"Imitative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... imitative in a high degree. This faculty also it does not share with the lower animals, but does with man, imitation being one of the methods by which he has attained his supremacy. Observation, imitation, education, are the three levers in the development of the human intellect. ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... from the time of its first appearance in England, was found to be valuable for other uses besides those which so intimately connected it with both real and imitative warfare, with the fierce life-and-death conflict of the battle-field, and with the scarcely less perilous struggle for honour and renown in the lists. Very soon after the Norman Conquest, in consequence ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... tendency and check this great waste of human power and energy brings me to the only important cause of self-destruction which seems to me removable, and that is newspaper publicity. No argument is needed to prove that man is essentially an imitative animal. In dress, in behavior, in speech, in modes of thought, and in social conventions, we are all prone to do what we see others do; and when unhappy men and women learn, from the newspapers, that scores of other unhappy people are daily escaping from their troubles through the always open ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... notes suggest, what imitative parallel may be found to them in that chaos that is termed Nature, is a matter of no importance. They may suggest, as they do sometimes to me, peacocks and pomegranates and splashing fountains of gold water, or, as they do to your critic, sponges ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... to be noticed that these works of Giotto, in common with all others of the period, are independent of all the inferior sources of pictorial interest. They never show the slightest attempt at imitative realisation: they are simple suggestions of ideas, claiming no regard except for the inherent value of the thoughts. There is no filling of the landscape with variety of scenery, architecture, or incident, as in the works of Benozzo Gozzoli ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... movement draw their recruits. The real tragedy of Russia is that neither the party of reform nor the party of reaction shares, or even understands, the outlook and ideals of the people. Russian culture is still so comparatively recent that it has not yet passed out of the imitative stage; and, in spite of the work of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoieffsky, the books that are read and studied in Russia are for the most part translations from foreign authors. The result is that the political and social ideas of the intelligentsia are almost wholly derived from countries ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... objected that many children are entirely imitative, and that the imagination cannot be appealed to with them and that they cut themselves off from ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... among them Kaltschmidt, contend that there was but one primitive language, which was purely onomatopoeic, that is, imitative of natural sounds. This has been stigmatized as the "bow-wow" theory, but its advocates might derive an argument from the epithet itself, as not only our children, but the natives of Papua, call the dog a "bow-wow." They have, however, gone too far in attempting to trace back words in ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... exercised by Byron's genius on the imagination of Pushkin is well known. Shakespeare and other English dramatists had also their share in influencing his mind, which, at all events in its earlier developments, was of an essentially imitative type. As an example of his Shakespearian tastes, see his poem of "Angelo," founded ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... by Mr. Parsons was not of these half dozen; but the plain, hard-headed builder who had erected it for the original owner was shrewd and imitative, and had avoided ambitious deviations from the type he wished to copy—the red sandstone, swell front variety, which ten years before would have seemed to the moral sense of Benham unduly cheerful. Mr. Parsons ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... as he lifted himself up to look again at the first-born of his parents, the head of the brave troop of brethren, the gay, handsome, imperious young Lord de Montfort, whose proud head and gallant bearing he had looked at with a younger brother's imitative deference. What did he see but a wreck of a man, sitting crouched on the wretched bed, the left arm a mere stump, a bandage where the bright sarcastic eyes used to flash forth their dark fire, deep scars on all the small portion ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... house and garden. Mrs Browning in the fresh yet warm September air regained her strength. Before returning to Florence, they spent a week in the city to see the churches and the pictures by Sodoma. Even little Wiedemann screamed for church-interiors and developed remarkable imitative pietisms of a theatrical kind. "It was as well," said Browning, "to have the eyeteeth and ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... virtually gave the aeroplane its present place in aeronautics, there were three definite schools of experiment. The first of these was that which sought to imitate nature by means of the ornithopter or flapping-wing machines directly imitative of bird flight; the second school was that which believed in the helicopter or lifting screw; the third and eventually successful school is that which followed up the principle enunciated by Cayley, that of opposing a plane surface to the resistance of the air by supplying suitable ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... fern, or the sea-moss, are so true to the details as to answer a scientific purpose; natural objects are thus lithographed without the intervention of pencil or ink. And these several discoveries have placed the results of mere imitative art within reach of the mass; in other words, her prose language, that which mechanical science can utter, is so universal, that her poetry, that which must be conceived and expressed through individual genius, the emanation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... rampant even among the men who were most successful with the fantasy-trick. There were new devices. They were triumphs. They were plainly the beginnings of progress of a brand-new kind, not derived wholly from the present, and certainly not imitative of the children's. But the devices couldn't be used. Their existence couldn't be revealed. Because anything of unprecedented design would seem to have been learned from the children, and the United ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... their distinguishing characteristic is, that they not only admit of a perfect realization, but also of outward manifestation, so as to be communicated to others. All works of imagination, so called, present examples of this. Hence they may also be termed imitative or imaginative. For, though they draw their assimilants from the actual world, and are likewise regulated by the unknown Power before mentioned, yet are they but the forms of what, as a whole, ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... the service of his pen, it results that there is something "newspapery" and superficial about most of his prose. It is reporter's work, though reporting of a high order. His poetry too, though full of glow and picturesqueness, is largely imitative, suggesting Tennyson not unfrequently, but more often Shelley. His spirited Bedouin Song, for example, has an echo of Shelley's Lines ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... looked in the mirror and pursed up her lips, accompanying it with a little toss of the head, as she had seen the railroad treasurer's daughter do. She caught up her skirts with an easy swing, for had not Drouet remarked that in her and several others, and Carrie was naturally imitative. She began to get the hang of those little things which the pretty woman who has vanity invariably adopts. In short, her knowledge of grace doubled, and with it her appearance changed. She became a girl of ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... organized whole must be assimilated to the more important and essential parts. This and the preceding arguments may be strengthened by the reflection, that the composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the same throughout the radically different, or of the different throughout a base ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... been sought by various imitative processes, some of which are indistinguishable from it except by close inspection. In one of these wax, either in its natural state or tinted with an addition of powder colour, was used; in another glue mixed with whiting or plaster, also sometimes tinged, or red lead. On April ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... intensely self-contained and ambitious, and of whom two-thirds are now native-born,—a novel that would have corrected the too languidly accepted judgments of omniscient elderly gentlemen, who, after a few weeks or months spent among the smallest and most imitative section of Antipodean society, gravely conclude that 'leaves that grow on one branch of an oak are not more like leaves that grow upon another, than the Australian swarm is like the ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... first place, the plan of the Miscellany is frankly imitative. For some years now there has been published in England an anthology entitled Georgian Poetry. The Miscellany is intended to be an American companion to that publication. The dissimilarities of temperament, ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... old quarrel of the philosopher with the imitative arts seems to be revived in respect of the novel. But though novel-writers might be banished from a new republic,[14] it would not be as artists, but for the inferiority of their art. An artist indeed the novelist is; he combines events and persons with reference to ends; he concentrates ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... battery jesters did not refrain from imitative expressions of "Ahs" and "Ohs" and "Ain't it bootiful?" as their laughing upturned faces were illuminated ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... his rank of life, when once the golden days of youth and early manhood have passed away. Such years are in many men's lives marked by the projection, or even by the partial accomplishment, of literary undertakings on a large scale, and more especially of such as partake of an imitative character. When a juvenile and facile writer's taste is still unsettled, and his own style is as yet unformed, he eagerly tries his hand at the reproduction of the work of others; translates the "Iliad" or "Faust," or suits himself with unsuspecting promptitude to ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... social instincts of the child reinforce the tendency to imitate is indicated by the fact that his early imitations are of human acts especially, as yawning, smiling, crying, etc. The same is further evidenced in that, at a later stage, when ordinary objects enter into his imitative acts, the imitation is largely symbolic, and objects are endowed with living attributes. Here blocks become ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... than a clever adaptation of Plautus to English manners and customs; but a comedy written soon after, Gammer Gurton's Needle, is really an Interlude cast in the Plautean mold. The first English tragedy, Gorboduc, closely imitative of Seneca, but on {30} a mythical British subject and written in English blank verse, did not appear until 1562, nearly a quarter of a century later. Seneca's tragedies had little action, slight characterization, and many extremely long speeches, which often display, however, much brilliant ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... a battle, in defence of his beauty, with another boy, bigger than himself, and beat his opponent most handsomely—and, therefore, HE likes Dash; and the maids like him, or pretend to like him, because we do—as is the fashion of that pliant and imitative class. And now Dash and May follow us everywhere, and are going with us to the Shaw, as I said before—or rather to the cottage by the Shaw, to bespeak milk and butter of our little dairy-woman, Hannah Bint—a ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... describe my son. Like all children, he was imitative, so had commenced very early to make a collection of insects, and this was sufficient to give him a precocious taste for natural history; but in his character he was earnest and reflective, and very eager for knowledge. Sumichrast took ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... the business of art was held to be 'the sublime and beautiful.' In our day it has fallen to be the imitative and voluptuous. In both periods the word passionate has been freely employed; but in the eighteenth century passion meant irresistible impulse of the loftiest kind: for example, a passion for astronomy or ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... crest, his dusky white vest, his white-tipped tail and the black band across the back of his head, down the neck and across the breast—like a black collar worn very low down. It was a spring-like morning, the thermometer rapidly rising toward forty-five, and Mr. Blue Jay was in one of his imitative moods. There is hardly a limit to his vocabulary, and it would not be surprising if some of his imitative stunts should be mistaken for the call of an early robin. Among these calls is a liquid gurgle, like hard cider coming out of the neck of a big brown jug. Another, and a common one, ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... capitalized on the popularity of the Travels were the imitative Memoirs of Lilliput (1727) and A Voyage to Cacklogallinia (1727). The author of the Memoirs emphasizes the evil character of the Lilliputians, particularly their lecherous clergy, and concludes with an account of the sufferings of Big-Endian ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... education, the tremendous power of the propitiatory tradition, had always caught and crippled every new gospel before it had run a score of years. Jesus for example gave man neither a theology nor a church organization; His sacrament was an innocent feast of memorial; but the fearful, limited, imitative men he left to carry on his work speedily restored all these three abominations of the antiquated religion, theology, priest, and sacrifice. Jesus indeed, caught into identification with the ancient victim of the harvest sacrifice ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... doctrines he taught; admired in the poems in which he went halting after Byron, and in the eloquence with which he meant one day to astonish great congregations. There was nothing original as yet discoverable in him; nothing to deliver him from the poor imitative apery in which he imagined himself a poet. He did possess one invaluable gift—that of perceiving and admiring more than a little, certain forms of the beautiful; but it was rendered merely ridiculous by being conjoined with the miserable ambition—poor as that of any mountebank ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or, as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative. Each class, in right of this distinction, obeys principles apart; yet both may claim a common ground of existence, and it may ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... He was a younger man than Lockwood, with an impressionable erudition. Like his co-workers he had been somewhat stampeded by Dorn's imitative faculties, faculties which enabled the former journalist to bombinate twice as loud in a void three times as great as any of ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... sunshine and flowers and laughter, against the limitations and thwartings and disappointments of life. For a time it seemed to her that these brave consolations were solutions, and she was stirred by an imitative passion. How stupid had she not been to let life and Sir Isaac overcome her! She felt that she must make herself like Elizabeth, exactly like Elizabeth; she tried forthwith, and a certain difficulty she ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... had it repaired and set up her tea-table near the black marble fireplace. The next time the banker's wife came to call she was able to offer her a cup of tea, with sliced lemon, quite as a matter of course, after the manner that Mrs. Kemp had handed it to her the week before. Milly was not crudely imitative: she was selectively imitative, and for the present she had chosen Mrs. Kemp ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... laughter, the superior giggles that would arise from a group of Greenwich Villagers if they did me the honour to read this page; but the real Quartier Latin has better taste and is not so imitative—and paraphrases of this lovely lyric still find admirers in the gardens of the Luxembourg and on the heights of Montmartre. Tennyson, like De Gu['e]rin, had bent the old classic form to newer usage, and one can hardly help seeing, in spite of the fact ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... swearing that he had been shot in the arm through the commanding general's mismanagement of the army. One was marching with an air imitative of some sublime drum major. Upon his features was an unholy mixture of merriment and agony. As he marched he sang a bit of doggerel in a high ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... Guns.—The imitative, if not inventive, powers of our forefathers have been shown in so many instances, that it is not surprising we have no absolute record of the first gun-maker, when he lived, or where he worked, but we ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Were these letters penned by natives or by half-castes, with foreign blood in their veins and inherited capacities of feeling? Unless we know that, no scientific deduction is allowable. These natives are very imitative. They learn our music easily and rapidly, and with the art of writing and reading they readily acquire our amorous phrases. A certain Biblical tone, suggesting the Canticles, is noticeable. The word "heart" is used in a way foreign to Polynesian thought, and ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... die out, were merged, not in a Sicilian nation, for that did not exist, but in the common mass of settlers of Latin speech and rite, as distinguished from the older inhabitants, Greek and Saracen." Independent, enterprising, impatient of restraint, gifted with a rare imitative power which imparted a peculiar tinge and a peculiar grace to whatever they adopted from others, they lacked originality, and the power to maintain their own distinctive type of character and ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... works on the mind, there is no longer a fair fight with those sober reasons. The action of the glands controls the psychophysical reactions, so that the ideas which would lead to opposite response are inhibited. Alcohol and the imitative mood of social gayety may help to dull those hygienic fears, but on the whole the mere sexual longing is sufficient to break down the reminiscence of medical warning. The situation for the boy is then ultimately ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... combined with the other peculiarities of their social life and forestine character. Dominant woodland animals, indeed, like monkeys, parrots, toucans, and hornbills, at least if vegetarian in their habits, are almost always gregarious, noisy, mischievous, and imitative. And the imitation results directly from the unusual intelligence; for, after all, what is the power of learning itself—at least, in all save its very highest phases—but the faculty of accurately imitating another? Monkeys for the most part imitate action only, because they ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... varied yet profound knowledge which made him without equal in the House of Commons. His earliest production was a Vindication of Natural Society (1756), written in the manner of Lord Bolingbroke, and successful enough in its imitative satire not only to deceive its immediate public, but also to become the basis of Godwin's Political Justice. After a vain attempt to serve in Ireland with "Single-Speech" Hamilton, he became the private secretary to Lord Rockingham, the leader ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... England at this time for women to paint; they principally affected miniature and water-color pictures, but of the many who called themselves artists few merit our attention; they practised but a feeble sort of imitative painting; their works of slight importance cannot now be named, while their lives were usually commonplace and void of incident. Of the few exceptions to this rule I have written in the later ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... emotion; gazing down on his mortal length with a sort of benignant friendliness; aloof, as one whose duties to that form of flesh were well-nigh done. At the feet of his master, Jacko, the monkey, had jumped up, and was there squatted, with his legs crossed, very like a tailor! The imitative wretch had got a towel, and as often as Lady Racial's handkerchief travelled to her eyes, Jacko's peery face was hidden, and you saw his lithe skinny body doing grief's convulsions till, tired of this amusement, he obtained possession of the warrior's helmet, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... them were, was able to attain to the position of importance which the great poet had rendered obligatory for future aspirants. It is worth noting that Pushkin's best work, in his second, non-Byronic, purely national style, enjoyed less success among his contemporaries than his early, half-imitative efforts, where the characters were weak, lacking in independent creation, and where the whole tone was gloomy. This gloomy tone expressed the sentiments of all Russia of the period, and it was natural that Byronic heroes ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... over the mill-stream is almost on a level with the clear running water, and I lay there and gazed at the huge wheel which, under multitudinous forms and uses, is one of the world's wonders, because one of the few things we imitative children have not learnt from nature. Is it perchance a memory out of that past when Adam walked clear-eyed in Paradise and talked with the Lord in the cool of the day? Did he see then the flaming wheels instinct with service, wondrous messengers of the Most High vouchsafed in vision to ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... proceeding from Washington Street. In a building not far off, there is a hall for exhibitions; and sometimes, in the evenings, loud music is heard from it; or, if a diorama be shown (that of Bunker Hill, for instance, or the burning of Moscow), an immense racket of imitative ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... literary popularity upon the mind of Miss Roberts very probably caused that lady to desire similar celebrity. Indeed, so imitative are the impulses of the human mind, that it may fairly be questioned if Miss Landon would ever have attuned her lyre had she mot been in the presence of Miss Mitford's and Miss Rowden's "fame, and felt ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... if you did but know how refreshing it is to see anything shabby, and dull, and ugly," Mrs. Grinstead answered with imitative inflections, which set Anna Vanderkist off into a fit of laughter, infecting both her uncle and ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... masculine mind. Orators have found that logic—conviction—may have little or no effect on a feminine audience and yet prove the surest means of convincing an audience of men. School teachers early note that the feminine portion of the school lean towards grammar—which is imitative and illogical—while the boys are generally best in mathematics, which is a hard and fast ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... was forthwith written down, so as to impress it on our memories, and none of us have yet forgotten it. It was singular, moreover, how the imitative faculty gained strength among us. We children acquired the habit of speaking of all our garden-plants by such outlandish names as father then taught us,—not seriously, of course, but as a capital piece of fun. We knew no more of relations and affinities than he, and so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... that those delightful half-illusions which imitative art seeks to produce are greatly favoured by such a temporary attitude of the interpreting imagination. In the theatre, for example, we are prepared for realizing the semblance of life that is to be unfolded before us. We come knowing that what is to be performed aims at representing ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must he a university of knowledges.... We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame.—The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.—The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of barks that went too soon to sea. And if you launch even your well-built ship at half-tide, what will it do but strike bottom, and stick there? The perpetual tragedy of literary history, in especial, is this. What numbers of young men, gifted with great imitative quickness, who, having, by virtue of this, arrived at fine words and figures of speech, set off on their nimble rhetorical Pegasus, keep well out of the Muse's reach ever after! How many go conspicuously through life, snapping their smart percussion-caps ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... off the head before you send it to table, we hardly remember that the thing ever lived if we don't see the head, while it may excite ugly ideas to see it cut up in an attitude imitative of life; besides, for the preservation of the head, the poor animal sometimes suffers ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... applies to it only when it is an imitative art. For in the use of French women, I think it is as innocent as in the use of a wild Indian, who draws a circle round her face, and makes two spots, perhaps blue, perhaps white, in the middle of it. Such are my ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... the Universal History of Orosius, Baeda's Ecclesiastical History, and Pope Gregory's Regula Pastoralis. But the fact that AElfred still has recourse to Roman originals, marks the stage of civilisation as yet mainly imitative; while the interesting passages intercalated by the king himself show that the beginnings of a really native prose literature were already ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... the way they work and what their possibilities are. And each animal, man, beast, or bird has to do it for himself. Apart from the instinctive actions which the child does without knowing their value at all, and apart from the equally instinctive imitative way of doing them without aiming at learning more by the imitations, he proceeds in all cases to make experiments. Generally his experiments work through acts of imitation. He imitates what he sees some other creature do; or he imitates his own instinctive ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... a great way off, there seemed to be an exhibition of a mechanical diorama; for three times during the day occurred a repetition of obstreperous music, winding up with the rattle of imitative cannon and musketry, and a huge final explosion. Then ensued the applause of the spectators, with clap of hands and thump of sticks, and the energetic pounding of their heels. All this was just as valuable, in its way, as the sighing of the breeze among ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to take a view on any side, or observe any of the various classes that form the great community of the world, without discovering the influence of example; and admitting with new conviction the observation of Aristotle, that man is an imitative being. The greater, far the greater number, follow the track which others have beaten, without any curiosity after new discoveries, or ambition of trusting themselves to their own conduct. And, of those who break the ranks and disorder the uniformity of the march, most return ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... indefinitely into each other—expresses a sympathetic emotional consciousness of the actions going on about them, particularly of the life of their kind. In general these utterances are directed toward their kindred of their own species. In many cases, however, as among the imitative birds, the sounds which they utter indicate a curiously keen interest in the actions of their masters or other human affairs. The mocking-birds and some other species will, with great assiduity, endeavor to copy any sound which they happen to hear. ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... highly probably that in the earlier objective phases of music, even the contemporary audiences were not moved in the sense that we should be moved to-day. The audiences were objective also and their enthusiasm may have been aroused by merely the imitative aspects of music as Avison called them. It is certainly a fact that content and form are more closely linked in music than in any other art. Suppose, however, we imagine the development of melody, counterpoint, harmony, modulation, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... Daedalus, they say, both in this and in other, hath three wings to bear itself up into the air of due commendation; that is art, imitation, and exercise. But these, neither artificial rules, nor imitative patterns, we much cumber ourselves withal. Exercise, indeed, we do, but that very forebackwardly; for where we should exercise to know, we exercise as having known; and so is our brain delivered of much matter ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... Creek meeting-house last summer. Our negroes were all Baptists, and considered themselves remiss, as devout hearers of aught that partook of the nature of a religious service, if they did not respond at intervals with groans and pious ejaculations. Their children, as gravely imitative as juvenile Simiae, came up nobly to their parts ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... "epic" of eleven or twelve years old, in four books, and called "The Battle of Marathon," and of which fifty copies were printed because papa was bent upon spoiling me—is Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone; for, although a curious production for a child, it gives evidence only of an imitative faculty and an ear, and a good deal of reading in a peculiar direction. The love of Pope's Homer threw me into Pope on one side and into Greek on the other, and into Latin as a help to Greek—and the influence of all these tendencies is manifest so long afterwards as in my "Essay ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... office to Irishmen and the-dollar-and-a-half-a-day "jobs" of sweeping the streets to the Italians. This general struggle to rise in life, to be at least politically represented by one of the best, as to occupation and social status, has also its negative side. We must remember that the imitative impulse plays an important part in life, and that the loss of social estimation, keenly felt by all of us, is perhaps most dreaded by the humblest, among whom freedom of individual conduct, the power to give only just weight to the opinion of neighbors, ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... unvarying characteristic of every social fact whatsoever is that it is imitative. And this characteristic belongs ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... successes have been gained as the formidable lady who typifies in comedy the domestic proprieties and the Nemesis of respectability. It was her refined and severely correct demeanour that gave soul and wings to the wild fun of A Night Off. From Miss Garth to Mrs. Laburnum is a far stretch of imitative talent for the interpretation of the woman nature that everybody, from Shakespeare down, has found it so difficult to treat. This actress has never failed to impress the spectator by her clear-cut, brilliant identification with ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... no sentimental preference for modern sciences. Indeed, in this very essay he seems to demand what at present we must consider as a too early initiation into the ancient languages, no longer the exclusive keys to knowledge. But Milton realized that there was a natural development to the imitative and perceptive powers of man, and he knew that a mere tasking of the verbal memory blighted the diviner faculties of comparison and judgment. We hold that the ideal system of education, to which through coming centuries men can only approximate, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... Hitchcock. Even the girl was one of them. If it weren't for the women, the men would not be so keen on the scent for gain. The women taught the men how to spend, created the needs for their wealth. And the social game they were instituting in Chicago was so emptily imitative, an echo of ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... merely the dim., Fr. moulins, mills. The Yorkshire name Tankard is identical with Tancred. Stiggins goes back to the illustrious Anglo-Saxon name Stigand, as Wiggins does to wigand, a champion. Cadman represents Caedmon, the name of the poet-monk of Whitby. Segar is an imitative form of the Anglo-Sax. Saegaer, of which the normal modern representative is Sayers. Giblett is not a name one would covet, but it stands in the same relationship to Gilbert as ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... was a street by that name until last week when I heard a girl talking to grannie, who said she lived on it. She did her hands, when she talked, just like the girl with you did." Bettina twisted hers in imitative movements. "She didn't keep her ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... the possession of organs blown by steam, you are learning yourselves to sing by gas, and expect the Dies Irae to the announced by a steam-trumpet. But I can very positively assure you that, in my poor domain of imitative art, not all the mechanical or gaseous forces of the world, nor all the laws of the universe, will enable you either to see a colour, or draw a line, without that singular force anciently called the soul, which it was ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... Indeed, it may be said that he takes from others even his religion, clothes, language, customs; there is hardly anything which is Turkish and not borrowed. The religion is Arabic; the language half Arabic and Persian; the literature almost entirely imitative; the art Persian or Byzantine; the costumes, in the Upper Classes and Army mostly European. There is nothing characteristic in manufacture or commerce, except an aversion to such pursuits. In fact, all occupations, except agriculture and ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... always as humanely disposed as the circumstances of war would permit, and, at the request of the commissioners for the liberation of the Spanish prisoners, he gave this little band of 83 heroes and two priests their liberty under a decree so characteristic of Philippine imitative genius in its pompous allusion to the Spanish glorious past that it is well worth ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... bars, opening in C minor, and passing to, and closing in E flat. It contains imitative passages evolved from ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... we have improved upon them, and varied them ad infinitum. In those departments of the mechanics which are in any way connected with the fine arts, the ancients appear to have attained perfection. To them belongs the invention of all that embellishes life, of all the graceful forms of imitative art, varied with such exquisite taste, such boundless fertility of fancy, that nothing is left to us but to refine upon their ideas, and copy their creations. With all our new invented machines, and engines, we can do little more than what ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... what ancestral laces, what ancient flowers, more imaginative than imitative, were boldly displayed on some perennial caps! The Presidente Boirouge, Bianchon's cousin, exchanged a few words with the doctor, from whom she extracted some "advice gratis" by expatiating on certain pains in the chest, which she declared were nervous, but which he ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... back," I in these words Continu'd, "where thou saidst, that usury Offends celestial Goodness; and this knot Perplex'd unravel." He thus made reply: "Philosophy, to an attentive ear, Clearly points out, not in one part alone, How imitative nature takes her course From the celestial mind and from its art: And where her laws the Stagyrite unfolds, Not many leaves scann'd o'er, observing well Thou shalt discover, that your art on her Obsequious follows, as the learner treads ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... separation, the foetus is given to her, and she lets it slide down between her shirt and her body so as to fall on the ground like an infant.[122] Here the imitation of childbirth is a piece of homoeopathic or imitative magic designed to facilitate the effect ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... Children are naturally imitative, hence the value of example over precept. The children of courteous parents will imbibe courtesy as naturally and unconsciously as the growing plant absorbs oxygen from the air and sunlight that ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... his Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature, and many other curious searchers into the secrets of words, have attempted to explain the physiological basis of these varying "tone-qualities." Some of them are obviously imitative of sounds in nature; some are merely suggestive of these sounds through more or less remote analogies; some are frankly imitative of muscular effort or of muscular relaxation. High-pitched vowels and low-pitched vowels, liquid consonants and harsh consonants, are unquestionably ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... may be his manner of testifying to his own preference for the ideal of usefulness and immediate efficiency. But even so he would never for an instant admit that he was pursuing a merely conventional good. He may be largely imitative in his standards of value, recognizing such aims as are common to some time or race; nevertheless none would be more sure than he of the truth of his ideal. Question him, and he will maintain that his is the reasonable life under the ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... necessity that he be sent to an institution specially set apart for the feeble-minded. It is absolutely impossible with the most devoted love and the most lavish expenditure of money, to do at home what can be, and is constantly, accomplished even in a pauper idiot asylum. The imitative faculty, which is usually very strongly marked in the idiot, furnishes one great means of his improvement; while besides there are many of the moral powers which cannot be brought out except in the society of other children of his own age and not differing too widely ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... I became her teacher, she had made for herself upward of sixty signs, all of which were imitative and were readily understood by those who knew her. The only signs which I think she may have invented were her signs for SMALL and LARGE. Whenever she wished for anything very much she would gesticulate in a very ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... here, including blackcaps, wrens, the active little titmice, together with the North American wood warblers. Next to these are cases (53-55) of Thrushes, including the tropical ant thrushes; the Javan mountain warbler; the Brazilian king thrush; the rock thrushes: the imitative Australian thrush; the blackbird; the North American mimic thrush; the Chinese and South American thrushes, celebrated for their babbling; the yellow orioles, of Europe and the east; and here also are the short-legged thrushes ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... account of their youth, no direct instruction about method of study would be advisable, that teachers should set a good example of study by their treatment of lessons in class, and rely only upon the imitative tendency of children for some effect on their habits of work? Or should extensive instruction be imparted to them, as well as ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... Akenside's "Pleasures of Imagination" (1742-44), Armstrong's "Art of Preserving Health" (1744), Dyer's "Fleece" (1757) and Grainger's "Sugar Cane" (1764). Mason's blank verse, like Mallet's, is closely imitative of Thomson's and the influence of Thomson's inflated diction is here seen at its worst. The whole poem is an object lesson on the absurdity of didactic poetry. Especially harrowing are the author's struggles to be poetic while describing ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... perhaps still completer expression in music, which was in pre-Christian days in a very rudimentary condition. But painting is but ill suited to the rendering of these vague aspirations. And still more unsuited is sculpture, the most imitative and objective of all the arts. The attempts which have been made in recent years by some sculptors to give a mystic turn to their art seems to me doomed to failure by the essential nature of sculpture. A Western mind can have little sympathy with the art which has moved ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... news to many non-slaveholders in the gentleman's district. Thomas Jefferson tells us that man is an imitative animal; therefore, if the assertion of the gentleman from Mississippi be correct, we must wonder why slaveholders do not relieve themselves of their negroes, that they may become equally noble, proud, prosperous, and elevated, with the non-slaveholder. Who can compare with them on this ...
— Slavery: What it was, what it has done, what it intends to do - Speech of Hon. Cydnor B. Tompkins, of Ohio • Cydnor Bailey Tompkins
... trembling, covered with parasites—pot-bellied, hemorrhoidal apes. They come freely and simply, as to a restaurant or a depot; they sit, smoke, drink, convulsively pretend to be merry; they dance, executing abominable movements of the body imitative of the act of sexual love. At times attentively and long, at times with gross haste, they choose any woman they like and know beforehand that they will never meet refusal. Impatiently they pay their money in advance, and on the public bed, not yet grown ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... absolutely nothing. How lovely that thing you are playing is! I wonder did Chopin write it at Majorca, with the sea weeping round the villa, and the salt spray dashing against the panes? It is marvellously romantic. What a blessing it is that there is one art left to us that is not imitative! Don't stop. I want music to-night. It seems to me that you are the young Apollo, and that I am Marsyas listening to you. I have sorrows, Dorian, of my own, that even you know nothing of. The tragedy of old age is not ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... interesting article on "Imitation in Children," Miss Haskell observes: "That the imitative faculty is what makes the human being educable, that it is what has made progressive civilization possible, has always been known by philosophical educators. The energy of the child must pass from ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... that of precept. Our object in this chapter is to show the bearing of example upon the well-being of the Christian home. Example may be good or bad. Its power arises out of the home-confidence and authority. Children possess an imitative disposition. They look up to their parents as the pattern or model of their character, and conclude what they do is right and worthy of their imitation. Hence the parental example may lead the child to happiness ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... Full fain it would delay me! My dear babe, Who, capable of no articulate sound, Mars all things with his imitative lisp, How he would place his hand beside his ear, His little hand, the small forefinger up, And bid us listen! and I deem it wise To ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... spirit, local pride, provincial independence, influence the individual man precisely because they appeal to his imitative tendencies. But thereby they act so as to render him more or less immune in presence of the more trivial of the influences that, coming from without his community, would otherwise be likely to reduce him to the dead level of the customs of the whole nation. A country district ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... distinctively American birds. Most numerous in the tropics. Their long tails serve a double purpose-in assisting their flight and acting as an outlet for their vivacity. Usually they inhabit scrubby undergrowth bordering woods. They rank among our finest songsters, with ventriloquial and imitative powers added to sweetness of ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... in an analogy between experimental sciences and imitative arts? Between poetry and a magic-lantern? Is either an argument that is convincing? Are ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... the traditional sports of the baba-logue; but they are ingenious in inventing others, wherein, from time to time, the imitative faculty, of the native child ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... misunderstood. I have adduced them only as examples of the kind of study which I would desire to see substituted for that of our modern schools, and of singular success in certain characters, finish of detail, and brilliancy of color. What faculties, higher than imitative, may be in these men, I do not yet venture to say; but I do say that if they exist, such faculties will manifest themselves in due time all the more forcibly because they have received ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... 48). It is this pattern of thought that regulates the Full Enquiry. Perhaps more than any other poetic type, the pastoral of the Restoration and the early eighteenth century was dominated by classical tradition; the verse composed was largely imitative of the eclogues of Theocritus and Virgil, especially the latter, and criticism of the form was deduced from their practices or from an assumption that the true pastoral of antiquity was the product of the Golden Age. Of this mode of criticism ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... up to this time, had been tentative and imitative, being mainly reflections from (and upon) what had most struck him in his reading. He had read considerably in some six languages, (Hebrew, Irish, German, Italian, French and English) and widely in at least four ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... soldiery of which wore uniforms, underwent regular drill, obeyed words of command, and carried arms of precision. He had devoted great pains to the manufacture of a formidable artillery, and what with presents from the British Government and the imitative skill of native artificers he was possessed at the outbreak of hostilities of several hundred cannon. His artisans were skillful enough to turn out in large numbers very fair rifled small-arms, which they copied from British models; ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... Each style of work embodies its own peculiar class of conceptions. Relief work is generally realistic or grotesque; incised work is almost exclusively geometric, and embraces combinations of lines usually recognized as archaic. An occasional example is easily recognized as imitative. Painted figures are both geometric and imitative, the two ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... themselves, it is by no means their interest to undeceive such judges, however conscious they may be of the very natural means by which the extraordinary powers were acquired; our art being intrinsically imitative, rejects this idea of inspiration more, ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... nothing more heartily than the cant of Rousseau and the sentimentalists, adopting in this poem the ordinary denunciations of the corruption of towns, and singing the praises of an innocent country life. Doubtless, the young writer was like other young men, taking up a strain still imitative and artificial. He has a quiet smile at Savage in the life, because in his retreat to Wales, that enthusiast declared that he "could not debar himself from the happiness which was to be found in the calm of a cottage, or lose the opportunity ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... course how far, with my complications, I got away from Gyp; but I see to-day so much else too that this particular deflexion from simplicity makes scarce a figure among the others after having once served its purpose, I mean, of lighting my original imitative innocence. For I recognise in especial, with a waking vibration of that interest in which, as I say, the plan of the book is embalmed for me, that my subject was probably condemned in advance to appreciable, or more ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... them, we must go not to physical geography, but to psychology and sociology. The latest chapter both in sociology and in psychology to be developed in a manner that approaches adequacy is the chapter on the imitative impulse. First Bagehot, then Tarde, then Royce and Baldwin here, have shown that invention and imitation, taken together, form, one may say, the entire warp and woof of human life, in so far as it is social. The American over-tension ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... for the worst was yet to come. He lingered, nursing a colossal scruple. Poor Spinks's honour was dear to him because it was less the gift of nature than the supreme imitative effort of his adoring heart. He loved honour because Rickman loved it; just as he had loved Flossie for the same reason. These were the only ways in which he could imitate him; and like all imitators he exaggerated the ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... come in, and he did. He was shown to the rear room, where Maggie was clearing off the supper table. Fitz was a young "man of the world," and as imitative as a monkey. He had once moved in what he called "good society," and was familiar with all the little courtesies of life. He expressed his regret at the illness of Andre in the most courtly terms, and his sympathy with Maggie. Leo wanted to go ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... of the smithcraft of a rude but docile and progressive people. I trust that it may serve not only to illustrate some aspects of their mental condition, their inventive and imitative talents, but possibly to shed some light on the condition and diffusion of the art of the metalist in the prehistoric days of our continent, notwithstanding the fact that some elements of their craft are of recent introduction and others of ...
— Navajo Silversmiths • Washington Matthews
... of the student. Conscious imitation has its place in developing the power to write, and it is no less valuable in gaining an appreciation of an author's style. The study of the essay offers the best opportunity for imitative work of this kind, since it is the essay that the student himself, in his school exercises, is continually trying to write. Care should be taken at this stage of the work not to ask pupils to discuss matters that ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... [7] It was a time of rapture! Clear and loud 30 The village-clock tolled six—I wheeled about, Proud and exulting like an untired horse That cares not for his home. [8]—All shod with steel We hissed along the polished ice, in games Confederate, imitative of the chase 35 And woodland pleasures,—the resounding horn, The pack loud-chiming, [9] and the hunted hare. So through the darkness and the cold we flew, And not a voice was idle: with the din Smitten, [10] the precipices rang aloud; 40 The leafless trees and every icy crag Tinkled like iron; ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... lisped and gurgled their merry, imitative "'Scuse me's," though with no thought of any attention being ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... only. Consider the pre-Raphaelite painters. All the early painters were Italians, Spaniards, Flemings, or Germans. Those whom some writers try to represent as our fellow-countrymen are Flemings transplanted to Burgundy, or docile Frenchmen whose imitative work bears an unmistakable Flemish stamp. Look in the Louvre at our primitive artists; look at Dijon, especially at what remains from the time when northern art was introduced by Philippe le Hardi into his own province. It is impossible to feel a doubt. Everything came from Flanders—Jean ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... profusely gilt bell-tower, in the Russian manner; and the walls of the interior are covered with large paintings of no merit. But one must not be too critical: a kindling of intellectual energy ever seems, in most countries, to precede excellence in the imitative arts, which latter, too often survives the ruins of those ruder and nobler qualities which assure the vigorous existence of ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... asked, after a moment's pause; since Johnny seemed to expect some astonishment. "Boys are imitative ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... of animal representations, made hollow for use as drinking vessels, were obtained, displaying grotesquely imitative forms of deer, elk, sheep, big-horn, antelope, and other animals with which they are familiar. All of these objects have more color laid on them than is to be found on the pottery of their neighbors of Acoma, the birds and animals ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... fine arts, as well as in literature, a levelling principle is going on, fatal, perhaps, to excellence, but favourable to mediocrity. Such facilities are afforded to imitative talent, that whatever is imitable will be imitated. Genius will often be suppressed by this, and when it exerts itself, will find it far more difficult to obtain notice than in former times. There is the evil here that ingenious persons are ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... set; "and this, to be sure, is England's great poet!" Besides these personal objections, there were others of a more solid character. While all admitted the exquisite polish and terse language of Pope's compositions, many felt that they were too artificial—that they were often imitative—that they seldom displayed those qualities of original thought and sublime enthusiasm which had formed the chief characteristics of England's best bards, and were slow to rank the author of "Eloisa and Abelard," with the creator ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... we found the patient weavers sitting or standing at the back side of their pieces, with their baskets of many-colored spools at their sides, and the paintings they were copying behind them, slowly building up their imitative fabrics, loop after loop, and stitch after stitch, by hand. Madam told the workmen who she was, and learned that one had been at work six months on his picture; it was a female figure kneeling to a colossal pair of legs, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... True to her imitative instincts, Audrey could be frank with the frank. "Yes, I am. But it's our own little secret, and we don't want ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... beaten fine; these were made by hand with plaited thread and woollen, so closely wove as to resemble cloth, and frequently had worked on them figures of men and animals: on one was the whole process of the whale fishery. Their aptitude for the imitative arts was very great. Their canoes were rather elegantly formed out of trees, with rising prow, frequently carved in figures. They differ from those of the Pacific generally, in having neither sails nor outriggers; ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... of physical science, or, in other words, the whole of sensible nature, is included in the domain of imitative art, either as the subjects, the objects, or the materials of imitation: every fine art, therefore, has certain physical sciences collateral to it, on the abstractions of which it builds, more or less, according to its nature and purpose. But the ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... everybody's recollection, where that poor Goddess has been almost equally outraged, through a puerile ambition on the part of the orator to endow her with an exceptional distinction by senseless rhodomontade, manufactured by the word-machine which he presumes to call his imagination! All imitative imagery is the grave ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... patience. I have refrained from pointing to those Natives who have proved their scholastic capabilities at various universities and colleges because it is generally surmised that these men are exceptional or that their success is due to a highly developed imitative faculty coupled with a strong memory, with which it is fashionable to credit the successful Native student, and I have advisedly confined myself to instances drawn from the everyday life and thought of the normal and uneducated ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... alludes to a game of "tables," played with three dice, in which "men" were moved from the opponent's "tables," the game (ludus Anglicorum) being described in the Harleian MSS. (1527). The French name for backgammon is trictrac, imitative of the rattle of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Procrustes. The lyrics of this period, with the exception of those by Milton, were usually less idealistic, ethereal, and inspired than the corresponding work of the Elizabethans. This age was far more imitative, but it chose to imitate Jonson and Donne in preference to Shakespeare. The greatest lyrical poet of this time thus addresses ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... reason rather for congratulation. Surely that nation which can best discriminate and imitate has advantage over nations that are so fixed in their self-sufficiency as to be able neither to see that which is advantageous nor to imitate it. In referring to the imitative powers of the Japanese, then, I do not speak in terms of reproach, but rather in those of commendation. "Monkeyism" is not the sort of imitation that has transformed primitive Japan into the Japan of the early or later feudal ages, nor into the Japan of the twentieth century. Bare imitation, ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... that is especially true of young girls. Their supreme terror seems to be that they should be caught doing or saying something different from what all other girls say or do or wear. Their opinions are as imitative as their clothes. Hence the need of the pressure of a strong Christian example, which would result most readily in the union of Christian women in a single ideal. Our present difficulty is that so many of our women who are devout members of the Church in ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... Perceiving this had awakened her, a train of powder was fired in the adjoining room opposite the secret door, which was left open, in order that the flash might illuminate her apartment; then several large cannon balls were rolled through the rooms over her head, imitative of thunder. The person in her room then uttered a horrible groan, and gliding along by her bed, took his stand behind the curtains, near the foot. The noises below, the cry of murder, the firing of the second pistol, and the running up stairs, were ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... out this simple direction, however, we are confronted by another of the peculiar characteristics of music. Music, in distinction from the static, concrete and imitative arts, is always in motion, and to follow it requires an intensity of concentration and an accuracy of memory which can be acquired, but for which, like most good things, we have to work. We all know the adage that "beauty ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... apart from such importance as might be implied in her finding herself presently in the enjoyment of a very pretty little income for a young lady, was a simple, good-natured school-girl, in the echoing and imitative stage of school-girl life. She looked up to her brother in everything, and was disposed to regard whatever was by his decree as ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... models of architectural beauty for all nations, and the grace and elegance of their statuary have found students among every people. Much of this taste for the beautiful mingled with their poetry, which is kin sister to the imitative arts. In recent times the Italians have inherited the faculty of beauty, and introduced it into their fine cathedrals and capitols, as well as their statuary. The French also have displayed the highest ideals of beauty in their ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... many other historians that the Mehrikans were a mongrel race, with little or no patriotism, and were purely imitative; simply an enlarged copy of other nationalities extant at the time. He pronounces them a shallow, nervous, extravagant people, and accords them but few redeeming virtues. This, of course, is just; but nevertheless they will always be an interesting study by reason of their ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... reason already enjoys, by giving any one cause to suspect you think reason is not fully able to take care of itself. With these leading hints, and your own natural tendencies, which I am glad to see are eminently fitted for the great objects of diplomacy—being ductile, imitative, yielding, calculating, and, above all, of a foreign disposition—I think you will be able to get on very cleverly. Cultivate, above all things, your foreign dispositions, for you are now on foreign duty, and your country reposes on your shoulders and eminent talents the ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the same, so long as the brilliancy of the hue is equal, whether it be produced by the chemistry of man, or the chemistry of flowers, or the chemistry of skies. We deal with color as with sound—so far ruling the power of the light, as we rule the power of the air, producing beauty not necessarily imitative, but sufficient in itself, so that, wherever color is introduced, ornamentation may cease to represent natural objects, and may consist in mere spots, or bands, or flamings, or any other condition of arrangement favorable to ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... his imitations of many birds and quadrupeds. His mocking-bird is very fair; his thrush, passable; but his canary less successful, being rather too reedy and harsh. Farm-yard sounds are thrown off with considerable imitative power. His pig is so good, indeed, that it invites a purchaser, who puts one of the calls into his mouth, and frightfully distorts his features in his wretched efforts to produce the desired grunts and squeaks. The crowing of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... person. The American father is better, for he is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher. The mother, however, is always with us, and, lacking the quick imitative faculty of the younger generation, remains uninteresting and provincial to the last. In spite of her, however, the American girl is always welcome. She brightens our dull dinner parties for us and makes life go pleasantly by ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... including the "Theory of Moral Sentiments," "The Formation of Languages," "Astronomical Inquiries," "Ancient Physics," "Ancient Logic and Metaphysics," "The Imitative Arts—Music, Dancing, Poetry," "The External Senses," "English and Italian Verses," &c. By ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... follow in the wake of; take pattern by; follow suit, follow the example of; walk in the shoes of, take a leaf out of another's book, strike in with, follow suit; take after, model after; emulate. Adj. imitated &c v.; mock, mimic; modelled after, molded on. paraphrastic; literal; imitative; secondhand; imitable; aping, apish, mimicking. Adv. literally, to the letter, verbatim, literatim [Lat.], sic, totidem verbis [Lat.], word for word, mot a mot [Fr.]; exactly, precisely. Phr. like master like man; like - ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the beginning of the combination known a little while afterwards as Les Petit Patou. Elodie, receptive, imitative, histrionic, showed herself from the start an apt pupil. To natural talent she added the desire, born of infinite gratitude, to please her benefactor. She possessed the rare faculty of perfect surrender. Andrew marvelled. Had he hypnotized ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... Horatio had been a useful instrument, and had received liberal payment for his labours. Unhappily, so serene an occupation as promoting cannot go on for ever; or rather, cannot remain for ever in the same hands. The human mind is naturally imitative, and the plagiarisms of commerce are infinitely more audacious than the small larcenies of literature. The joint-stock company market became day by day more crowded. No sooner did Philip Sheldon float the Non-destructive Laundry ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon |
