"Mimicry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sitting promiscuously with the knights in the theatre. Scandalous libels, published to defame persons of rank, of either sex, he suppressed, and inflicted upon their authors a mark of infamy. He expelled a man of quaestorian rank from the senate, for practising mimicry and dancing. He debarred infamous women the use of litters; as also the right of receiving legacies, or inheriting estates. He struck out of the list of judges a Roman knight for taking again his wife whom he had divorced and prosecuted for adultery. He condemned ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... to caution. He then assures his protege that things are to be made more easy for him; that, as a kindred spirit, he will no longer be expected to make sublime masterpieces, but that his work must be one of two kinds—either the imitation of reality to the point of simian mimicry, in idylls or gentle and humorous satires, or the free copying of the best-known and most famous classical works, albeit with shamefast concessions to the taste of the age. For, although he may only be able to appreciate slavish ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... drama find no joys, But doat on mimicry and toys. Thus, when a dance is in my bill, Nobility my boxes fill; Or send three days before the time, To ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... the theories which had breathed such new life into biological studies. In Nicaragua he devoted special attention to those wonderful protective resemblances, especially among insects, which Bates had explained by his theory of "Mimicry;" and as the subject crops up again and again in this book, the non-scientific reader will find it helpful to have before him an outline of the expanded and completed theory—though he should be warned ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... eyes Where our reflection lies Steeped in the sea, And, in an endless fit Of languor, smile on it And its sweet mimicry. Where shall ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... had been a child of one purpose: to increase by burlesques the sufferings of unfortunate friends. If one of them wept, Wallie incessantly pursued him, yelping in horrid mimicry; if one were chastised he could not appear out-of-doors for days except to encounter Wallie and a complete rehearsal of the recent agony. "Quit, Papa! Pah-puh, quee-yet! I'll never do it again, Pah-puh! ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... difficult to explain, but the fact is undeniable. Experience shows that the human voice can imitate the voice of all men and of all inferior animals. The sound of musical instruments, and even noises from the contact of inanimate substances, have been accurately imitated. The mimicry of animals is notorious; and Dr. Burney ("Musical Travels") mentions one who imitated a flute and violin, so as to ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... was the Mercutio to his Shallow. Roger was a rare fellow, 'of the driest humour and the nicest tact, of infinite sleights and evasions, of a picked phraseology, and the very soul of mimicry.' He had the mind of a harlequin; his wit was acrobatic, and threw somersaults. He took in a character at a glance, and threw a pun at you as dexterously as a fly-fisher casts his fly over a trout's nose. 'How finely,' says Hazlitt, in his best and heartiest mood; 'how finely, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... steady work; and the result was a period of upheaval and disquiet. Vicente suffered like the rest. He had embodied in his plays the simple pastimes of the Portuguese people, their delight in the processions, services and dramatic displays of the Church, in the mimicry of the early arremedillos, in the rich fancy-dress momos which were an essential element at great festivities. But his drama was not classical, often it was not drama. Technically he is less dramatic than Lucas Fern['a]ndez or Torres Naharro. He ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... possession, and stood in the pillory for impostors. Mildred Norrington, called the Maid of Westwell, furnished another instance of possession; but she also confessed her imposture, and publicly showed her fits and tricks of mimicry. The strong influence already possessed by the Puritans may probably be sufficient to account for the darker issue of certain cases, in which both juries and judges in Elizabeth's time must be admitted to have shown ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... all-powerful among them and dreaded accordingly, and I was the dwarf's pet and plaything, and all-powerful with him. The hideous creature had a most hideous passion for me then, and I could wind him round my finger as easily as Delilah and Samson; and by his command and their universal consent, the mimicry of royalty was begun, and I was made mistress and sovereign head, even over the dwarf himself. It was a queer whim; but that crooked slug was always taking such odd notions into his head, which nobody there ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... was the whole party. He is not naturally handsome, but he has distinction, and he was well-dressed. And I never heard anyone talk as he did. He told the most delightful stories, he was full of mimicry and wit, and said things that brought everyone into the merry talk; and I am sure he charmed and astonished the whole party. Mr. Denning asked me quietly afterwards 'what university he was educated at.' I think he took it all as education, and had some wild ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... its aesthetic quality, and beauty would be a pervasive ingredient in happiness. No work would be called, in a special sense, a work of art, for all works would be such intrinsically; and even instinctive mimicry and reproduction would themselves operate, not when mischief or idleness prompted, but when some human occasion and some general utility made the exercise of such skill entirely delightful. Thus there would need to be no division of mankind into mechanical ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... patroness. Miss Travers saw with singular sensations that both the captain and her usually self-reliant sister were annoyed and embarrassed by the topic and strove to change it; but Foster's propensity for mimicry and his ability to imitate Mrs. Clancy's combined brogue and sniffle proved too much for their efforts. Kate was in a royally bad temper by the time the youngsters left the house, and when Nellie would have made some laughing allusion to ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... for a true artist to introduce on the stage the hiccoughs of a drunkard and vulgar brutality. . . . Take Ziolkowski's The Master and the Apprentice for instance: there you have a type, a finished type of a drunkard presented in broad and classical outlines; there is gesture and pose and mimicry, but there is also nobility. What does Glas make of that role? . . . He makes a filthy, repulsive, drunken shoemaker of the lowest order. That is their art! . . . And Piesh? . . . Piesh is also not much better, ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... her lap, perched upon the piano, placed on high cushions in the carriage, and lifted on the table of the drawing-room, where she entertained a brilliant, if dissipated company, by her talk, her little songs, her laughter, her mimicry, and her dancing. She rarely danced now, yet all the seductive arts of perfect dancing seemed hers by right of birth. Each movement, each gesture had a peculiar charm, and her dark blue eyes, the more provocative for their lack of passion, were full of a half-mocking, half-tender vivacity. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... Cuvier.—Oss. Foss. 502, t. 39, f. 10. The Singhalese, on following the elk, frequently effect their approaches by so imitating the call of the animal as to induce them to respond. An instance occurred during my residence in Ceylon, in which two natives, whose mimicry had mutually deceived them, crept so close together in the jungle that one shot the other, supposing the cry ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... the means and methods of protection that are to be observed in the lower animals, I have brought forward only those in which mind-element was to be discerned. Mimicry and kindred phenomena hardly have a place in this treatise, for they are, undoubtedly, governed and directed by unconscious mind, a psychical phase which, as I intimated in the introductory chapter of this book, ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... shade of mimicry in her voice, "when Lady Temple is married to the Colonel. There now, I have gone and told you! I did try to ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... this scene, which Europe related far more amusingly than it can be written, because she told it with much mimicry, Carlos ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... took my brother and me to the theatre. Although the world was unfolding rather rapidly for a country boy of twelve, it was with difficulty that I was made to understand that what we had witnessed on the stage was but mimicry. ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... have a discussion on "Mimicry, as producing Abnormal Sexual Characters," at the Entomological to-night. I have a butterfly (Diadema) of which the female is metallic blue, the male dusky brown, contrary to the rule in all other species of the genus, and in almost all insects; ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... to imitating Chamberlain's own methods, and pointing a finger at his distinguished victim, would hiss out his charges word by word with a vibrant slowness. Even the impassive Chamberlain used sometimes to color a little under this mimicry. If ever a man went thoroughly out of his way to be hated it was Lloyd George. But he gained way. Once under an unsparing attack by Lloyd George, Chamberlain winced, leaped to his feet, and asked permission to make a second speech in reply. That was the first occasion which caused members to say ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... imitation; copying &c. v.; transcription; repetition, duplication, reduplication; quotation; reproduction; mimeograph, xerox, facsimile; reprint, offprint. mockery, mimicry; simulation, impersonation, personation; representation &c. 554; semblance; copy &c. 21; assimilation. paraphrase, parody, take-off, lampoon, caricature &c. 21. plagiarism; forgery, counterfeit &c. (falsehood) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Jumieges. The Brethren of the Green Wolf select a leader called Green Wolf, there is an ecclesiastical procession, cure and all, a souper maigre, the lighting of the usual St. John's fire, a dance round the fire, the capture of next year's Green Wolf, a mimicry of throwing him into the fire, a revel, and next day a loaf of pain benit, above a pile of green ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... remembered the fool's tale of the morning—how he had played at being the King and was menaced with death for his mimicry. She felt sure that the moon had overthrown his weak wits, and that he had now come to believe, in his madness, that he was, indeed, the King. But Robert ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... gesture, and went on energetically eating. In the midst of this, something alarmed him, and he flew swiftly away and did not come back. Was this crow a pet that had concluded to strike out for himself? Or had his mimicry or his habit of laying hold of whatever pleased him caused him to appropriate this word ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... fair value for your money, or perhaps—for the thing has happened again and again—there slowly unfolds before the delighted eyes of the happy purchaser, day after day, some new variety, some novel richness, a strange twist of the labellum, or some subtler colouration or unexpected mimicry. Pride, beauty, and profit blossom together on one delicate green spike, and, it may be, even immortality. For the new miracle of Nature may stand in need of a new specific name, and what so convenient as that ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... cloister, little dreaming of the extent of the change. With a heart that overflowed with the warm thoughts of love and youth, the ghostlike shapes that flitted round her, the icy forms, the rigid ceremonials of that life, which is but the mimicry of death, appalled and shocked her. That she had preserved against a royal and most perilous, because unscrupulous suitor, her fidelity to the absent Fonseca, was her ...
— Calderon The Courtier - A Tale • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wonderful case of Volucella of which I had never heard. (134/2. Volucella is a fly—one of the Syrphidae—supposed to supply a case of mimicry; this was doubtless the point of interest with Bates. Dr. Sharp says ["Insects," Part II. (in the Camb. Nat. Hist. series), 1899, page 500]: "It was formerly assumed that the Volucella larvae lived on the larvae ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... differ from the ordinary festal dancing except that they are a pantomimic representation, by gestures, by postures, and by mimicry of some feature of Manbo life. So far as I know these dances ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... the morality of theater-going was one Scott felt obliged to discuss when he was writing upon the drama. He found its vindication, characteristically, in a universal human trait,—the impulse toward mimicry and impersonation,—and in the good results that may be supposed to attend it. In naming these he lays what seems like undue stress on the teaching of history by the drama, in language that might quite as well be applied to historical novels. His argument on the literary side also is stated in a ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... Canalis exerted over her. La Briere had not the gift of seduction which Melchior possessed. Nature frequently denies it to true hearts, who are, as a rule, timid. This gift demands fearlessness, an alacrity of ways and means that might be called the trapeze of the mind; a little mimicry goes with it; in fact there is always, morally speaking, something of the comedian in a poet. There is a vast difference between expressing sentiments we do not feel, though we may imagine all their variations, and ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... still on the crypt-slab, was quivering with hunger and eagerness, but he remained in place until the second chunk was tossed and he was ordered to take it. Then he, too, leaped and caught it, savaging it in mimicry of a kill. For a while, he stood watching them growl and snarl and tear their meat, great beasts whose shoulders came above his own waist. While they lived to guard it, the Crown was safe. Then he crossed to the hearth, scraped away the covering ashes, piled on kindling and logs ...
— The Keeper • Henry Beam Piper
... voice of love, Or speaks in thy unclosing eyes, Or through thy frame doth burn or move, Or think or feel, awake, arise! 105 Spirit, leave for mine and me Earth's unsubstantial mimicry! ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... classes—(1) primary pleasures, which entirely proceed from objects before our eyes; and (2) secondary pleasures, flowing frm the ideas of visible objects. The latter are greatly extended by the addition of the proper enjoyment of resemblance, which is at the basis of all mimicry and wit. Addison recognizes, too, to some extent, the influence of association ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the pilot could reply, the voice from the silver and red patrol ship dropped into an exaggerated mimicry ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... the apartment where his poor Father was in the last struggle, he could scarcely get across for KAMMERJUNKER, KAMMERHERRN, Goldsticks, Silversticks, and the other solemn histrionic functionaries, all crowding there to do their sad mimicry on the occasion: not a lovely accompaniment in Friedrich Wilhelm's eyes. His poor Father's death-struggle once done, and all reduced to everlasting rest there, Friedrich Wilhelm looked in silence over the Unutterable, for a Short ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... repulsively disproportioned to his puny frame, which looked doubly contemptible, enveloped as it was in an ample tawdry robe. Sprung from the lowest ranks of the populace, he had gradually forced himself into the favour of his superiors by his skill in coarse mimicry, and his readiness in ministering to the worst vices of all who would employ him. Having lost the greater part of his patrons during the siege, finding himself abandoned to starvation on all sides, he had now, ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... concert with the notes of the musicians. In attitude and gesture they are almost as bad as their pious sisters of the temples. The endeavor is to express the passions of love, hope, jealousy, despair, etc, and they eke out this mimicry with chanted songs in every way worthy of the movements of which they are the explanatory notes. These are the only women in Hindustan whom it is thought worth while to teach to read and write. If they would but make as noble use of their intellectual ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... her tenderness, and exerted all her powers of mimicry to amuse her sister. The young folks screamed with laughter to see her perform the shuffling dances of the negroes, or to hear her accompany their singing with imitations of the growling contra-fagotto, or the squeaking fife. In vain she filled the ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... most obvious features of an animal may have been recently acquired; which often happens with those characters that adapt an animal to its habits of life, as the wings of a bat, or the fish-like shape of a dolphin; or as in cases of 'mimicry.' Some butterflies, snakes, etc., have grown to resemble closely, in a superficial way, other butterflies and snakes, from which a stricter investigation widely separates them; and this superficial resemblance is probably a recent acquisition, for the ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... soah!" He leaped in frenzy. He seized his harpoon in mimicry of striking, and darted it up and down in the air. "Walrus! Walrus!" he cried, and his feverish ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... There was the faintest mimicry of his half Scotch, half Australian accent in her voice—a little husky, with now and then unsuspected modulations. She looked at him and the gleam in her eyes and her strange smile made him stare at ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... has been the subject of many volumes and yet it may be truthfully said that no two naturalists are wholly agreed on the interpretation of the countless hues of plants and animals. Some assert that all alleged instances of protective colouring and mimicry are merely the result of accident; while at the opposite swing of the pendulum we find theories, protective and mimetic, for the colours of even the tiny one-celled green plants which cover the bark of trees! Here is abundant opportunity for any observer ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... know that thee was possessed of the art of mimicry, my cousin," she remarked. "Harriet hath it to perfection, but thee has never shown sign of ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... a more steely hue than his brother's, striking fire readily and showing all manner of flinty lights, who had a downright talent for mimicry, and a small share of juvenile self-importance, came in for regard of a more ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... still more childish, can only prove (if it prove any thing at all) that the parodist is a still greater blockhead than the original writer, and, what is far worse, a malignant coxcomb to boot. The talent for mimicry seems strongest where the human race are most degraded. The poor, naked half human savages of New Holland were found excellent mimics: and, in civilized society, minds of the very lowest stamp alone satirize by copying. At ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... at; but it is very often not the laugh of incredulity; it is a mode of distorting the sense of inferiority into a sense of superiority, or a mimicry of superiority interposed between the laugher and his feeling of inferiority. Two persons in conversation {253} agreed that it was often a nuisance not to be able to lay hands on a bit of paper to mark the place in a book, every bit of paper on the table was sure to contain something not to be ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... sometimes introduced, who are raised on a little stage and during several hours arrest the attention of their audience by the relation of wonderful and interesting adventures. There are also characters of humour amongst them who, by buffoonery, mimicry, punning, repartee, and satire (rather of the sardonic kind) are able to keep the company in laughter at intervals during the course of a night's entertainment. The assembly seldom breaks up before daylight, and these bimbangs are often continued for several ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... successful burlesques, Mr. Webb has travestied rather the ideas than the manner of Mr. Reade; and one who turned to "Liffith Lank" from the wonderful parodies in "Punch's Prize Novelists," or those exquisitely finished pieces of mimicry, the "Condensed Novelists" of the Californian Harte, would feel its want of fidelity to the method and style of the author burlesqued. Yet the essential absurdities of "Griffith Gaunt" are most amusingly brought out in "Liffith ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... more than ordinary size Retreats suburban please the public eye; But occupants their villa homes disguise And strive to imitate the great and high By striking names and such-like mimicry; They choose them mainly for a good address, We see it as we pass the villa by, And with a smile we mark its rottenness. This evil's ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... drawn from the camp to the college.' The essence of pedantry is want of originality. It is nourished on imitation. For the pedant to imitate is enough of itself; to him the suitability of the model is immaterial. Thus military bodies have been ruined by mimicry of foreign arrangements quite inapplicable to the conditions of the mimics' country. More than twenty years ago Sir Henry Maine, speaking of the war of American Independence, said, 'Next to their stubborn valour, the chief secret of the colonists' ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... just say here, that if any disapprove of my picture of the lady, they may take Bernard Blackmantle's 278magnifique, et admirable? Do they not awake in you visions of rapturous delight, as you contrast their antics and mimicry, their grotesque and beautiful grimaces, their cunning leers, with the eye of Garrick, the stately action of Kemble, the sarcasm of Cooke, the study of Henderson, the commanding port of Siddons, the fire of Kean, the voice of Young, the tones of O'Neill? ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... best clubs, played cricket with the chance of a blue ahead of him, and had, moreover, a real social gift. He had a quite unembarrassed manner and, what is rare in a young man, a strong sense of humour. He was a prominent member of the A. D. C., and had a really artistic gift of mimicry; but there was no touch of forwardness or conceit about him. He had been in for some examination or other; and when Howard came in he was describing his experiences. "What sort of questions?" he was saying. "Oh, you know the kind—an awful quotation, ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... relief" was occasionally interposed amid more serious happenings. The blacks were friendly, though occasionally shy and suspicious. In one scene the mimicry that is a characteristic of the aboriginal was quaintly displayed. The incident, full of colour and humour, ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... same.— Arrived in London, he finds the lady gone abroad. Suspects Belford. His unaccountable freaks at Smith's. His motives for behaving so ludicrously there. The vile Sally Martin entertains him with her mimicry of the ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... her mimicry was irresistible. "Don't you think I'm a bit lovable, cousin?—not a bit? You discourage me! I'm doomed to be a spinster, I suppose! Ah, me! And I'd far rather be the spinster's cat! Cats aren't worried about ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... physiognomy is one of the principal means of a knowledge of mankind: arts of dissimulation do not come within the range of physiognomy, but within that of mere pathognomy and mimicry. This is precisely why I recommend the physiognomy of a man to be studied when he is alone and left to his own thoughts, and before he has been conversed with; partly because it is only then that his physiognomy can be seen purely and simply, since in conversation ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... put on the screw nuts. Then, for those who bore the heavy burden of rails and sleepers and carried material for the road bed, there were licensed fools, mummers, and droll mimics, who by their antics revived the lagging spirits of the gangs. There is an unsuspected capacity for mimicry in what are called savage men. I have seen Red Indians give excellent pantomimic entertainments, and aborigines in other lands exhibit high mumming talent. In the railroad battalion there was an eccentric negro who was a very king of jesters. From the Sirdar and the Khalifa downwards—for he was ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... the Judge laughed heartily over her mimicry of Larry McCarthy, the "new policeman." Nor did he make any criticisms when the story was ended. She had been sufficiently punished, he considered, for any lapses from prudence and the lessons her experience had taught would be far more valuable than any ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... promise good, When she winks the other eye? Noodledom seeks her neighbourhood, And winks its other eye. For no one winks so freely as a fool who thinks he's sly; The dupe of deeper knavery smirks in shallow mimicry Of the smirking JERRY DIDDLER who is sucking him so dry, And who ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... the most common causes is Mimicry, or, as it is probably more often called, Imitation. Mimicry or Imitation is almost wholly confined to children. After reaching the age of discretion, the adult is usually of sufficient intelligence to refrain from mimicking or imitating a ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... this, then, be named the art of mimicry, and this the province assigned to it; as for the other division, we are weary and will give that up, leaving to some one else the duty of making the class and giving ...
— Sophist • Plato
... the night's work. We now went home by dawn to apprise all the porters that we had flesh in store for them, when the two boys who had so shamelessly deserted me, instead of hiding their heads, described all the night's scenes with such capital mimicry as to set the whole camp in a roar. We had all now to hurry back to the carcass before the Wagogo could find it; but though this precaution was quickly taken, still, before the tough skin of the beast could be cut through, the Wagogo ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... apprehension every time she opened her lips, lest some treacherous a or e, some strong r, some puzzling aspirate or non-aspirate, some unguarded note, interrogative, or expostulatory, should betray her to be an Irishwoman. Mrs. Dareville had, in her mimicry, perhaps, a little exaggerated, as to the teebles and cheers, but still the general likeness of the representation of Lady Clonbrony was strong enough to strike and vex her son. He had now, for the first time, an opportunity of judging of the estimation in which his mother and his ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... present has slipped from me as a garment might, and I see the past like a little show, struggles and heartbreakings of long ago, and watch it with the same indifferent curiosity as I would the regulated mimicry of a stage play. Pictures from the past come and go without an effort of will; many are habitual memories, but the one before me rises for the first time—for fifteen years it has lain submerged, and now like ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... and looked angrily at him, and the stern father spoke with the voice of Niel Andreevich. At last Tatiana Markovna took the book from him with an intimation to him to behave reasonably, whereupon he continued his studies in character-mimicry for Marfinka's benefit behind her back. When Marfinka betrayed him he was requested to go into the garden until supper time and the reading went on without him. The catastrophe of the tale approached ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... the Shadow, with that wonderful power of accurate mimicry which is so strong in all natural human beings, began to trill out at once, with a very good Parisian accent, a few lines from a well-known song in "La Fille ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... most desired to take. No need for 'trying' to love her, he said to himself,—that was already done. And yet he was very jealous on her behalf. Was that love worthy of her which had once been given to Cynthia? Was not this affair too much a mocking mimicry of the last? Again just on the point of leaving England for a considerable time! If he followed her now to her own home,—in the very drawing-room where he had once offered to Cynthia! And then by a strong resolve he determined on this course. They were friends now, and he ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... celebrated for her powers of mimicry, and had been a source of great amusement to her companions in the use—sometimes the abuse—of these powers; but this was the first occasion on which she had thought of personating an ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... his feet and was mincing along behind the Admiral in such perfect mimicry of his sister that Archie hooted. Beverly scorned to notice ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... has passed away for ever. History repeats itself, it is true, but history will not bear mimicry. In every melody that wakes the echoes there is repetition of this note and that, the same single sound is heard again and again; but the glorious intertwinings of the several parts, the subtle fugues and merry peals of laughter ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... imaginative representation of a future life. The first is the method of the universal barbarian mind, which paints the life to come as a shadowy reflex or copy of the present world and life, an unsubstantial, graspless, yet actual and conscious realm of ghosts, carrying on a pale and noiseless mimicry of their former adventures in the body. Holding fast to that clew of analogy which is the nucleus of philosophy in this view, but rejecting the rest as fantastic figment, we arrive at the next way in which those who are unwilling ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... speaks at first in vague emotions, scarcely distinguishable from mere animal buoyancy. The boy, hooting in mimicry of the owls, receives in his heart the voice of mountain torrents and the solemn imagery of rocks, and woods, and stars. The sportive girl is unconsciously moulded into stateliness and grace by the floating clouds, the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... cried, "you resemble only too closely that which you try to imitate, that which my mouth has been so vile as to conjure up before you. Lay aside those flowers and that dress. Let us wash away such mimicry with a sincere tear; do not remind me that I am but a prodigal son; I remember ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... years of intermittent intimacy with a disillusioning world of mimicry, her dreams were pure romance, proved that Lorraine had still the unclouded innocence ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... modern, the elements of its formation are of the greatest antiquity; the chorus of dancers and the performances of the men in the Egyptian chapters represent without much doubt public dancing performances. We get singing, dancing, mimicry and pantomime in the early stages of Greek art, and the development of the dance rhythm in ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... amusement found vent in his absence in laughter and mimicry. Zilda joined in this mimicry; she watched the Frenchmen strut along the platform in imitation of Gilby, and smiled when their imitation was good. When it was poor she cried, 'Non, ce n'est pas comme ca,' and she came out from the doorway and showed them how to do it. Her imitation ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... the shady river-side. He went through the dumb show of repeatedly offering to his captive guest the fish they had caught, pressing additional portions upon him, laughing significantly and joyously throughout his mimicry. Then suddenly grave, he seized the Highlander's left arm, giving it an earnest grasp about the wrist, the elbow, then close to the shoulder to intimate that he spared him for his gift to the ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... buff, occupying the larger part of the surface of the hind wings. This peculiarity of colouring led me to discover that this extraordinary female closely resembles (when flying) another butterfly of the same genus but of a different group (Papilio cooen), and that we have here a case of mimicry similar to those so well illustrated and explained by Mr. Bates.[ Trans. Linn. Soc. vol. xviii. p. 495; "Naturalist on the Amazons," vol. ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... who are thus slain in mimicry it is impossible not to recognise representatives of the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation, as he is supposed to manifest himself in spring. The bark, leaves, and flowers in which the actors are dressed, and the season of the year at which they appear, show that they belong to the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... lively humour, and verified Johnson's saying, that if he had cultivated gaiety as much as his brother David, he might have equally excelled in it. He was to-day quite a London narrator, telling us a variety of anecdotes with that earnestness and attempt at mimicry which we usually find in the wits of the metropolis. Dr. Johnson went with me to the cathedral in the afternoon. It was grand and pleasing to contemplate this illustrious writer, now full of fame, worshipping in the 'solemn temple' of ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... other examples; and in English drama this kind of thing is alluded to again and again. What Jonson really did, was to raise the dramatic lampoon to an art, and make out of a casual burlesque and bit of mimicry a dramatic satire of literary pretensions and permanency. With the arrogant attitude mentioned above and his uncommon eloquence in scorn, vituperation, and invective, it is no wonder that Jonson soon involved himself in literary and even personal quarrels ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... slow-moving boy, preferring in their various games and mimic battles to play the role of councilor, to plan and assign to the others their parts in the fray. This he did so cleverly that he soon became a leader among his youthful contemporaries; and withal he was apt at mimicry and impersonation, so that the other boys were accustomed to say of him, "He has his grandfather's wit and the wisdom of ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... songs were not Mac's. They belong to the lore of the bushmen; but he sang or crooned them with such perfect mimicry of tone or cadence, that never again was it possible to hear these songs of the Never-Never without associating ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... into his throat, while his eyebrows were wrinkled up to their highest elevation. From this attitude, expressive of the accurate balancing of the claims of an internal debate, he emerged into the posture of a cock crowing, and Emilia heard again his bitter mimicry of her miserable broken tones, followed by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... according to its abilities, up to the natural limits of its type. They have become convinced that this is not possible in dispersion, as, under that condition, prejudice, hatred, and contempt continually follow and oppress them, and either stint their development, or force them to an ethnical mimicry which necessarily makes of them, instead of original types with a right to existence, mediocre or bad copies of foreign models. They therefore work methodically with a view to rendering the Jewish people once more a normal ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... eye—the creature appeared, there, behind Lucy; fearfully the same as to outward semblance, but kneeling exactly as Bridget knelt, and clasping her hands in jesting mimicry as Bridget clasped hers in her ecstasy that was deepening into a prayer. Mistress Clarke cried out—Bridget arose slowly, her gaze fixed on the creature beyond: drawing her breath with a hissing sound, never moving ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... timber roof admitting the heat and the cold, and the stone walls bedewed with condensed moisture,—and after the first pleasant impression of the moment is over, there is left only a painful feeling of mimicry, not to be removed by any precision of copying, nor by the feeble attempts at ivy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... intimately connected for a long period of years. He delivered his story, referring to one of the many incidents in his perilous life, orally, but with pantomimes so graphic and vivid that it may be presented truly as a specimen of gesture language. Indeed, to any one familiar with Indian mimicry, the story might have been intelligible without the expedient of verbal language, while the oral exposition, incoherent as it was, could hardly be styled anything better than the subordinate part of the delivery. I have endeavored to reproduce these gestures ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... of "natural selection" Bates, Wallace and Poulton have explained the value of "mimicry" as an aid to beasts, birds, insects, as they elude their enemies or lie unsuspected on the watch for prey. The resemblances thus worked out through successive generations attest the astonishing plasticity of bodily forms, ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... way: they did not delve into the mind of a colored man for capacities which the pride of race led them to believe to be restricted to their own Saxon blood. Bitter and vindictive sarcasm, irresistible mimicry, and a pathetic narrative of his own experiences of slavery, were the intellectual manifestations which they encouraged him to exhibit on the platform or ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... cadenced, suddenly became vivacious; his gestures, at first constrained, became dramatic. He used to act his subject, apparently without premeditated art, in the liveliest pantomime. He had no power of voice-mimicry, and none of the ordinary gifts of the actor. A tall and slim figure, not yet shortened from its five feet ten or eleven by the habitual stoop, which ten years later brought him down to less than middle ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... mimicry of perfect bliss. Jim was not critical. She was more beautiful than he remembered her. He told her so, and she was flattered by his courtship, miserably treacherous ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... remark with a pantomime mimicry of the air and gesture of the individual. He showed in a second the contortions of Harry Weston in drawing the bow, and in another the grimaces of Henry Hope, the choir man, in producing bass notes, or the swelling ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... imitation, resting upon painted figures drest up in regimentals, and worked by watchwork through the whole movements of the battle, would have been no art whatsoever in the sense of a Fine Art, but a base mechanic mimicry. ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... colours," advertising the nauseousness of their possessors to the bird, which had learned to recognise them; in other cases these colours and marks seemed to be borrowed by palatable species, whose unconscious "mimicry" led to their survival; in other cases, again, the patterns and spots were regarded as "recognition marks," by which the male ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... bands, gives it a rude resemblance to the wasp. Obliged, if not for its own sake at least for that of its family, to force itself into the wasp's dwelling as a parasite, it deceitfully dresses itself, we are told, in the livery of its victim, thus affording the most curious and striking example of mimicry; and naturalists insufficiently informed would regard it as one of the greatest ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... that detestable malady was so accurate, that I almost fancied myself again in the cockpit of the Actaeon, and all the terrors of the voyage across the Adriatic arose fresh to my imagination. After many other adventures, he returns safe to [Sidenote: INGENIOUS MIMICRY.] Aleppo, his native city, no richer than he set out; but, like the monkey who had seen the world, "full of wise saws," and strange assertions. His hairbreadth escapes, the unlucky scrapes he gets into, the blunders he is incessantly ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... sir." Val could be rather exasperating when she chose. She always could be sure of making Manley silently furious when she adopted that tone of respectful servility—as employed by butlers and footmen upon the stage. Her mimicry, be it ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... not to be worth the cost of the process,—possibly, in those attempts, some scanty grains of this substance were found by the alchemists, in the crucible, with grains of the metal as niggardly yielded by pitiful mimicry of Nature's stupendous laboratory; and from such grains enough of the essence might, perhaps, have been drawn forth, to add a few years of existence to some feeble graybeard,—granting, what rests on no proofs, that some of ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... accustomed—at such times as suited his caprice and his resources—to give exhibitions of his genius for mimicry to the rest of the boys. I had heard from Rupert of these entertainments, which were much admired by the school. They commonly consisted of funny dialogues between various worthies of the place well known to everybody, which made Weston's audience able to judge of the ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... business methods had left Gabrielle just a simple girl, aside from all her accomplishments. Her laugh was the loudest and her zeal for a good time the strongest. She entered into the revels with zest, prompted Nellie Gibson to exhibitions of mimicry, recited, cleverly told anecdotes evolved from her own experiences, played, sang, danced and cheered for the host and hostess. It was well there were ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... amusing; how he was always hunted by bailiffs and duns; how, to the landlady's horror, though she never could abide the woman, he did not marry his wife till a short time before her death; and what a queer little wild vixen his daughter was; how she kept them all laughing with her fun and mimicry; how she used to fetch the gin from the public-house, and was known in all the studios in the quarter—in brief, Mrs. Bute got such a full account of her new niece's parentage, education, and behaviour as would scarcely have pleased Rebecca, had the latter known that such inquiries ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... is true, he allows his spirits to run away with his judgment, although in such instances the manner is so obviously exaggerated as to suggest deliberate mimicry. His account of the tawdry sentimentality of Moore's poetry sounds like ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... opportunity as he sat opposite, gently touched one of the fore—legs of the balanced chair with his toe, while he finished Gelid's sentence by interjecting, "iors," as the conch fell back and floundered over on his stem; his tormentor drawling out in wicked mimicry. ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... Well, you see, I was in trade then. Different now. I'm getting to be quite a fop. Do you notice that I say 'By Jove' occasionally?" He gave his raucous laugh of derision. "Dined at Sherry's the other night, old chap," he went on with raw mimicry. "They thought I was a Christian and let me in. I used to look like the ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... would never had it; they don't want convicts in this town. This is a moral burg. That's more than the women said to me though—the starved buzzards; if they've spoke a word to me since I never heard it." Her voice rose in sharp mimicry: "You, Katie, come right up on the porch, child! Don't you know—! See, I'm ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the same scheme to ridicule a third, and either take advantage of, or invent, some story for that purpose, and mimicry will have already produced a sort of rude comedy. It becomes an inviting treat to the populace, and gains an additional zest and burlesque by following the already established plan of tragedy; and the first ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... potato meet us in the human face, or even in the hippopotamus, whom accordingly Nature kindly puts out of sight. It is bad taste that we suffer from,—not plainness, not indifference to appearance, but features misplaced, shallow mimicry of "effects" where their causes do not exist, transparent pretences of all kinds, forcing attention to the absence of the reality, otherwise perhaps unnoticed. The first step toward seemly building is to rectify the relation between the appearance and the uses of the building,—to give ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... and he looked down upon the unconscious man more in curiosity than in hate. The wearing of the Arab burnoose which Tarzan had placed upon his person had aroused in the mind of the anthropoid a desire for similar mimicry of the Tarmangani. The burnoose, though, had obstructed his movements and proven such a nuisance that the ape had long since torn it from ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... ear. He hesitated a little, and ended by taking the boots off, and walking backwards and forwards noiselessly. All desire to sleep or to rest had left him. The bare thought of lying down on the unoccupied bed instantly drew the picture on his mind of a dreadful mimicry of the position of the dead man. Who was he? What was the story of his past life? Poor he must have been, or he would not have stopped at such a place as The Two Robins Inn—and weakened, probably, by long illness, or he could hardly ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... of the pedigree of our species in the inherent taste for mimicry which we share, at all events, with the anthropoid apes. This instinct of mimicry I take to be the humble beginning from which dramatic art has sprung, and it appears in the individual at a very early stage. Perhaps it is even expressed in the first squalls of infancy, though this possibility ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... the most beautiful lanterns that I have ever seen. Each is a gigantic lotus-flower of paper, so perfectly made in every detail as to seem a great living blossom freshly plucked; the petals are crimson at their bases, paling to white at their tips; the calyx is a faultless mimicry of nature, and beneath it hangs a beautiful fringe of paper cuttings, coloured with the colours of the flower, green below the calyx, white in the middle, crimson at the ends. In the heart of the blossom is set a microscopic oil-lamp of baked clay; and this being lighted, all the flower becomes ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... power. As evaporation continues, solidification goes on, and we finally obtain, through the clustering together of innumerable molecules, a finite crystalline mass of a definite form. What is this form? It sometimes seems a mimicry of the architecture of Egypt. We have little pyramids built by the salt, terrace above terrace from base to apex, forming a series of steps resembling those up which the traveller in Egypt is dragged by his guides. The human mind is as little disposed to look without ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... hall, upon the walls of which hung the customary banners: a serpent springing from the top of a barrel; the steamboat, Alcohol, bursting her boiler and going to pieces, and the staunch craft, Temperance, safe and sound, sailing away before a fair wind. With perfect self-command, gift of mimicry and dramatic gestures, the lecturer swayed his audience; now bubbling over with witty anecdotes, again exercising his power of graphic portraiture. His elixir vitae—animal spirits—humanized his effort, and, as Sir Robert Peel played upon the House of Commons "as on an old fiddle," so John ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... was glancing at her foregone mimicry of Beauchamp's occasional strokes of emphasis. 'Do your utmost to have your bonnet on in time for us to walk to church. I can't ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... marks the spot; no polished alabaster, or the mimicry of sculptured marble marks his grave: the real excellency of the patriot is written on the minds of his countrymen; it will be remembered with applause as long as the nation subsists, without this artificial expedient to ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... imitation of means which help to reach ends, is a superficial and transitory affair which leaves little effect upon disposition. Idiots are especially apt at this kind of imitation; it affects outward acts but not the meaning of their performance. When we find children engaging in this sort of mimicry, instead of encouraging them (as we would do if it were an important means of social control) we are more likely to rebuke them as apes, monkeys, parrots, or copy cats. Imitation of means of accomplishment is, on the other hand, an intelligent ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... the unsatisfactory reply in an exasperated burlesque of mimicry: "I cannot say, sir—you cannot say? Pooh, pooh, there is no shame in being in love with her. We all are more or less; pass the bottle. As for you, since you clapped eyes on her you have been like a man in the moon, not a word to throw to a dog, no eyes, no ears but for your ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... wanted to know what amused him, asked my permission to tell. I gave him leave; and with a memory for detail which I could have spared, to say nothing of an attempt at mimicry, he repeated, word for word, my objections to meeting the Irish friends of ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... this outer gate, the youth winded the horn which hung at his side in mimicry of the ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... remarkably well preserved. This tomb contains the ashes of the dependents of Tiberius, the contemporary of our Lord. One pigeon-hole is filled with the calcined bones of the court buffoon, a poor deaf and dumb slave who had wonderful powers of mimicry, and used to amuse his morose master by imitating the gesticulations of the advocates pleading in the Forum. Another pigeon-hole contains the remains of the keeper of the library of Apollo in the imperial palace on the Palatine. A most pathetic lamentation ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... phrase, of the great masters of style, the old masters. Godwin, seeing in quotation a passage from John Woodvil, takes it for a choice fragment of an old dramatist, and goes to Lamb to assist him in finding the author. His power of delicate imitation in prose and verse reaches the length of a fine mimicry even, as in those last essays of Elia on Popular Fallacies, with their gentle reproduction or caricature of Sir Thomas Browne, showing, the more completely, his mastery, by disinterested study, of those elements of the man which were the real source of style ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... conceiving of the communication of thought among animals by sounds which seem to us all alike. When I was engaged in hospitals, the evenings in the guard room were sometimes enlivened by the presence of a companion who excelled in humorous mimicry. He would represent a man in liquor who had stopped at a fountain that flowed with a gentle sound, somewhat like that of his own hiccough. A single oath, pronounced in different tones, was sufficient to enable us to comprehend all the impressions, all the states of mind ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... drunk. He has skill in numbers, and seldom exceeds his sevenpence.—He had a brother once, no Michael Cassio, no great arithmetician. Roger Kirkpatrick was a rare fellow, of the driest humour, and the nicest tact, of infinite sleights and evasions, of a picked phraseology, and the very soul of mimicry. I fancy I have some insight into physiognomy myself, but he could often expound to me at a single glance the characters of those of my acquaintance that I had been most at fault about. The account as it was cast up and balanced ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... as mine—your shoulders are a trifle stooped and you walk with a curious drag of your left foot. Your hair is white but thick: the contour of our faces is quite similar, and so with dry cosmetics, some physical mimicry, and the use of a pair of horn-rimmed glasses like yours I can make a comparatively good double. The only exposure to the sharp eyes of your enemies will be, first, when I substitute myself for you and take your automobile back home; second, when I go down to the theatrical district, to visit a ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... as without this I felt they would lose their weight and dignity, which does seem to me the essential business in a mural decoration, and which makes Puvis de Chavannes a great decorator far more than his flat mimicry of fresco does.... Tintoretto, in S. Rocco, is my idea of the big way to decorate a building; great clustered groups sculptured in light and shade filling with amazing ingenuity of design the architectural spaces at his disposal: a far richer and more satisfying result to me than the flat and ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... though not deep, humour. It turned out that Gemma really did read excellently—quite like an actress in fact. She indicated each personage, and sustained the character capitally, making full use of the talent of mimicry she had inherited with her Italian blood; she had no mercy on her soft voice or her lovely face, and when she had to represent some old crone in her dotage, or a stupid burgomaster, she made the drollest grimaces, screwing up ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... to the Struggle for Existence, color and mimicry are important factors. Grant Allen, in his work on Darwin, says concerning this, and also as illustrating "Natural Selection": "In the desert with its monotonous sandy coloring, a black insect or a white insect, still ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... neither has he the frequent antithetical abuses of that great orator. Burke and Sheridan are as distinguishable as any other two of their contemporaries; Curran stands alone; O'Connell never had a model, and never had an imitator who rose above mimicry. Every combination of powers, every description of excellence, and every variety of style and character, may be found among the masterpieces of this great school. Of their works many will live for ever. ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... of his exploders, he has just time, before they have quite kicked him off, for exposing to view the real pig concealed under his cloak, which pig it was, and not himself, that had been the artist—forced by pinches into 'mimicry' of his own porcine music. Of all baffled connoisseurs, surely, these Roman pig-fanciers must have looked the most confounded. Yet there is no knowing: and we ourselves have a clever friend, but rather too given to subtilising, who contends, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... affectionate, and so happy with me, that telling him the truth would have been about as pleasant as slitting the throat of some artless animal. At first I used to wonder what had put into that radiant head the detestable delusion that it held a brain. Then I began to see that it was simply protective mimicry—an instinctive ruse to get away from family life and an office desk. Not that Gilbert didn't—dear lad!—believe in himself. There wasn't a trace of hypocrisy in his composition. He was sure that his 'call' was ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... the principal cascade is well contrived, and I had the good fortune to be present at the moment the water commenced flowing, which continued but a short time. This struck me as a singular piece of mimicry, and compared with those truly-sublime spectacles—the cascades of Nature—the boasted works of St. Cloud seemed mere playthings, like the little falls which children contrive in running brooks; or at best resembling hydraulic exhibitions ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... me; At those times —God help us— I was impelled to be a grand knight, And swagger and snap my fingers, And explain my mind finely. Oh, lost sweetheart, I would that I had not been a grand knight. I said: "Sweetheart." Thou said'st: "Sweetheart." And we preserved an admirable mimicry Without heeding the drip of the blood From ...
— War is Kind • Stephen Crane
... short, the finest people that have as yet been created on the broad face of God's smiling earth." These last words she pronounced with a nasal twang, and in a tone of voice which almost seemed to him to be a direct mimicry of the American Minister. The upshot of the conversation, however, was that the disgust against Americans which, to a certain degree, had been excited in Mr. Glascock's mind by the united efforts of Mr. Spalding and the poetess, had been almost entirely dispelled. From ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... buckled his own sword to the actor's side, and, according to old Downes, our comedian looked more like a dressed-up ape or a quiz on the French than Sir Arthur Addle. The English Court was straightway convulsed with laughter at this mimicry, which seems, to say the least, in highly questionable taste. When Nell Gwynne appeared and burlesqued the biter, Charles II, who was present at the first performance of The Conquest of Granada, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... own personality out of the dialogue. Remember that your characters and not you are doing the talking. You have laid down a problem in your playlet, and your audience expects it to fulfill its promise dramatically—that is, by a mimicry of life. So it does not care to listen to one man inhabiting four bodies and talking like a quartet of parrots. It wants to hear four different personalities talk with all the individuality that life bestows so ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... old man stopped of his own accord, and, as if he had sufficiently rebuked me by his mimicry, he said, 'But for a' that, ye will play very weel wi' a little practice and some gude teaching. But ye maun learn to put the heart into it, man—to put the ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... making hundreds laugh and roar with glee By my transcendent feats of mimicry, And humour wanton as an elvish sprite: I wake from ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... are you not now too advanced to smudge your upper lip and stalk agreeably as a villain? Surely you can no longer frisk lightly in a comedy. If you should wheeze and limp in an old man's part, with back humped in mimicry, would you not fear that it bordered on the truth? But doubtless there was a time when you ranged upon these heights—when Kazrac the magician was not too heavy for your art. In those soaring days, let us hope ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... his hairy fellows of the tribe of Kerchak followed his example. The shes came down from their perches of safety and struck and reviled the dead body of Sheeta. The young apes refought the battle in mimicry of their mighty elders. ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the middle of the floor and thrust his chin out, knitting his brow and widening his nostrils, and shout "Of the people, By the people, and For the people" at the top of his lungs in that little parlour. He always had a great talent for mimicry, a talent of which I think he was absolutely unconscious. He would give his speeches in exactly the boy-orator style; that is, he imitated speakers who imitated others who had heard Daniel Webster. Mary and he, however, had no idea that he imitated anybody; ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... style congenial to the minds around him. Steele, a rough, vigorous, forward man, struck out the periodical essay; Addison, a wise, meditative man, improved and carried it to perfection. An unconscious mimicry is always producing countless echoes of an original writer. That, I take it, is undeniably true. Nobody can doubt that all authors are in some degree echoes, and that a vast majority are never anything else. But it does not answer why a particular form ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... interrupted her husband's declaration. With clever mimicry she struck the attitude of a nervous photographer just ready to close the shutter of his camera. Dicky stood just behind her too, also smiling, but while Lillian's merriment evidently was genuine, I detected a distaste for the proceedings behind Dicky's ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... surged and rustled. The artists, who were in evidence until evening, were easily recognized by their activity, the sonorousness of their voices, and the authority of their gestures. They drew their friends by the sleeve toward the pictures, which they pointed out with exclamations and mimicry of a connoisseur's energy. All types of artists were to be seen—tall men with long hair, wearing hats of mouse-gray or black and of indescribable shapes, large and round like roofs, with their turned-down ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... Truro, Cornwall, of a good family; was educated at Oxford, and studied law, but ruined himself by gaming, and took to the stage; he became the successful lessee of Haymarket Theatre in 1747, where, by his inimitable powers of mimicry and clever comedies, he firmly established himself in popular ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... consider the Sand Hills a happy hunting ground. There the dead, who are themselves shadows, live in shadow lodges, hunt shadow buffalo, go to war against shadow enemies, and in every way lead an existence which is but a mimicry of this life. In this respect the Blackfeet are almost alone. I know of scarcely any other American tribe, certainly none east of the Rocky Mountains, who are wholly without a belief in a happy future state. The Blackfeet do not especially say ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... out of Mildred Thurston. Letters to Miss Somers elicited no real response—only a line to say that she wasn't strong enough to write. None of her other female friends could get any encouragement to visit her. It was perhaps due to Miss Thurston's mimicry of Melora Meigs—she made quite a "stunt" of it—that none of them pushed the matter beyond the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... up the jack with which he had pulled off his wet boots, and waited for a good chance to launch it at Joe's head. But Joe kept behind his grandmother, and proceeded with his mimicry. ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... other calamities may cease with the war; but I dismally dread the multiplication of these mortals under the ease and luxuriousness of a settled peace, half the blessing of which may be destroyed by them. Their mistake lies certainly here, in a wretched belief, that their mimicry passes for real business, or true wit. Dear sir, convince them, that it never was, is, or ever will be, either of them; nor ever did, does, or to all futurity ever can, look like either of them; but that ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... He walked, spoke, laughed exactly like him; it was the same language as that of the Jesuits correct but rather harsh French. I thought that excess of imitation perfectly scandalous, and I could not help telling De la Haye that he ought to change his pupil's deportment, because such servile mimicry would only expose him to bitter raillery. As I was giving him my opinion on that subject, Bavois made his appearance, and when he had spent an hour in the company of the young man he was entirely of the same mind. Calvi died two or three years later. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... for it was she, wrapped in a horseman's cloak, whistled in playful mimicry the second part of the tune, which had been on Frank's lips as they came up ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... 2. Mimicry, the favorite amusement of little minds, has been ever the contempt of great ones. Never give way to it yourself, nor ever encourage it in others; it is the most illiberal of all buffoonery; it is ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... I," she had a trick of mimicry and dropped easily into the southern English accent, "'Miss Millit, are you aware that the gentleman who lives opposite to me has been, to my knowledge, consistently drunk for two months—ever since he came to live at Kroomans?' ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... The mimicry is perfect. The professor, after a faint struggle with his dignity, joins in her naughty mirth, and ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... you ever noticed the effect on human beings of a life in common? By the ineffaceable instinct of simian mimicry they all tend to copy each other. Each one, without knowing it, acquires the gestures, the tone of voice, the manner, the attitudes, the very countenance of others. In six years Dinah had sunk to the pitch of the society she lived in. As she acquired Monsieur de Clagny's ideas ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... joyous and somewhat feverish spirit that animated her, related her travels, parodying in a good-natured manner her own enthusiasm and her husband's relative indifference in presence of the masterpieces of antique art. She illustrated these recollections with scenes of mimicry in which she displayed the skill of a fairy, the imagination of an artist, and sometimes the broad humor of a low comedian. In a turn of the hand, with a flower, a bit of silk, a sheet of paper, she composed a Neapolitan, Roman, or Sicilian head-dress. ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... much delights in mimicry, that it is all one to him whether he exposes by it vice and folly, luxury and avarice; or, on the contrary, virtue and ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... "Mimicry isn't a fair word," he said. "The mimic doesn't interpret. He's a mere thief of expression. You can always see him behind his stolen mask. The actress takes a different rank. This ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan |
