with' AEschylus: the miserable poetaster! Yet another peers with the suspicious eye of a policeman into every contradiction, even into the shadow of every contradiction, of which Homer was guilty: ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... sir, I shall have no successor, only a miserable imitator, and you will be that imitator," said Thugut, proudly. "But I give you my word that this task will not be intrusted to you for a long while. I shall now draw up my request to the emperor, and I beg you, gentlemen, to ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... talented imitator, she next tried her hand at an essay on an abstract subject. This was a failure: you could not SEE things, when you wrote about, say, "Beneficence"; and Laura's thinking was done mainly in pictures. Matters ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... man crowned with vine, playing and singing to two girls in a garden, for example. The celebrated Concert of the Louvre Gallery, so charming for its landscape and so voluptuous in its dreamy sense of Arcadian luxury, is given by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to an imitator of Sebastian del Piombo. See History of Painting in North Italy, vol. ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... it, except in his heart. His intelligence was bright and lively, 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 of Perugini. ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... ridicul'd, as the Quakers have been in any Book against them. And when they were attack'd by one Samuel Young, a whimsical Presbyterian-Buffoon-Divine, who call'd himself Trepidantium Malleus, and set up for an Imitator of Mr. Alsop, in several Pamphlets full of Stories, Repartees, and Ironies; in which Young, perhaps, thought himself as secure from a Return of the like kind, as a Ruffian or Thief may when he assaults ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... was born a youth of such virtuous dispositions that he seemed to belie the promise of his years, since virtue and adolescence are not easily reconciled. He gave himself much to the reading of the Lives of the Saints, of whose exercises he was a great imitator, very fearful of those snares which lie in the way of youth, and which, though he escaped, he was not without a disposition to fall into." . . ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... that I believe were I to publish the Canongate Chronicles without my name (nom de guerre, I mean) the event would be a corollary to the fable of the peasant who made the real pig squeak against the imitator, while the sapient audience hissed the poor grunter as if inferior to the biped in his own language. The peasant could, indeed, confute the long-eared multitude by showing piggy; but were I to ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... were abused with diverse stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed, the stealthes of injurious copyists, we expos'd them; even those are now offer'd to your view, crude and bereft of their limbes, and of the rest absolutely in their parts as he conceived them 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 told with that easinesse that wee have scarse received from him a {123} blot in his papers." On the other hand, scholarship ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... and, imagining it proceeds from the throat of one of their species, who, entirely at his ease, is letting the ornithological world know how excessively overjoyed he is at his safe arrival, alight in the trees which surround and conceal the treacherous imitator, and quickly fall a prey to the ready gun. So infatuated are they, that enormous quantities are killed by this method early in the season; in fact, I knew one person who shot one hundred and four, besides other birds, to his ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... which admit of 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 can be taught, of ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... garden by the lake: we pass through a winter-parlour, a morning-room, and a north-parlour protected from the heat. Every detail seems to be complete; and yet we hear nothing of a library. The explanation seems to be that the Bishop was a close imitator of Pliny. The villa in Auvergne is a copy of the winter-refuge at Laurentum, where Pliny only kept 'a few cases contrived in the wall for the books that cannot be read too often.' But when the Bishop writes about his friends' houses we find many allusions to their ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... Majestas Populi The Difficult Union To a World-Reformer My Antipathy Astronomical Writings The Best State To Astronomers My Faith Inside and Outside Friend and Foe Light and Color Genius Beauteous Individuality Variety The imitator Geniality The Inquirers Correctness The Three Ages of Nature The Law of Nature Choice Science of Music To the Poet Language The Master The Girdle The Dilettante The Babbler of Art The Philosophies The Favor of the Muses Homer's ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the wonders and the labours of the happy, busy day. No; such short glimpses of the water-world as our present appliances afford us are full enough of pleasure; and we will not envy Glaucus: we will not even be over-anxious for the success of his only modern imitator, the French naturalist who is reported to have fitted himself with a waterproof dress and breathing apparatus, in order to walk the bottom of the Mediterranean, and see for himself how the world goes on at the fifty-fathom line: we will be content with the wonders of the shore and ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... Jacob Bryant believed in them and wrote an 'Apology' for the credulous. Bryant, who believed in his own system of mythology, might have believed in anything. When Chatterton sent his "discoveries" to Walpole (himself somewhat of a mediaeval imitator), Gray and Mason detected the imposture, and Walpole, his feelings as an antiquary injured took no more notice of the boy. Chatterton's death was due to his precocity. Had his genius come to him later, it would have found him wiser, and better able to command the fatal demon of ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... and third quarter of the XVI century. Pupil of Pordenone; imitator of all his great Venetian contemporaries; finally, imitator of ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... venture to play on the borders of 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, ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... of the moment. That disclaimer of mine was a case in point. I am ashamed every time I think of my bursting out before an unconcerned public with that bombastic pow-wow about burning publishers' letters, and all that sort of imbecility, and about my not being an imitator, etc. Who would find out that I am a natural fool if I kept always cool and never let nature come ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... and colouring as to be mistaken for it, although the two may not be really allied and often belong to distinct families or orders. One creature seems disguised in order to be made like another; hence the terms "mimic" and mimicry, which imply no voluntary action on the part of the imitator. It has long been known that such resemblances do occur, as, for example, the clear-winged moths of the families Sesiidae and Aegeriidae, many of which resemble bees, wasps, ichneumons, or saw-flies, and have received names expressive of the resemblance; ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... be excellent and the chief, is not to be imitated alone; for no imitator ever grew up to his author: likeness is always on this side truth. Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language (when he could spare or pass by ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... whistle]; the former 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 limits ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... Italy. Neither the invention nor the conduct of this great action were owing to Homer or any other poet; it is one thing to copy, and another thing to imitate from nature. The copier is that servile imitator to whom Horace gives no better a name than that of animal; he will not so much as allow him to be a man. Raffaelle imitated nature; they who copy one of Raffaelle's pieces, imitate but him, for his ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it, developing itself in correspondence with their development. For Lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill became his genius, had affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he created anew all that he copied; and none among the flock of mock-birds, though their notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, or Claudian, have sought even to fulfil a single condition of epic truth. Milton was the third ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... now ensued, the continuity of classicism is seen in two forms of literature—namely, philological criticism and poetry. The acknowledged model of Latin poetry was Virgil, and his greatest imitator was Claudian, who had made himself a Latin scholar by study, much as the moderns do. Claudian is commonly called the last of the heathen poets. He has also been called the transitional link between ancient and modern, between ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... specimens, but for five objections; it is difficult; time is short; I have done it elsewhere; an able imitator has since done it better and similarity, a virtue in peas, is ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... how the storms rage and the winds howl in the world below! Someone is wielding your thunder hammer all unskilfully. Can you not guess the thief? Who but Thrym, the mighty giant who has ever been your enemy and your imitator, and whose fingers have long itched to grasp the short handle of mighty Mioelnir, that the world may name him Thunder Lord instead of you. But look! What a tempest! The world will be shattered into fragments unless we ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... societies. It was not done by a German. The A, if you noticed, was printed somewhat after the German fashion. Now, a real German invariably prints in the Latin character, so that we may safely say that this was not written by one, but by a clumsy imitator who overdid his part. It was simply a ruse to divert inquiry into a wrong channel. I'm not going to tell you much more of the case, Doctor. You know a conjuror gets no credit when once he has explained his trick, and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the greatest living Englishman. He spoke with great respect of Carlyle. He said: "Emerson was an imitator of Carlyle, and got his thoughts from him." I could not stand that. It seemed to me that he had probably never read a page of Emerson in his life, and had got his notion from some writer for a magazine, before either of these great men was ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... opposite Simonides' place is said to have been completed by the famous Epiphanes, and was all such a habitation can be imagined; though he was a builder whose taste ran to the immense rather than the classical, now so called—an architectural imitator, in other words, of the Persians ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... to high rank in this department also. The closest imitators of the human voice are birds of this family: for instance, the Mino bird. Our crow also is a vocal mimic, and that not in the matter-of-course way of the mocking-bird, but, as it were, more individual and spontaneous. He is not merely an imitator of the human voice, like the parrots, (and a better one as regards tone,) nor of other birds, like the thrushes, but combines both. The tame crow already mentioned very readily undertook extempore imitations of words, and with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... two had parted. It has been said that the letters are not genuine, and they must be read with this assertion in mind; yet it is difficult to believe that any one save Heloise herself could have flung a human soul into such frankly passionate utterances, or that any imitator could have ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... other hand, there is much genuine Aino matter in the present collection. For instance, we learn 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
... of composition and taught him some of the secrets of color. In Florence, too, he acknowledged the spell of Michelangelo and Leonardo. But though he learned from many teachers, Raphael was never merely an imitator. His scholarship and his skill he turned to his own uses; and when we have traced the sources of his motives and the influences in the moulding of his manner, there emerges out of the fusion a creative ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... of these, as I am told, had no good original manner of his own, yet we see how well he succeeded when he turns an imitator; for the following are rather imitations than ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... time—untying the strict chain that binds you to the fourteenth century, but impressing on you candour, clearness, shrewdness, ingenuous susceptibility, simplicity, ANTIQUITY! A creative translator or imitator—Chaucer born again, a century ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... then gone to Rome, and seen the works of Michael Angelo, with those of Raphael and the ancients, he was convinced, the admirable facility of his coloring considered, that he would have produced works of the most astonishing perfection; seeing that, as he well deserved to be called the most perfect imitator of Nature of our times, as regards coloring, he might thus have rendered himself equal to the Urbinese or Buonarroto, as regarded the great foundation of all, design. At a later period Titian repaired to Vicenza, where he painted "The Judgment ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... lies,—indeed, she was the last person buried in it; and it is here that the child loves to linger and dream the sweet, sad, purposeless dreams of childhood. She knows nothing of "Old Mortality," yet she is his childish imitator in this lonely spot. She keeps the weeds in some sort of subjection; she pulls away the moss and lichens from head and foot stones,—not so much with any idea of reverence as that she likes to read the inscriptions, and feel the quaint flourishes and curlicues of the older gravestones. She has ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards
... controlled most of the German lands that acknowledged Charlemagne, while his hold on Italy was immeasurably stronger. Further parallels between two ages and systems so unlike as those of Charlemagne and his imitator are of course superficial; and Napoleon's attempt at impressing the imagination of the Germans seems to us to smack of unreality. Yet we must remember that they were then the most impressionable and docile of nations, that his attempt was made with much skill, and that none of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... publish the author's 'mere writings,' he being dead, and to offer them, not 'maimed and deformed,' in surreptitious and stolen copies, but 'cured and perfect of their limbs and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them, 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 easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... Woman Weighing Pearls, now in the possession of P. A. B. Widener, of Philadelphia, to be found accredited to Vermeer in Smith's Catalogue Raisonne. But not much weight can be attached to the opinions of the earlier critics of Vermeer. For them he was either practically unknown or else an imitator of Terburg, De Hooch, or Mieris, he whose work is ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... classicists as Melndez, Cienfuegos, Jovellanos, and Quintana. Two of Espronceda's academic exercises have been preserved. They are as insipid and jejune as Goethe's productions of the Leipzig period. As an imitator of Horace he was not a success. What he gained from the Academy was ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... progressive spirit of the people. Mr. Herbert Spencer attributes two motives to imitation, either reverential or competitive.[9] It is with the latter that we are concerned. This, coming as it does from a desire of an imitator to assert his equality with the one imitated, implies the recognition of superiority of the latter, and the acknowledgment of inferiority of the former. Conservatism, in the sense we have been using the term, defies any recognition ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... above all men? Because I knew of it beforehand? Consider rather whether this was not his reason for calling on me, that, when he had performed an action very like those which I myself had done, he called me above all men to witness that he had been an imitator of my exploits. But you, O stupidest of all men, do not you perceive, that if it is a crime to have wished that Caesar should be slain—which you accuse me of having wished—it is a crime also to have rejoiced at his death? For what is the difference between a man who has advised an ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... excellent, and the chiefe, is not to bee imitated alone. For never no Imitator, ever grew up to his Author; likenesse is alwayes on this side Truth: Yet there hapn'd, in my time, one noble Speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language, (where hee could spare, or passe by a jest) was nobly censorious. ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... 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
... gagging comedians, 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 such full possession of the galleries that he would ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... thick, conical bill is made for crushing seeds, but he now feeds on so many different substances that its original use, as shown by its shape, is obscured. If there were such a thing as vaudeville among birds, the common sparrow would be a star imitator. He clings to the bark of trees and picks out grubs, supporting himself with his tail like a woodpecker; he launches out into the air, taking insects on the wing like a flycatcher; he clings like a chickadee to the under side of twigs, or hovers in front of a heap of insect eggs, ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious impostors, that expos'd them: euen 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 conceiued th[e]. 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 vttered with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers. But it is not our prouince, who onely gather his works, and giue them you, ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... 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 in the circumstance that the latter invariably used a purfling of whalebone. ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... flesh, to be meat 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 ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... truly ingenious, and philosophical works of AEsop, we shall add those of his imitator Phoedrus, which in purity and elegance of style, are inferiour to none. We shall add also the Lyrick Poetry of Alcman, which is no servile composition; the sublime Morals of Epictetus, and ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... their human nature, by those thousand little touches and nameless turns, which distinguish the genius essentially dramatic from the genius merely poetical; the Proteus of the stage from the philosophic observer and trained imitator of life. We have not those careless felicities, those varyings from high to low, that air of living freedom which Shakspeare has accustomed us, like spoiled children, to look for in every perfect work of this species. Schiller is too elevated, too regular and sustained in his ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... set forth as the head of the Artificial School. This is, perhaps, rather a convenient than an exact designation. He had little of original genius, but was an apt imitator and reproducer—what in painting would be an excellent copyist. His greatest praise, however, is that he reduced to system what had gone before him; his poems present in themselves an art of poetry, with technical canons and illustrations, which were long after servilely obeyed, and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... said the same voice which had spoken before. 'She's a true Nickleby—a worthy imitator of her old uncle Ralph—she hangs back to be more sought after—so does he; nothing to be got out of Ralph unless you follow him up, and then the money comes doubly welcome, and the bargain doubly hard, for you're impatient and he ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... A singleton in Clubs!" Nita's imitator demanded triumphantly, as she continued to lay down her dummy hand, slapping the lone nine of Clubs down beside trumps; "and this little collection of Hearts!" as she displayed and arranged the King, Jack, eight and four of Hearts; "and this!" as a length of Diamonds—Ace, Jack, ten, eight, ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... Joan of Arc, if she 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 by herself. While ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... portraits of deceased Canadians of merit, the News is a valuable and interesting addition to journalism in this country, and will be found most useful to the future generations who will people the Dominion. Nor does Canada now lack an imitator of Punch, in the humorous line. It is noteworthy that whilst America has produced humorists like 'Sam Slick,' Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and others, no American rival to Punch has yet appeared in Boston or New York. The attempts ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... was destined to bring the unrestrained 'Young-European' mood in me to full maturity. This friend was Theodor Apel. I had known him a long while, and had always felt particularly flattered by the fact that I had won his hearty affection; for, as the son of the gifted master of metre and imitator of Greek forms of poetry, August Apel, I felt that admiring deference for him which I had never yet been able to bestow upon the descendant of a famous man. Being well-to-do and of a good family, his friendship gave me such opportunities ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... bare framework of incident wherein to set the noble, lofty womanhood of Hermione,—a conception far, far above the reach of such a mind as Greene's. In the matter of the painted statue, Shakespeare, so far as is known, was altogether without a model, as he is without an imitator; the boldness of the plan being indeed such as nothing but entire success could justify, and wherein it is hardly possible to conceive of anybody but Shakespeare's having succeeded. And yet here it is that we are ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... fact, that, notwithstanding his profound originality, Jesus, during some weeks at least, was the imitator of John. His way as yet was not clear before him. At all times, moreover, Jesus yielded much to opinion, and adopted many things which were not in exact accordance with his own ideas, or for which he cared little, merely because they were popular; ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... tendency to realism already marks this early Fleming, and is the distinctive feature of a manner in which the painter strives to imitate nature in its most material forms. Idealism and noble forms are lacking, but Broederlam is a fair imitator of the truth. Distinctive combination and choice of colours in draperies, and vigorous tone, characterise him as they do the early works at Bruges and other cities of the Netherlands which may be judged by his standard." And again, "the ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... behind lattice-work or in a glass cabinet, that she might be heard but not seen. The dry tourist-chronicler fails to report whether her disciples approved of the preventive measure, and whether in the end it turned out to have been effectual. At all events, the example of the learned maiden found an imitator. Almost a century later we meet with Miriam Shapiro, of Constance, a beautiful Jewish girl, who likewise delivered public lectures on the Talmud sitting behind a curtain, that the attention of her inquisitive pupils might not be distracted by sight ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... choleric warrior Achilles, 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 ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... 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 ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... between the natives and their lords. All ancient nations seem to have considered that the right of conquest gave a right to the lands of the conquered country. William dividing England among his Normans is but an imitator of every successful invader of ancient times. The new-comers having gained the land of a subdued people, that people, in order to subsist, must become the serfs of the land [65]. The more formidable warriors are mostly slain, or exiled, or conciliated by some remains of authority and possessions; ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Fastidious Brisk are two characters in "Every Man Out of his Humour;" the former of whom is represented as copying the dress and manners of the latter. Dryden seems only to mean, that one of those pamphleteers was the servile imitator of ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... Atlantic. Now, in my opinion, this indefinite influence was also making itself felt, faintly and dimly, in Scotland. The Death-Wake is the work of a lad who certainly had read Keats, Coleridge and Shelley, but who is no imitator of these great poets. He has, in a few passages, and at his best, an accent original, distinct, strangely musical, and really replete with promise. He has a fresh unborrowed melody and mastery of words, the first indispensable sign of a ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... 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
... l. 2. 'Frederica Brun.' More exactly Frederike. She was a minor poetess; imitator of Matthison, whose own poems can hardly be called original. (See Gostwick and Harrison's 'Outlines of German Literature,' p. 355, cxxiii., ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... glad eyes at the possible advent of a new impetus to the jaded theatrical machine. They had worked themselves into the most appreciative state of mind. Lo, and behold! After a few weeks, M. Antoine's American imitator evaporated. Lack ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... wont for many years to entertain curious audiences by reproducing those swelling tones in which he rolled out his defense of popular sovereignty, and it is not improbable that Douglas owes to the marvelous imitator of sounds a considerable part of such fame as he has among uneducated men in our time. Among historical students, however seriously his deserts are questioned, there is no question of the ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... 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 Watts, had been offered without success to ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... balance inclines towards Richardson, though I dare say I am one in a hundred in thinking so. First of all, beyond anything I may have already urged, he had the supreme credit of having been the first. Surely the originator should have a higher place than the imitator, even if in imitating he should also improve and amplify. It is Richardson and not Fielding who is the father of the English novel, the man who first saw that without romantic gallantry, and without bizarre imaginings, enthralling stories may be made from ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... honorable lines may sometimes 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 of success. ...
— The Young Man in Business • Edward W. Bok
... 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 or twenty-seven ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... are from the fictitious theology of Orpheus and Museus to the elegance and grace of Anacreon, Horace, and Sappho. It is mainly Horace whom Ogilvie has in view as the exemplar of the lyric poet, though "a professed imitator both of Anacreon and Pindar" (p. xxx). We can distinguish, therefore, several different criteria which contribute to Ogilvie's criticism: (1) a unity of sentiment consistent with a variety of emotions; (2) a propriety of the passions in which vivacity is controlled by the circumstances of character; ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... a steady reading of them, till I had nearly finished both before I went to bed,—the two of your last edition, of course, I mean, And in the morning I awoke determined to take down the "Excursion." I wish the scoundrel imitator could know this. But why waste a wish on him? I do not believe that paddling about with a stick in a pond, and fishing up a dead author, whom his intolerable wrongs had driven to that deed of desperation, would turn the heart of ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... you by too serious an example, it came into my head that there is perhaps a morality peculiar to artists or to art, and that this morality might well be the very reverse of the common morality. Yes, my friend, I am much afraid that man marches straight to misery by the very path that leads the imitator of nature to the sublime. To plunge into extremes—that is the rule for poets. To keep in all things the just mean—there is the rule for happiness. One must not make poetry in real life. The heroes, the romantic lovers, the great patriots, the inflexible magistrates, the apostles of religion, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... B.C. 51.] was, on the contrary, the most eager of all the flatterers of Augustus,—a man of wit and pleasure, whose object or idolatry was Cynthia, a poetess and a courtesan. He was an imitator of the Greeks, but had a great contemporary fame, [Footnote: Quint., x. 1. Section 93.] and shows great warmth of passion, but he never soared into the sublime heights of poetry, like his rival. Such were among the great elegiac poets of Rome, generally devoted to the delineation of the passion ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... mummery of words, and induce them to believe him. But as they grow older, and come into contact with realities, they learn by experience the futility of his pretensions. The Sophist, then, has not real knowledge; he is only an imitator, or image-maker. ...
— Sophist • Plato
... (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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... even now a book turns up from time to time in which is inscribed, in fair large Italian lettering, the name, Ben Jonson. With respect to Jonson's use of his material, Dryden said memorably of him: "[He] was not only a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all the others; you track him everywhere in their snow....But he has done his robberies so openly that one sees he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... that capacity he filled every expectation that could be required of him, always reflecting the character of his master. If the master was very religious, so was he. If the master was a drunkard and a sinner, so was he. Always a good imitator, but never an originator. He liked to be flattered and honored and was always faithful to every special trust. When kindly treated he loved his master like a child. These were the conditions that the discipline ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... was contemporary with, and imitator of, Sir Philip Sydney, with Daniel, Lodge, Constable, and others, in the pastoral strain of sonnets, &c. Watson thus describes a ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... innumerable provincialisms which must cling to his youth: and we laid our account at the best with meeting a fine forward boy who would speak, perhaps not very well either, by rote; and taking the most prominent favourite actor of his day, as a model, be a mere childish imitator. We considered that when young people do any thing with an excellence disproportioned to their years, they are viewed through a magnifying medium; and that being once seen to approach to the perfection of eminent adults, they are, by a transition sufficiently easy ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... in what he had done, upon being duly informed of the grievance. Louis XIV. however, from a spirit of pride and insolence, refused to part with anything that looked like a prerogative of his crown. He said the king of France was not the imitator, but a pattern and example for other princes. He rejected with disdain the mild representations of the pope; he sent the marquis de Lavarden as his ambassador to Rome, with a formidable train, to insult Innocent even in his own city. That nobleman swaggered ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... not 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, ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... entirely occupied with his Dictionary. The last paper of his Rambler was published March 2, this year; after which, there was a cessation for some time of any exertion of his talents as an essayist. But, in the same year, Dr. Hawkesworth, who was his warm admirer, and a studious imitator of his style, and then lived in great intimacy with him, began a periodical paper, entitled The Adventurer, in connection with other gentlemen, one of whom was Johnson's much-beloved friend, Dr. Bathurst; and, without doubt, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... he said to the steward, who, having so far completed his morning work, and consumed his morning meal, was smoking his pipe, seated on the rail beside Tips. Tips was an admirer of the Irishman, and, in consequence, an imitator as far as he ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 Amorites ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... future author of "Robert le Diable" and "Les Huguenots." On returning to Germany Meyerbeer was very sarcastically criticised on the one side as a fugitive from the ranks of German music, on the other as an imitator of Rossini. ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... glittering malignity and eloquent irreligion of his later productions. Collins' callow namby-pamby died and gave no sign of the vigorous and original genius which he afterwards displayed. We have never thought that the world lost more in the "marvellous boy," Chatterton, than a very ingenious imitator of obscure and antiquated dulness. Where he becomes original (as it is called) the interest of ingenuity ceases and he becomes stupid. Kirke White's promises were endorsed by the respectable name of Mr. Southey ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Indeed, there is unmistakable evidence to show that certain work, so closely characteristic of the Adams that it might have been assigned to them without hesitation, was actually produced by Chippendale. This may be another of the many indications that Chippendale was himself an imitator, or it may be that Adam, as architect, prescribed designs which Chippendale's cabinetmakers and carvers executed. Chippendale's bills for this Adam work are still preserved. Stourhead, the famous house of the Hoares in Wiltshire, contains much undoubted Chippendale furniture, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... the Casina of Plautus, which is itself an imitation of the lost kleroumenoi of Diphilus. Plautus was, unquestionably, one of the best Latin writers; but the Casina is by no means one of his best plays; nor is it one which offers great facilities to an imitator. The story is as alien from modern habits of life, as the manner in which it is developed from the modern fashion of composition. The lover remains in the country and the heroine in her chamber during the whole action, leaving their fate to be decided by ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 views of it as there are various modes of life? Thus, to one, Nature is nothing more ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... this allusion to the Divine Master, and the fear of seeming a presumptuous imitator. At that moment he ceased to feel his illness—the fever, the thirst, the heaviness of ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... and Venetian, "as the ostentatious vehicle of puny conceits and emblematic quibbles, or the palliative of empty pomp and degraded luxuriance of colour." He considers Andrea del Sarto to have been his copyer, not his imitator. Tibaldi seems to have caught somewhat of his mind. As did Sir Joshua, so does Mr Fuseli mention his Polypheme groping at the mouth of his cave for Ulysses. He expresses his surprise that Michael Angelo was unacquainted with the great talent of Tibaldi, but lavished his assistance on inferior ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... of the prophetic past had nothing scholastic or antiquarian about it. John was a disciple, not an imitator, of the great men of Israel; his message was not learned from Isaiah or any other, though he was educated by studying them. What he declared, he declared as truth immediately seen by his own soul, the essence of his power ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... letter, and is headed in the best MSS. 'Q. M. Fratri S. D.' Quintus writes with special reference to his 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
... depended: it was lost. The loss absorbed the whole of my remaining fortune; it absorbed about twenty thousand francs in excess, a debt of honour to De N., whom you called my friend. Friend he was not; imitator, follower, flatterer, yes. Still I deemed him enough my friend to say to him, 'Give me a little time to pay the money; I must sell my stud, or write to my only living relation from whom I have expectations.' You remember that relation,—Jacques de Mauleon, old ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is 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 ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... religion, to its art and to its music, to the grandeur of its glorious fanes, and the solemnity of its stately ritual. She detested the meretricious show, the tinsel gaudiness, the bowing and genuflecting, the candles and the draperies, of Romanism, and of its pinchbeck imitator Ritualism; but I doubt whether she knew any keener pleasure than to sit in one of the carved stalls of Westminster Abbey, listening to the polished sweetness of Dean Stanley's exquisite eloquence; or to the thunder of the organ mingled with the ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... necessary to go beyond the obvious and almost commonplace solution that The Castle of Otranto was simply the castle of Strawberry Hill itself with paper for lath and ink for plaster—in other words, an effort to imitate something which the imitator more than half misunderstood. Of mediaeval literature proper, apart from chronicles and genealogies, Walpole knew nothing: and for its more precious features he had the dislike which sometimes accompanies ignorance. But he undoubtedly had positive literary genius—flawed, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... the Greek original in a few references to conversations of animals—although no plays are now called after them—and the names, places, and money he introduces are generally Greek. Still, we cannot regard him as a mere servile imitator—much of his own genius is doubtless preserved in the plays. In some, we can clearly recognise his hand, as where he alludes to Roman customs, or indulges in puns. For instance, where a man speaks of the blessing of having children, (liberi,) another observes he would rather be free (liber). ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... their resemblance, may be found. Altogether no less than ten genera are enumerated, which include species that imitate other butterflies. The mockers and mocked always inhabit the same region; we never find an imitator living remote from the form which it imitates. The mockers are almost invariably rare insects; the mocked in almost every case abounds in swarms. In the same district in which a species of Leptalis closely imitates an Ithomia, ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... difference which appears between his first rude essays and his magnificent Transfiguration to a change in the constitution of his mind? In poetry, as in painting and sculpture, it is necessary that the imitator should be well acquainted with that which he undertakes to imitate, and expert in the mechanical part of his art. Genius will not furnish him with a vocabulary: it will not teach him what word most exactly corresponds ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... two tables like that which he hath made, with a round hole in the middle, in his closet, to turn himself in; and he is to be in one of them as master, and Sir J. Duncomb in the other, as his man or imitator: and their discourse in those tables, about the disposing of their books and papers, very foolish. But that, that he is offended with, is his being made so contemptible, as that any should dare to make a gentleman a subject for the mirth of the world: and that therefore ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... bee-keeping requires that a man should be in some things, a very close imitator of Napoleon, who always aimed to have an overwhelming force, at the right time and in the right place; so the bee-keeper must be sure that his colonies are numerous, just at the time when their numbers can be turned to ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... Schill soon had an imitator of exalted rank. In August 1809 the Duke of Brunswick-OEls sought the dangerous honour of succeeding that famous partisan. At the head of at most 2000 men he for some days disturbed the left bank of the Elbe, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... 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 ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... is very amusing; he is a great orator, and addresses the others on all subjects, both general and political. On one occasion, when the Principal ventured to ask him whom he had adopted as his model for speaking, he grandly replied, 'I will have you to know, sir, that I am no servile imitator.' Some of the boys cannot overcome their thieving propensities, but will, even in the Refuge, purloin things that can be of no earthly use to them, if they get the chance. They are very quick and expert. Only a few days ago one of the boys fell down in a fit in the schoolroom; some of the ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... Be no imitator; freshly act thy part; Through this world be thou an independent ranger; Better is the faith that springeth from thy heart Than a better faith ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... cellars of the Gualfonda (Rucellai) Gardens by Professor 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 ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... look out for reminiscences in every new piece of music find of course that Paderewski is an imitator of Wagner, but though Manru would probably not have been written without the composer's intimate knowledge of the Ring of Nibelungen, the melodies and rythm are entirely his own. The music is true gypsy music with very much movement and highly phantastic colouring, ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... think I understand what is here meant by the style of Sophocles, but it is rather in detached scenes, than in the general plan, that I at all discern it. Hence, if the piece is to be taken from Euripides, I should be disposed to attribute it to some eclectic imitator, but one of the school of Sophocles rather than of that of Euripides, and who lived only a little later than both. This I infer from the familiarity of many of the scenes, for tragedy at this time was fast sinking into the domestic tragedy, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... inhabitants as one of the wonders of the world, and is certainly unique in its style, which belongs to no school. "From the beginning," says a modern writer on architecture, "it has been an exotic, and to the end of time will probably remain so, without a follower or imitator of the singular development of which it is the only example.... It has all the appearance of having been the work of a stranger, who was but imperfectly acquainted with the wants or customs of Italian ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... centuries contemptuously styled the Dwarf-nation, and always despised as a mere imitator and brain-picker of Chinese wisdom, now swims definitively into the ken of the Manchu court. The Formosan imbroglio had been forgotten as soon as it was over, and the recent rapid progress of Japan on Western lines towards national strength had been ignored by all Manchu statesmen, ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... always naif and original, and I prefer an in indifferent original any day to a good copy. How it shocks me to hear people recommending to their children to copy such a person's manners! A copied manner, how insupportable! The servile imitator of a set pattern, how despicable! No! I would rather have Edward in all the freshness of his own faults rather than in the faded semblance of ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... She knew they were not related, and so she put the whole thing down to Carnac's impressionable nature which led its owner into singular imitations. It had done so in the field of Art. He was young enough to be the imitator without loss ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... abusive as Horace upon the occasion—but if there is no catachresis in the wish, and no sin in it, I wish from my soul, that every imitator in Great Britain, France, and Ireland, had the farcy for his pains; and that there was a good farcical house, large enough to hold—aye—and sublimate them, shag rag and bob-tail, male and female, all together: and this leads me to the affair of Whiskers—but, by what chain ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... that Mr. Larry Cawdor is deeply incensed by the widespread prevalence of the erroneous impression that he still appears in the music-halls. For many years he has been replaced by an imitator who bears the same name and has modelled himself, both vocally and histrionically, on his illustrious namesake. But the real Larry Cawdor never sets foot inside a music-hall nowadays, being mainly engaged on an exhaustive commentary on the Talmud and devoting ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... 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 ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... named La 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 ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... name Pantomime itself signifies Nature as Pan was amongst the Ancients, the allegorical god of Nature, the shepherd of Arcadia, and with Mimos, meaning an imitator, we have, in the combination of these two words, "an imitator of Nature," and from whence we derive the origin ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... concerning the fact that Wagner used to wear gaudy costumes of silk and satin while he was composing, and that he had colored glass in his windows, which gave every object a mysterious aspect. He was called an imitator of the eccentric King of Bavaria, and some went so far as to declare him insane. But in truth, Wagner was simply endeavoring to put himself into an atmosphere most favorable for dramatic creation. We ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... conformity with his rather primitive artistic code, believed that he also was telling the truth. It is in Daudet's paper explaining how he came to write "Fromont and Risler" that he discusses the accusation that he was an imitator of Dickens,—an accusation which seems absurd enough now that the careers of both writers are closed, and that we can compare their complete works. Daudet records that the charge was brought against him very early, long before he had read Dickens, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... 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 ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... Lemon. He was turned over to Mr. Swain for some instruction in drawing on the wood, and subsequently took up his residence in the engraver's house for a time; but, not living long enough to prove his individuality, he remained to the end an imitator of Leech. Perhaps that was the reason that he drew so small a salary from Punch; at any rate, he always resented what he considered to be the contumelious and shabby treatment meted out to him by Mark Lemon. But for such ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... upon a performance which is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... it is inconceivable that any imitator but one should have had the power so to catch the very trick of his hand, the very note of his voice, and incredible that the one who might would have set himself to do so: for if this be not indeed the voice and this the hand of Marlowe, then what we find in these ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the friend and imitator of George Herbert, has some homely lines on the duties of clerk and sexton in his poem The Synagogue. Of ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... a man who sold himself to falsehood, that he might 'ride in gilt coaches, escorted by the flunkeyisms, and most sweet voices.' Nor to appreciate the secret of our character-test, can the assertion of any historian, from Clarendon down to Carlyle's last imitator, be credited, that 'a universal rising of Royalists combined with Anabaptists' broke out in March 1655. On the contrary, it must be accepted as a preliminary condition in this investigation that England was, at that time, in a state of immovable ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... known, it is only in cases of abnormally increased sensibility—for instance, in some of the stages of hypnotism and thought transmission—that the motor counterpart of a mental state can be imitated with such faithfulness and completeness that the imitator is thereby enabled to partake of all the intellectual elements of the state existing in another. The hedonic qualities, on the other hand, which are physiologically conditioned by much simpler motor counterparts, may of course be transmitted with far greater perfection: it is easier ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... appeared Jane Shore, written, as its author professes, IN IMITATION OF SHAKESPEARE'S STYLE. In what he thought himself an imitator of Shakespeare it is not easy to conceive. The numbers, the diction, the sentiments, and the conduct, everything in which imitation can consist, are remote in the utmost degree from the manner of Shakespeare, whose dramas it resembles only as it is ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... Donatello—a marble boy: his attitude is unbecoming, but the modelling of this admirable statue—the urchin is nearly life-sized—is almost unequalled. There is a similar figure in the Louvre made by some imitator. It need hardly be said that Donatello's children, especially the free-standing bronze statuettes, were widely copied. According to Vasari, Donatello designed the wooden putti carrying garlands in the new Sacristy of the Duomo. There are fourteen of these ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford |
