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Mimic   Listen
verb
Mimic  v. t.  (past & past part. mimicked; pres. part. mimicking)  
1.
To imitate or ape for sport; to ridicule by imitation. "The walk, the words, the gesture, could supply, The habit mimic, and the mien belie."
2.
(Biol.) To assume a resemblance to (some other organism of a totally different nature, or some surrounding object), as a means of protection or advantage.
Synonyms: To ape; imitate; counterfeit; mock.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mimic" Quotes from Famous Books



... in a bee, laden with his morning's load of honey, who touched the water unwarily close to his nose. With trembling hand, Tom took off his tail fly, and, on his knee, substituted a governor; then shortening his line, after wetting his mimic bee in the pool behind him, tossed it gently into the monster's very jaws. For a moment the fish seemed scared, but the next, conscious in his strength, lifted his nose slowly to the surface and ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes

... disobedient, and as wicked as himself. He taught both by precept and example, that towards masters neither honour was to be recognised, nor respect to be considered due. To cheat them, to lie to them, to annoy them in every possible way—to misrepresent their motives, mimic their defects, and calumniate their actions—was the conduct which he inaugurated towards them; and for the time that he continued at Roslyn the whole lower-school was a Pandemonium of evil passions and ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar

... men travelling with a "bear leader" had laughed at some Arabs prostrating themselves to pray, at that sacred moment, just after sunset, ordained by Mohammed lest his people should appear to worship the orb itself. One of these youths, fancying himself a mimic, had imitated the Moslems. They were old men, unable to resent with violence what they thought an insult to their religion; but they had told their sons, and the story had spread. Later that night the joyous tourists with their near-sighted ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... advanced in turn, gradually driving their supposed enemies back, till, when the smoke was rising in a faint, misty cloud to float softly away over the river, the final stages of the sham-fight were nearly at an end, and for a concluding curtain to the mimic warfare the two little forces advanced as if to meet in contention in the middle of the field. But at a certain stage a bugle rang out, and with wonderful precision the men fell into column and marched ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn

... stop at dacoities. A regular semi-military organization was introduced, and bands of young men used to go out into the country to carry out mimic manoeuvres. It is of no slight significance that photographs have been discovered of groups of these young men—some of whom were subsequently convicted for serious offences—with Tilak himself in their midst. They were in constant communication with Poona, ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... is a mimic is to be met with in many books about birds. I rather think that in jerking out these various little broken notes which end its strain, whether he only squeaks or succeeds in producing a pure sound, he is striving to recover his own lost ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... of you," said Lady Manorwater. "I forbid you to mimic Mr. Stocks. He is very clever, and very much in earnest over everything. I don't wonder that a butterfly like you should laugh, but I hope Miss Wishart will ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan

... comes the bridegroom proceeds with a large party of his friends, male and female, to the bride's house. Most of the males have warlike weapons, real or sham, and as they approach the village of the bride's family the young men from thence emerge, also armed, as if to repel the invasion, and a mimic fight ensues, which like a dissolving view blends pleasantly into a dance. In this the bride and bridegroom join, each riding on the hips of one of their friends. After this they have a feast till ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... that doll who gazes at us with such a fashionable stare. This is the little girl's true plaything. Though made of wood, a doll is a visionary and ethereal personage endowed by childish fancy with a peculiar life; the mimic lady is a heroine of romance, an actor and a sufferer in a thousand shadowy scenes, the chief inhabitant of that wild world with which children ape the real one. Little Annie does not understand what I am saying, but looks wishfully at the proud lady in the window. We will invite her home with ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... believed in, it does not in the least follow that it will cease to be done. We have to reckon with all the huge forces of habit. The motor nerves, once set in one direction, given the slightest impulse tend always to repeat the same reaction. We mimic not only others but ourselves mechanically, even after all emotion proper to the act is dead; and then because mimicry has a certain ingenious charm, it becomes an end in itself ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison

... extraordinary and grotesque manner, and so do the natives of New Zealand. The Kamschatkans have a great power of imitating other men and animals, and this is also the case with the inhabitants of Vancouver. Herndon was astonished by the mimic arts of the Brazilian Indians, and Wilkes made the same observation on the Patagonians. This faculty is still more apparent in the lower races. Many travellers have spoken of the extraordinary tendency ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... distinguish groups of men, apparently captives, with their hands bound behind them, standing together while their captors performed an extravagant dance round them. Armed warriors then rushed upon each other in mimic warfare, and the sound of their bare feet, as they stamped in unison upon the hard sand, came to us with measured cadence across the sea. When the dance was ended, the captives were made to lie flat, one behind the other, till they ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes

... enough of a fine lady to be dismayed or humiliated by its straits and shifts of poverty, by its isolation and ostracism; while there was something in its alternations of want and profusion, in its piquant contrasts of real and mimic life, in its excitement, action, and change, which had a peculiar charm for her wild and restless spirit. But from many of the associations of the stage, from nearly all actors and actresses, and from all green-room loungers, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... act of the play a cannon was fired, giving a grand salute to the mimic King Henry and his royal train as they appeared before ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... not wrought now amongst the Red Branch. I think we are all become women. I grow weary of these huntings in the morning and mimic exercises of war, and this training of steeds and careering of brazen chariots stained never with aught but dust and mire, and these unearned feastings at night and vain applause of the brave deeds of our forefathers. Come now, let us make an end of this. Let us conquer Banba [Footnote: ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady

... her daughters, coffee was ordered; during which H.R.H. took me outside and talked exclusively about music near half an hour, and as long with your brother concerning Greek literature. He is a most excellent mimic of well-known characters: had we been in the dark any one would have sworn that Dr. Parr and Kemble were in the room. Besides being possessed of a great fund of original humour, and good humour, he may with truth be said to have as much wit as Charles II., with much more ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay

... ages when the Dreadful Bird Stamped his huge footprints, and the Fearful Beast Strode with the flesh about those fossil bones We build to mimic life with pygmy hands, Not in those earliest days when men ran wild And gashed each other with their knives of stone, When their low foreheads bulged in ridgy brows And their flat hands were callous in the palm With walking in the fashion of their sires, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... is how the thing presents itself to their understanding. When you explain to them that you had no original intention of getting up at five o'clock in the morning to play cricket on the croquet lawn, or to mimic the history of the early Church by shooting with a cross-bow at dolls tied to a tree; that as a matter of fact, left to your own initiative, you would have slept peacefully till roused in Christian fashion with a cup of tea at eight, they are firstly astonished, secondly apologetic, ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome

... Jim Dyckman went to the officers' school of application at Peekskill for a week to get a smattering of tuition under Regular Army instructors. He slept on a cot in a tent and studied map-making and military bookkeeping and mimic warfare, and ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... the object or physical stimulus, and if it be designated by the letter e; then the process of reproduction will take place in the following order: e, the physical stimulus; d-b, perceptions of physical facts (sounds, tones, mimic, combinations of lines and colours, etc.), which form together the aesthetic synthesis, already produced; c, the hedonistic ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... and her pretty face rouged with the best of them. And, if further need be to show the absurdity of having called her performance 'a triumph of naturalness over the jaded spirit of modernity,' let us reflect that the little mimic was not a real old-fashioned girl after all. She had none of that restless naturalness that would seem to have characterised the girl of the early Victorian days. She had no pretty ways—no smiles nor blushes nor tremors. Possibly Demos could not have stood a presentment ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm

... in the first place, have seldom seen a man degraded but by his vices. Unaccustomed to many of the diversions of the world, they have seldom, if ever, seen him in the low condition of a hired buffoon or mimic. Men, who consent to let others degrade themselves for their sport, become degraded in their turn. And this degradation increases with the frequency of the spectacle. Persons in such habits are apt to lose sight of the dignity of mankind, and to consider them as made for administration to ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... touched by the tragic bravery of King Minos; no one was listening. Poor Rotgans! Afterwards it was said that Napoleon had been especially pleased with "our Snoel" and with "our Watlier." Goodness, Napoleon! When he was to be crowned he had Talma the mimic to drill him for the ceremony—instead of saying to Talma: "Look, this is the way an emperor appears ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli

... been obviously improper to mimic the manner of any particular age or country. Something has been borrowed, however, from our own old ballads, and more from Sir Walter Scott, the great restorer of our ballad-poetry. To the Iliad still greater obligations are due; and those obligations ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... home for the Naiads—beneath the limpid surface. You might hear in the bushes the young blackbirds trilling their first untutored notes. And the graceful dragon-fly, his wings glittering in the translucent sunshine, darted to and fro—the reeds gathered here and there in the mimic bays that broke the shelving marge of the ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... firm and steady voice the words Sic semper tyrannis—and then walks with neither slow nor very rapid pace diagonally across to the back of the stage, and disappears. (Had not all this terrible scene—making the mimic ones preposterous—had it not all been rehears'd, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... upon them. Miss Braxton welcomed him cordially, and introduced him to the gentlemen about her. She straightway became so gracious to him that he aroused an amazing amount of suspicion and dislike in the little circle, to all of which, however, he was happily oblivious. He was a capital mimic, and under the inspiration of her applause he told innumerable negro stories with such lifelike fidelity to nature that even the hostile circle was convulsed, and Miss Braxton laughed until the tears ran down ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden

... to prepare the mind for something else. After that, one waited. Would he show the Kaiser? What would happen if suddenly the familiar face of Wilhelm the Second confronted that gathering of Germans? The mimic, however, would not risk it, and his concluding make-up was not Wilhelm but, very cleverly chosen, Frederick the Great. And every one was at ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... the children, who lay upstairs sprawled under their mosquito nettings. Immersed in living, how happily unaware of being alive! He saw, with tenderness, how naively they looked to him as the answer and solution of their mimic problems. But where could he find someone to be to him what he was to them? The truth apparently was that in his inward mind he was desperately lonely. Reading the poets by fits and starts, he suddenly realized that in their divine pages moved something of this loneliness, ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley

... in a sea that gently deepened from saffron to opal; and under that sky the yellow prairies; ever, forever, and ever. . . . Up from the East came the night, and large, bright stars stood out, and the click-clack of the car wheels came louder and louder, and mimic car lamps raced along against the darkness outside. And then the settlers' lights began to blink across the prairie, and Irene's eyes were wet with an emotion she could not define; but she knew her painting had missed something; it had ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead

... passing to and from the mainland. The insignia of royalty were ostentatiously displayed, and the captains and leaders within the fortress fulfilled the duties of this mimic and motley court in honour of their ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby

... she had taught him (by example, perhaps, more than by precept) of the feelings of others, was continually prompting him to do things that she, for the time being, resented as mortal affronts. He would mimic the clergyman she specially esteemed, even to his very face; he would refuse to visit her schools for months and months; and, when wearied into going at last, revenge himself by puzzling the children with the most ridiculous questions (gravely put) ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... degree than these remote posterity. They are a little wilder than sheep, but they do not snuff the air at the approach of human beings, nor evince much alarm at their pretty close proximity; although if you continue to advance, they toss their heads and take to their heels in a kind of mimic terror, or something akin to feminine skittishness, with a dim remembrance or tradition, as it were, of their having come of a wild stock. They have so long been fed and protected by man, that they must have lost many of their native instincts, and, I suppose, could not live comfortably ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... bulwarks, the glistening curve of her white sea-wall, her little fleet of safely moored vessels, her clustering cottages, her neat tempting inns, all challenging our wonder and delight, as, skirting the headland which had hitherto jealously hidden the mimic seaport, the entire picture flashed instantaneously ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various

... at the same instant, as if seized by one common thought, the Hungarian Hussars clattered their heavy sabres back into the scabbard, and with a fearful imprecation, such as no German tongue could echo, charged weaponless and at full speed their mimic caricatures whom fate had thrown in their way. The shock was so irresistible, that the poor Croats could make no use of their sabers against the furious onset of their unarmed foe: they were beaten down from their saddles ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various

... at its height, The evening primrose greets its light With grace and joy: then opens up The mimic moon within its cup. Tall trees, as high as Babel tower, Throw down their shadows to the flower— Shadows that shiver—seem to see An ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... in the reign of George I., and according to tradition in that of Elizabeth, the mimic reproduction of the great drama with which it is associated. It is even said that Shakespeare took part here in his own play, King Henry VIII., or the Fall of Wolsey. In 1558 the hall was resplendent with one thousand ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... spirit hath passed away From these white cliffs and high-embattled towers; This gorgeous fiery-coloured world of ours Seems fallen into ashes dull and grey, And the age changed unto a mimic play Wherein we waste our else too-crowded hours: For all our pomp and pageantry and powers We are but fit to delve the common clay, Seeing this little isle on which we stand, This England, this sea-lion of the sea, By ignorant demagogues is held ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde

... commence his visits. Going first to Chodowiecki, the renowned delineator and engraver, whose fame had already spread throughout Germany. When Goethe entered, the artist was busy in his atelier, working upon the figures of the characters in the "Mimic," the latest work of Professor Engel. "Master," said he, smilingly, extending him his hand, "I have come to thank you for many beautiful, happy hours which I owe to you. You paint with the chisel and poetize with the brush. An artist ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach

... a tranquil statue; And let thy body take Of Art's perfection chiseled Upon the shining stone; And play, and sing, and mimic With thoughtful nakedness Lithe beasts and snakes and birds ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas

... has travelled out of her proper sphere to ape nature, she has proved herself but a miserable mimic, even in her most ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various

... Leo Dillon awakened one of my consciences. But when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me. The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce

... on his arm, climbed the hill slowly and with frequent pauses to turn and admire the landscape. It was the freshest of spring mornings: the short turf was beaded with dew, the furze-bushes on either hand festooned with gossamer and strung with mimic diamonds. As he looked harbourwards, the radiance of sky mingling with the glitter of water dazzled and bewildered his sight: below, and at the foot of the steep woods opposite, the river lay cool and shadowy, or vanished for a ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... peculiar charms; and she was personally my notion of that "much blamed, much worshipped" modern Helen. She had remarkable decision of character and force of will, with the gentlest and most feminine appearance and manner; she was humorous and witty, and an incomparable mimic. She was a woman of admirably high principle and rectitude, and in every way as attractive as she was estimable. Her eldest son was proprietor of a charming place, Carolside, just over the Scottish border, and had hardly come of age ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... clever mimic, Miss Franklin," said he, "but you rather forgot yourself in that last speech. Anne is of too sensitive a nature to have explained herself with such a wealth ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume

... seemed to become divine in proportion as he ceased to be human; to be a dæmon or god. Already, in imagination, the initiated were numbered among the beatified. They alone enjoyed the true life, the Sun's true lustre, while they hymned their God beneath the mystic groves of a mimic Elysium, and were really renovated or regenerated under the genial influence of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... next to man, the animals by their structure having the best means to this end, are most excellent imitators, and there is no limit to the things they can mimic. ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... direction. "Ah! Ha! The bullet grazed my helmet."—"The gorgelet caught it."—"The corselet has saved me."—"Congratulations are in order. Surely your pension will be increased during the year."—"Oya! Oya! And Genzaemon Uji?" The unfortunate Genzaemon had not fared so well in the mimic war. At all events he sat the meeting out—if he could. To be reported dead, in the course of duty; or be overcome with regrets at showing such clumsiness in being wounded; or, if actually incapacitated, to go home and ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... the voice that will not let me rest? I hear it speak. Where is the shore will gratify my quest, Show what I seek? Not yours, weak Muse, to mimic that far voice, With halting tongue; No peace, sweet land, to bid my heart ...
— The Fairy Changeling and Other Poems • Dora Sigerson

... a most beautiful creature, said to be a variety of the Bird of Paradise. It runs very quickly, and springs very high, and calls very loudly. It lays but one egg a year and, consequently, only has one baby per annum. It is a great mimic. Mr. Metcalfe in his "Australian Zoology", describing it, says: "It is a consummate mimic and ventriloquist. It imitates to perfection the notes of all other birds, the united voices of a flock of parrakeets, the barking of dogs, the sawing of timber and the clink ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole

... sir. I know two or three books pretty well, and when I get a chance I can't help talking about them. It's so seldom now I can get a mouthful of Milton. There's no cave here to go into, and roll the mimic thunder in your mouth. If the people here heard me reading loud out, they would call me mad. It's a mercy in this London, if a working man get loneliness enough to say his ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... Arab usually takes up a strong position near a 'tazia' suggests the idea that he must originally have represented a guardian or scapegoat, designed to break by means of his abuse, buffoonery and laughter the spell of the spirits who long for quarters within the rich mimic tomb; and the fact that the crowds who come to gaze in admiration on the 'tazia' never retort or round upon him for the sudden fright or anger that he evokes gives one the impression that the crack of the bamboo is in their belief a potent scarer ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.

... Jorram, or boat-song, some specimens of which attracted the attention of Dr Johnson,[21] was a variety of the same class. In this, every measure was used which could be made to time with an oar, or to mimic a wave, either in motion or sound. Dr Johnson discovered in it the proceleusmatic song of the ancients; it certainly corresponds in real usage with the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... this day, related by John S., especially when we all meet for a family visit. It not unfrequently causes much laughter. I suppose the laughter is caused as much by the manner in which he tells it (he trying to imitate or mimic me) as its funniness. It sometimes causes a tear, perhaps, from excessive laughter and may be, from recollections of the past and its associations. It may once in a while cause me to give a dry laugh, but never a sad tear since the night ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin

... over the efforts of an effeminate and unwarlike people. As I passed through the camp, I was astonished at the order and regularity which prevailed among these barbarians. Some were exercising their horses in the mimic representation of a battle; part fled with incredible speed, while the rest pursued, and darted blunted javelins at their antagonists. Yet even those who fled would frequently turn upon their pursuers and make them repent their rashness. ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day

... was beautiful beyond any thing I had ever seen in Ireland. For upwards of two miles it led along the margin of the lofty cliffs of Moher, now jutting out into bold promontories, and again retreating, and forming small bays and mimic harbours, into which the heavy swell of the broad Atlantic was rolling its deep blue tide. The evening was perfectly calm, and at a little distance from the shore the surface of the sea was without a ripple. The ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever

... historical original of Chaucer's "Host"—the actual Master Harry Bailly, vintner and landlord of the Tabard Inn in Southwark, was likewise a member of Parliament, and very probably felt as sure of himself in real life as the mimic personage bearing his name does in its fictitious reproduction. And he and his fellows, the "poor and simple Commons"—for so humble was the style they were wont to assume in their addresses to ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward

... was where a fellow swam on his back, keeping his body up by a gentle, secret paddling motion with his hands, while with his feet he lashed the water into foam, like some river stern-wheeler. If he could cry: "Hoo! hoo! hoo!" in hoarse falsetto to mimic the whistle, it was ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood

... to seem to anoint their eyes with glue; so did those poor beasts employ their imitation to their own ruin they glued up their own eyes, haltered and bound themselves. The other faculty of playing the mimic, and ingeniously acting the words and gestures of another, purposely to make people merry and to raise their admiration, is no more in me than in a stock. When I swear my own oath, 'tis only, by God! of all oaths ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... her snowy wing Was like the music of the breeze, That seraphs mimic when they sing: 'T was sweet as when an organ's keys Are touched by angel's hand at night, When all the earth in slumber share, And glimmering grave-yard meteors light The church ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various

... sea, lake, or canal—he never learned to swim. Peacock also notices his habit of floating paper boats, and gives an amusing description of the boredom suffered by Hogg on occasions when Shelley would stop by the side of a pond or mere to float a mimic navy. The not altogether apocryphal story of his having once constructed a boat out of a bank-post-bill, and launched it on the lake in Kensington Gardens, deserves to be alluded to in ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... had to mind the baby for a while, and she took him out on the side lawn and pretended to play croquet with him. The baby wasn't quite three, and it was delicious to see him, with mallet and ball before a wicket, trying to mimic the actions of his elders. Poppylinda, Missy's big black cat, wanted to play too, and succeeded in getting between the baby's legs and upsetting him. But the baby was under a charm; he only picked himself up and laughed. And Missy was sure ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin

... in what is of vastly more account, the habit and power of mental labor. These studies were wrought into his mind and made part of the intellectual substance by the vigorous collisions of the societies in which he delighted. For these mimic conflicts he prepared assiduously, not in writing, but always with a carefully deduced logical analysis and arrangement of the thoughts to be developed in the order of argument, with a brief note of any quotation, ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell

... moreover, there is something that kindles the imagination more than the reality would do. If we see a real, great ship, the mind grasps and possesses, within its real clutch, all that there is of it; while here the mimic ship is the representation of an ideal one, and so gives us a more imaginative pleasure. There are many schooners that ply to and fro on the pond, and pilot-boats, all perfectly rigged. I saw a race, the other day, between the ship above mentioned and a pilot-boat, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... caravans, represented the marching units of United States troops. The columns of bluish-grey that passed them with shorter, quicker steps, were companies of those tireless Frenchmen, who after almost three years of the front line real thing, now played at a mimic war of make-believe, with ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons

... called into existence by his pen draw round him, and sing Io Paeans in his praise. A brace of Master Slenders attend the great Justice Shallow, who has been literally the making of them; and when at his bidding they engage with him in mimic warfare, they but pelt him with roses, or sprinkle him over with eau de Cologne. 'Ah,' thought we, 'had we but the true Mr. Clark here to take a part in this fray—the Mr. Clark who published the great non-intrusion sermon, and wrote the ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... natural selection as a true cause in nature, than is furnished by this culminating fact in the matter of protective resemblance, whereby it is shown that a species of one genus, family, or even order, will accurately mimic the appearance of a species belonging to another genus, family, or order, so as to deceive its natural enemies into mistaking it for a creature of so totally different a kind. And it must be added that while this fact of mimicry is of extraordinarily frequent ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... an outrageous little ape," said the Commendatore, grinning in spite of himself. "You would mimic the Devil ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... of the little queen I serve, whose smiles and favour are a continuous inspiration to me, were I weakly to forego my duty, and desire to seek the solace of her presence without having first acquitted myself with honour on this mimic field of battle. What is to be the outcome of this strife of tongues, and what the future of our country, riven asunder as it is by those, on the one side, who are jealous merely for their own rights and privileges, and, on the ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam

... before you turn your candid-innocent eyes to the fatal entrance to these mysteries! It is better never to have known what the high, terrible loveliness of Her of Melos is than, having seen her, to pass the rest of our days with these copies, and prostitutions, and profanations, and parodies, "which mimic humanity so abominably"! ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... arrived at a long slated house, situated in a solitary part of the neighborhood; a little below it ran a small stream, which was now swollen above its banks, and rushing with mimic roar over the flat meadows beside it. The appearance of the bare slated building in such a night was particularly sombre, and to those, like me, who knew the purpose to which it was usually devoted, it was or ought to have been peculiarly so. There it ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton

... Pythias,' and the other 'Palamon and Arcite,' both of which were acted before Queen Elizabeth. He also contrived masques and wrote verses for pageants, and is said to have been the first fiddler, the most elegant sonnetteer, and the most amusing mimic of the Court. He is the author of a pleasing poem, entitled 'Amantium irae,' and of some lines under the title, 'He requesteth some friendly comfort, affirming his constancy.' We quote a ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... redder lips be pressed, And a slumber, soft and warm, Fold us on a dove-like breast,— Not to love, but love's bestowing Gentle care and kiss are owing:— Is the passion changed or cloyed, Doth the giver's light grow less? Banished from the sweet recess, Sportive pressure, fond caress, See our mimic worth destroyed! ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various

... habit. A year will with certainty accomplish it. Your physiognomy has naturally much of benevolence, and it will cost you some labour (which you may well spare) to eradicate it. Avoid, for ever avoid, a smile or sneer of contempt; never even mimic them. A frown of sullenness or discontent is but one degree less hateful. You seem to require these things of me, or I should have thought them unnecessary. I see, with pleasure I see, that you have engaged in this matter. We shall both be gratified by the result, which ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... "How lovely!" exclaimed the mimic Oswald. "Perhaps he has broken both his legs so he can't run off any more," at which the fellow Hobbs remarked in his affected tones: "That sort of thing would ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... studied gardening in the most practical manner, and had their tiny tool-house, with the small spades and rakes properly grouped and duly lettered, "Prince Alfred" or "Princess Louise," as the case might be. A third idea, borrowed like the first from Coburg, was the miniature fort, with its mimic defences, every brick of which was made and built, and the very cannon-balls founded, by the two sons destined to be soldiers—the Prince of ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler

... pinch our ears until they almost bled. It was a poor punishment and gave him little satisfaction, but it had to serve. Out of school his temper would change as by magic. He was then the life of the house, a delightful talker with an inexhaustible fund of good stories, a good reader, mimic, and actor as well. ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson

... united the principle of the float to that of the sinker, as we see both united in some of our modern life boats, which are steadied on their keel by one principle, and preserved from foundering by the other; or as we find them united by the boy in his mimic smack, which he hollows out and decks, in order to render it sufficiently light, while at the same time he furnishes it with a keel of lead, in order to render it sufficiently steady. The old articulata abound in marks of ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... felt the influence of Helen's beauty, and that was Lieutenant Bob, who, after dinner, attached himself to her side, while around them gathered quite a group, all listening with peals of laughter as Bob, who was something of a mimic, related his adventure of two days before, with "the most rustic and charming old lady it was ever his fortune to meet." Told by Bob the story lost nothing of its freshness; for every particular, except indeed the kindness he had ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... title of a tragedy by J. Addison (1713). Disgusted with Caesar, Cato retired to U'tica (in Africa), where he had a small republic and mimic senate; but Caesar resolved to reduce Utica as he had done the rest of Africa, and Cato, finding resistance hopeless, fell ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... cries a lad, giving Nell's car a push, and sending her speeding along. In and out, around and about, they fly, like mimic charioteers, until, fairly exhausted, they are willing to stop, and go over to the Rotary Yacht, whose snow-white wings are visible from ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... stone; for that alone he had been beaten! What he said was but the babbling of priests. All priests are alike. They have a common jargon—a common disrespect for what they dare not openly defy. These temple rats of fakirs mimic them. That is all, sahib. A whipping ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... manner, and articulation, very like one of those which the great black-bearded apes were in the habit of preaching every evening when they could get together a congregation of little monkeys to listen, to the great scandal of Jack, who would have it that some evil spirit set them on to mimic him; which sermon, being partly interpreted by the Indian lad, seemed to signify, that the valor and justice of the white men had already reached the ears of the speaker, and that he was sent to welcome them into those regions by ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... home, carried to London, and bound prentice to an apothecary in Hatton Garden. He escaped again, wandered about England, went to Ireland, and there obtained credit as an actor; then returned to London, and appeared at Drury Lane, where his skill as a mimic enabled him to perform each part in the manner of the actor who had obtained chief credit by it. His power of mimicry made him very diverting in society, and as he had natural politeness with a sprightly wit, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... the doors, which, like the portals of a palace, stood between two pillars; it all seemed to be unlocked, showing within some beautiful old pictures in the panel of the doors, and a mirror, that opened a long succession of mimic halls, reflection upon reflection, extending ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... not, honey—you'd have to learn. There was a queer French girl at school, who could do the strangest things, Dorman—like fairy tales, almost. And she taught me to throw my voice different places, and mimic sounds, when we should have been at our lessons. Listen, hon. This is how a little lamb cries, when he is lost.... And this is what a hungry kittie says, when she is away up in a tree, and is afraid to ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower

... "See Nicholas, whom in his tender age, The willing people shall elect their lord; He who shall laugh to scorn the civil rage Of the rebellious Tideus and his horde; Whose infantine delight shall be to wage The mimic fight, and sweat with spear and sword: And through the discipline such nurture yields, Shall flourish as ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... and when we please, not for any reason, but just because we please, remains play always. Children in their sports like nothing better than to counterfeit what is to be the earnest work of their after-lives. The little girl plays with her dolls, and the boy plays he is a soldier and goes to mimic wars. ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz

... reputation of being a zealous Methodist preacher and a daring officer). The latter told me he could hardly understand how I could be an Englishman, as I pronounced my h's all right. General Scurry himself is very amusing, and is an admirable mimic. His numerous anecdotes of the war were very interesting. In peace times he is a lawyer. He was a volunteer major in the Mexican war, and distinguished himself very much in the late campaigns in New Mexico and Arizona, and at ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle

... shall not find it here. For this inferior world is but Heaven's dusky shade, By dark reverted rays from its reflection made; Whence the weak shapes wild and imperfect pass, Like sunbeams shot at too far distance from a glass; Which all the mimic forms express, Though in strange uncouth postures, and uncomely dress; So when Cartesian artists try To solve appearances of sight In its reception to the eye, And catch the living landscape through a scanty light, The figures all inverted show, And colours of a faded hue; ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... I see some crooked mimic jeer, And tax my Muse with this fantastic grace; Turning my papers asks, "What have we here?" Making withal some filthy antic face. I fear no censure nor what thou canst say, Nor shall my spirit one jot of vigour lose. Think'st thou, my wit shall keep the packhorse way, That every ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith

... and tomahawks and knives play the principal part in the war dance. A huge fire throws its yellow, fitful light upon the grim spectre-like objects that bound, leap, yell and howl, bend and pass, aim their weapons, and using their tomahawks in a mimic warfare, a hideous pantomine, around and across the blaze. Their gesticulations summon up visions of murder, horror, scalps, bleeding and dangling at their belts, human hearts and heads fixed upon their spears; their yells resemble at times the long and distant howl of a pack of ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney

... had escaped an earthquake. The landscape had literally the look of war; troops were seen encamped in the neighbourhood of the principal towns; the national guards were exercising in the fields; mimic processions of children were beating drums and displaying banners in the streets, and the popular songs were all for the conquest of every ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... multitude of snow points from smaller jets. The basin occupied the whole breadth of the piazza, whence flights of steps descended to its border. A boat might float, and make voyages from one shore to another in this mimic lake. ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... soon made Shafto feel at ease and at home; they were lively companions, too. Roscoe was a capital mimic, and kept his company in roars of laughter. FitzGerald drew notable caricatures and could tell a story with the best. "The MacNab," who had a certain dry wit, took the stranger firmly in hand with regard to finance—namely, the furnishing of his ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker

... easy because two children are admitted for one nickel at the last performance when the hour is late and the theater nearly deserted. The Hull-House residents were aghast at the early popularity of these mimic shows, and in the days before the inspection of films and the present regulations for the five-cent theaters we established at Hull-House a moving picture show. Although its success justified its existence, it was so obviously but one in the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... in the human occupation of the islands. Still, the sparrows have by no means conquered, and in the wilder places the catbird makes common cause with the bluebird and the redbird, and holds its own against them. The little ground-doves mimic in miniature the form and markings and the gait and mild behavior of our turtle-doves, but perhaps not their melancholy cooing. Nature has nowhere anything prettier than these exquisite creatures, unless it be the long-tailed white gulls which sail ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... uniformly pays, expects, and even exacts, are tedious and fatiguing. Her various movements and attitudes are all adjusted and exhibited by rule. By a happy fluency of the most eloquent language, she has the art of imparting a momentary dignity and grace to the merest trifles. Studious only to mimic such peculiarities as are most admired in others, she affects a loquacity peculiarly flippant and teazing because scandal, routs, finery, fans, china, lovers, lap-dogs, or squirrels, are her constant ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous

... were so perfectly contented with their self-deception Time, that 'pregnant old gentleman,' will disclose all Unwashed hands, and a heavy gold ring upon his thumb Vagabond if Providence had not made me a justice of the peace We pass a considerable portion of our lives in a mimic warfare What will not habit accomplish What we wish, we readily believe When you pretended to be pleased, unluckily, I believed you Whenever he was sober his poverty disgusted him Whiskey, the appropriate liquor in ...
— Quotes and Images From The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer • Charles James Lever

... moonlight evening the gentlemen rowed us up the mill-stream, and as we returned we landed at our favorite oak. The waters, swelled by recent rains, came dashing and tumbling along in mimic billows; the moon beamed down a heavenly radiance, and as the little wavelets broke against the shore, they glittered like molten silver, covering the wild blossoms with dazzling fairy gems. Kate's two ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... it of any use for this particular purpose of longevity to abstain from immorality so long as you are craving for it in your heart; and so on with all other unsatisfied inward cravings. To get rid of the inward desire is the essential thing, and to mimic the real thing without it is ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... any boy of either side the Potomac, and had proved it in many contests of skill. When he was at Hobby's school he had liked to form his mates into companies at recess time, with cane stalks for rifles and dried gourds for drums, and drill them in the manual of arms. They had fought mimic battles, and Washington always commanded one side. He had really learned a good deal of the art of war in this way, and so when men were casting about for likely young officers they naturally thought of the ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland

... the bright moments of invention, and dwells with prophetic ecstasy on the felicitous execution of particular parts, that already start into existence by the magic touch of a heated imagination. Let it depict the tender feelings of solitude, the breathings of midnight silence, the scenes of mimic life, of imaged trial, that often occupy the musing mind; let it be such a work, so drawn, so coloured, and who shall pronounce it inferior? Who rather will not confess that it presents a picture of human ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach

... quick, nervous utterance that is often associated with intense repressed feeling; and his words were accompanied by his best possible counterfeit of the burning, piercing, distraught gaze of passion. Though he acted a part, it was not with the cold-blooded art of a mimic who simulates by rule; it was with the animation due to imagining himself actually swayed by the feeling he would feign. While he knew his emotion to be fictitious, he felt it as if it were real, and his consequent actions were the same as if ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens

... spectator. While all their heart was in their limited boyish race, and its transitory prizes, he was already entertaining himself, very pleasurably meditative, with the tiny drama in action before him, as but the mimic, preliminary exercise for a larger contest, and already with an implicit epicureanism. Watching all the gallant effects of their small rivalries—a scene in the main of fresh delightful sunshine—he entered at once into the sensations of a rivalry beyond them, into the ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater

... their sense; 325 Such labour'd nothings, in so strange a style, Amaze th' unlearn'd, and make the learned smile. Unlucky, as Fungoso in the play, } These sparks with awkward vanity display } What the fine gentleman wore yesterday; } 330 And but so mimic ancient wits at best, As apes our grandsires, in their doublets drest. In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold; Alike fantastic, if too new, or old: Be not the first by whom the new are try'd, 335 Nor yet the last to ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope

... land! And drenched and drowned is the burnt blown sand That spreads its mantle of yellow-grey Round old Salmantica to-day; While marching men come, band on band, Who read not as a reprimand To mortal moils that, as 'twere planned In mockery of their mimic fray, The ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... governors had succeeded in putting on some distant portraiture of the real personages. As they vanished from the door, still did these shadows toss their arms into the gloom of night with a dread expression of woe. Following the mimic representative of Hutchinson came a military figure holding before his face the cocked hat which he had taken from his powdered head, but his epaulettes and other insignia of rank were those of a general officer, and something in his mien reminded the beholders of one who ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... element for which provision must be made in "our house" is FIRE. By which I do not mean merely artificial fire, but fire in all its extent and branches,—the heavenly fire which God sends us daily on the bright wings of sunbeams, as well as the mimic fires by which we warm our dwellings, cook our food, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... Oriental sailor-boys canoe wildly along. There are flower-beds which need not blush to be compared with Kew or the Crystal Palace. But it is not with such that we are now concerned. On one of those same lakes over which, on Saturday evening, sailors in embryo float their mimic craft—and one young gentleman, slightly in advance of the rest, directs a very miniature steamship—we see boards suggesting that daily, from four to eight A.M., the Orientals may immerse themselves in the limpid and most tempting waters. The depth, they are paternally ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... wine circulated; the dinner table became a livelier scene than ever, and the fun grew fast and furious. Imitations of the cries of various animals mingled with the loud laughter; the Museum official having taken it into his head to mimic a cat-call rather like the caterwauling of the animal in question, eight voices simultaneously struck up with the ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac



Words linked to "Mimic" :   impersonator, imitative, mimicker, imitator



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