"Imitator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we find it introduced in a note, as supplementary to the information regarding Blair given in his Essay on English Poetry by his editor, Mr. Cunningham. It is demonstrable, however, that the Scotchman could not have been the imitator. As shown by a letter in the Doddridge collection, which bears date more than a twelvemonth previous to that of the publication of even the first book of the Night Thoughts, Blair, after stating that his poem, then in the hands of Isaac Watts, had been offered without success to two London publishers, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... imitator of specific foreign models. His first play, Realidad, was a pure expression of his own genius. But it placed him at once in the modern school which aims to discard the factitious devices of the "well-made" play, and to present upon the stage a picture of life ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... parts than through the critical work in which he defended the grammarian Menahem against the attacks of Dunash.[138] His liturgical compositions and the short poems with which he sometimes prefaced his Responsa show that he was a clever poet, an imitator of the Spaniards. Abraham Ibn Ezra while on his rovings in France was one of ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... in me to full maturity. This friend was Theodor Apel. I had known him a long while, and had always felt particularly flattered by the fact that I had won his hearty affection; for, as the son of the gifted master of metre and imitator of Greek forms of poetry, August Apel, I felt that admiring deference for him which I had never yet been able to bestow upon the descendant of a famous man. Being well-to-do and of a good family, his friendship gave me such opportunities ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... published, but for the interference of a well-known work, which treated of similar scenes and subjects. That work appeared just as the "Quadroon" was about to be put to press; and the author of the the latter, not willing to risk the chances of being considered an imitator had determined on keeping the ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... we said at the beginning, are the three differences which distinguish artistic imitation,—the medium, the objects, and the manner. So that from one point of view, Sophocles is an imitator of the same kind as Homer—for both imitate higher types of character; from another point of view, of the same kind as Aristophanes—for both imitate persons acting and doing. Hence, some say, the name of 'drama' is given to such poems, as representing ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... of judgment applies of necessity to all great work in art. It does not apply to merely good work, for that is nearly always imitative, and therefore not much provocative of imitation. It happens sometimes that an imitator, to the undiscerning reader, may even seem better than the man he mimics, because he has a modern touch. But remember, in his time the master also was ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... concentrated all the excellences of the rhetorical schools of the day. Seneca became the model for literary aspirants to copy. But he was a dangerous model. His lack of connexion and rhythm became exaggerated by his followers, and the slightest lack of dexterity in the imitator led to a flashy tawdriness such as Seneca himself had as a rule avoided. He was too facile and careless a composer to yield a canon for style. The reaction came soon. Involved, whether justly or not, in the Pisonian conspiracy of 65 A.D., he was forced to commit suicide. He died as ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... had been accountable for the roar at the other end of the house? An imitator? A double? Gerald suspected a masked-ball device intended to intrigue. He gave it no more thought, but proceeded, started on that line by the episode, to reflect on the singularity, yes, the crassness, of Mrs. Hawthorne's determination ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... Ferrari, whereas it is only in two or three out of some five-and-forty that any statues are believed to be by Gaudenzio. He thinks the famous sculptor Tabachetti—for famous he is in North Italy, where he is known—was a painter, and speaks of him as "a local imitator" of Gaudenzio, who "decorated" other chapels, and "whose works only show how rapidly Gaudenzio's influence declined and his school deteriorated." As a matter of fact, Tabachetti was a Fleming and his name was Tabaquet; but this is a detail. Sir Henry ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... facts, it met with much credence, particularly abroad. There was, however, no foundation for the opinion: Let us render to Caesar that which is Caesar's due. Bonaparte was a creator in the art of war, and no imitator. That no man was superior to him in that art is incontestable. At the commencement of the glorious campaign in Italy the Directory certainly sent out instructions to him; but he always followed his own plans, and continually, wrote back that all would be lost if movements conceived ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... with your argument, and establish it beyound cavil that he is a mere imitator with an appearance of genius. The concise grand style of the eighteenth century is lacking; you show that the author substitutes events for sentiments. Action and stir is not life; he gives ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... says to a raven "Croak," and to a hen raven, "Droop thy tail and turn it this way as a lucky sign," is an imitator of the ways of the Amorites (Lev. ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... is threatened with ruin by her alliance with the King of Prussia, Byzantium is restored by a new Caraculla. William II is, therefore, twice entitled to wear the sphere with the Imperial crown atop, as the emblem of his sovereign power and as the imitator of the Roman Emperor. And notwithstanding the Anti-Christ protection which he extends to the infidel, he can also affix the Cross to his sphere. Is he not about to take possession, in theatrical fashion, ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... Moliere; author of "Satires" and "Epistles," "L'Art Poetique," "Le Lutrin," &c., in which he attached and employed his wit against the bad taste of his time; did much to reform French poetry, as Pascal did to reform the prose, and was for long the law-giver of Parnassus; was an imitator of Pope, but ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... which incessant repetition only can produce, cannot be imitated except at a cost utterly beyond their market value. Like the designs on the Etruscan vases, their main excellence is, that, being so good, they should be done so facilely. An imitator loses the rapidity and spirit of execution. The mass of imitations are of things only tolerably good, and of things whose characteristics are in the execution merely, as in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... among the ancients themselves—both his own contemporaries, and the men of succeeding ages. Some condemned his introductions, as having nothing to do with the works themselves; found fault with the minute details of the speeches introduced in the narrative; and called him a senseless imitator, in words and expressions, of the earlier Roman historians, especially of Cato. Others praised him for his vivid delineations of character, the precision and vigour of his diction, and for the dignity which he had given to his style by the use of ancient ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... is written in an easy, nonchalant manner, which helps to mitigate its severity. Thoreau could not have liked very well being called an imitator of Emerson; but the wit of it is inimitable. "T. never purloins the apples from Emerson's trees; it is only the windfalls that he carries off and passes for his own fruit." Emerson remarked on this, that Thoreau ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... be such a slavish imitator of others, that it can be said of you, as it is of many—"Oh! I know who taught him Elocution. Every gesture and every movement is in accordance with some specific rule, and a slavish mannerism that never breaks into the slightest originality, ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... might, too probably, bring down a curse upon them? And, after all, who knows but that my own sinful compliances with a man, who might think himself entitled to my obedience, might taint my own morals, and make me, instead of a reformer, an imitator of him?—For who can touch pitch, and ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... nor can anything give us a more melancholy view of the debasing effects of this miserable theory, than that it has given ordinary men a right to wonder at the folly and presumption of a man gifted like Mr. Wordsworth, and made him appear, in his second avowed publication, like a bad imitator of the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... conformity with his rather primitive artistic code, believed that he also was telling the truth. It is in Daudet's paper explaining how he came to write "Fromont and Risler" that he discusses the accusation that he was an imitator of Dickens,—an accusation which seems absurd enough now that the careers of both writers are closed, and that we can compare their complete works. Daudet records that the charge was brought against him very early, long ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... which he attempted, his own meanness shone most conspicuous. His airs, words, and actions, were the airs, words, and actions of born slaveholders, and, being assumed, were awkward enough. He was not even a good imitator. He possessed all the disposition to deceive, but wanted the power. Having no resources within himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he was forever the victim of inconsistency; and of consequence he was an object of contempt, and was held as such even ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... been regarded as a bookseller's mistake or deception without warrant. Locrine, "newly set forth, overseen, and corrected by W. S., 1595," is a play of about the date of Titus Andronicus, and is probably by Greene, Peele, or some imitator of Marlowe and Kyd. Sir John Oldcastle appeared in 1600 in two quartos, one of which ascribed it to William Shakespeare, but it was clearly composed for the Admiral's men as a rival to the Falstaff plays which the Chamberlain's ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... pastoral plays can be ascribed to Italy in the last third of the sixteenth century. The most successful imitator of Tasso was Giovanni Battista Guarini (born 1537) in The True Shepherd (II Pastor Fido). One quotation will shew how he outvied Aminta. In Act I, Scene 1, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... for the Celtic illuminator was imaginative rather than realistic, and aimed altogether at achieving beauty by means of color and design. The Book of Kells is the Mecca of the illuminative artist, but it is the despair of the copyist. The patience and skill of the olden scribe have baffled the imitator; for, on an examination with a magnifying glass, it has been found that, in a space of a quarter of an inch, there are no fewer than a hundred and fifty-eight interlacements of a ribbon pattern of white lines ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... minstrel performances and concert hall business. This was situated under Goodacre's butcher shop. The principal actor and negro delineator was "Tom Lafont," whose equal I have not seen since as an imitator of negro comicalities and as a bird whistler. He will be well remembered by old-timers. The Theatre Royal was situated on Government Street, one door from the corner of Bastion, as will be seen in the picture. This corner was first occupied by Doctor Davie, sr., then by a Doctor Dickson, ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... same ladies [G. 4. 336] in attendance on Cyrene; and has not only reduced the list, but added some slight touches illustrating their occupations and private history: a liberty permissible to an imitator, but ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... been published with notes, commentaries, or critical collations of the text; and, accordingly, Addison looked upon all of them, except those few who professed themselves followers in the retinue and equipage of the ancients, as creatures of a lower race. Boileau, as a mere imitator and propagator of Horace, he read, and probably little else amongst the French classics. Hence it arose that he took upon himself to speak sneeringly of Tasso. To this, which was a bold act for his timid mind, he was ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... rather whether this was not his reason for calling on me, that, when he had performed an action very like those which I myself had done, he called me above all men to witness that he had been an imitator of my exploits. But you, O stupidest of all men, do not you perceive, that if it is a crime to have wished that Caesar should be slain—which you accuse me of having wished—it is a crime also to have rejoiced at his death? For what is the difference between a man who has advised ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... artist, even at his lowest level, is more than an imitator of imitations.[6] Abridgment, selection, combination, are the necessary instruments of his craft; and by their aid he introduces harmony and order into the confused multiplicity of sensuous images. He substitutes for the ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... classical taste, and an historian of a classical era, could not preserve himself from colloquial inelegances; the greatest characters are levelled by the poverty of his style. Warburton, and his imitator Hurd, and other living critics of that school, are loaded with familiar idioms, which at present would debase even the style ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... mannerisms in order to convey an impression of importance. Even a brief visit to the country, or a single passage in a Yankee ship was sufficient to turn a hitherto humble fellow into an insufferable imitator. It was obvious the skipper had been a good deal on the Spanish Main, as he spoke their language with a fluency that left no doubt as to what he had been doing for many years. He was discovered at a time when the owner was in ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... little more what it was, for even a stupid book served as well as another to set their own fountains flowing. That afternoon Joan was reading from one partly written, partly compiled, in the beginning of the century, somewhat before its time in England. It might have been the work of an imitator at once of de la Motte Fouque, and the old British romancers. And this was ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... virtues, courage is the predominant excellence; what is most celebrated by poets, recommended by parents and instructors, and admired by the public in general. The ethics of Homer are, in this particular, very different from those of Fenelon, his elegant imitator; and such as were well suited to an age, when one hero, as remarked by Thucydides [Lib.i.], could ask another, without offence, whether he were a robber or not. Such also very lately was the system of ethics which prevailed in many barbarous parts of Ireland; if we may ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... York and London. In its prints of native scenery, and portraits of deceased Canadians of merit, the News is a valuable and interesting addition to journalism in this country, and will be found most useful to the future generations who will people the Dominion. Nor does Canada now lack an imitator of Punch, in the humorous line. It is noteworthy that whilst America has produced humorists like 'Sam Slick,' Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and others, no American rival to Punch has yet appeared in Boston or New York. The attempts that have heretofore been made have been ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... for this satire, appeared 'Verses to the Imitator of Horace;' said to have been the joint production of Lord Hervey and Lady Mary. This was followed by a piece entitled 'Letter from a Nobleman at Hampton Court to a Doctor of Divinity.' To this composition Lord Hervey, its sole author, added these lines, by way, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... operas in unremitting flow for the Italian theatres; but they were excellent drill for the future author of "Robert le Diable" and "Les Huguenots." On returning to Germany Meyerbeer was very sarcastically criticised on the one side as a fugitive from the ranks of German music, on the other as an imitator ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... English, than Murray's "English Grammar," or Lennie's "Principles of English Grammar;" which last work, in fact, the learned gentleman preferred, though he pretends to have mended the code of Murray. But, certainly, Lennie never supposed himself a copyist of Murray; nor was he to much extent an imitator of him, either in ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... being duly informed of the grievance. Louis XIV. however, from a spirit of pride and insolence, refused to part with anything that looked like a prerogative of his crown. He said the king of France was not the imitator, but a pattern and example for other princes. He rejected with disdain the mild representations of the pope; he sent the marquis de Lavarden as his ambassador to Rome, with a formidable train, to insult Innocent even in his own city. That nobleman swaggered through the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... to his task of noting down the conversations of Johnson enables us to glean from his journal some scanty notices of Goldsmith. It was now Holy Week, a time during which Johnson was particularly solemn in his manner and strict in his devotions. Boswell, who was the imitator of the great moralist in everything, assumed, of course, an extra devoutness on the present occasion. "He had an odd mock solemnity of tone and manner," said Miss Burney (afterward Madame D'Arblay), "which he had acquired from constantly thinking, and imitating Dr. Johnson." It would seem, that ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... the Post-office. In spite of all this administrative work his books show that he was a wide, general reader, apart from his special historical studies. He wrote in an agreeable literary style, with Macaulay undoubtedly as his model, although he was by no means a slavish imitator. His "History of Twenty-five Years" seems to me to be written with a freer hand than the earlier history. He is here animated by the spirit rather than the letter of Macaulay. I no longer noticed certain tricks of expression which one catches so easily in a study ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... the progressive spirit of the people. Mr. Herbert Spencer attributes two motives to imitation, either reverential or competitive.[9] It is with the latter that we are concerned. This, coming as it does from a desire of an imitator to assert his equality with the one imitated, implies the recognition of superiority of the latter, and the acknowledgment of inferiority of the former. Conservatism, in the sense we have been using the term, defies any recognition and acknowledgment of this sort; ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... planted the German commercial flag everywhere, and which provided a large part of the bone and sinew of the Teutonic world-wide exploitation campaign, was based upon it. With finance as with merchandising, the German is a prize imitator. ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... most part trailing their legs in it; but either on the water or under it, every movement is characterized by the most consummate dexterity, and facile agility. The most expert waterman that sculls his skiff on the Thames or Isis, is but an humble and unskillful imitator of the dabchick. In moving straightforward (under water?), the wings are used to aid its progress, as if in the air, and in turning it has an easy gliding motion, feet and wings being used, as occasion requires, sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other. It walks but indifferently, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... and never had any, except the West-Point text-books. No doubt Grant might have profited from some additional study, but none at all was far better than so much as to have dwarfed his mind into that of an imitator of ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... convinced of this, that I believe were I to publish the Canongate Chronicles without my name (nom de guerre, I mean) the event would be a corollary to the fable of the peasant who made the real pig squeak against the imitator, while the sapient audience hissed the poor grunter as if inferior to the biped in his own language. The peasant could, indeed, confute the long-eared multitude by showing piggy; but were I to fail as a knight with ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... handsomly and learnedly banter'd and ridicul'd, as the Quakers have been in any Book against them. And when they were attack'd by one Samuel Young, a whimsical Presbyterian-Buffoon-Divine, who call'd himself Trepidantium Malleus, and set up for an Imitator of Mr. Alsop, in several Pamphlets full of Stories, Repartees, and Ironies; in which Young, perhaps, thought himself as secure from a Return of the like kind, as a Ruffian or Thief may when he assaults Men: His Attacks were repell'd in a Book ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... hardihood. It is the only brave picture of life in the broad from an American pen. Scott, in inventing the romantic treatment of history in fiction, was the leader of the historical novel; but Cooper, except in so far as he employed the form, was not in a true sense an imitator of Scott; he did not create, nor think, nor feel, in Scott's way, and he came far short of the deep human power of Scott's genius. He was not great in character; but he was great in adventure, manly spirit and the atmosphere of the natural world, an Odysseyan writer, who ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... families, the Bellini and the Vivarini. Jacopo Bellini and his two sons, Gentile and Giovanni, were the real founders of the Venetian school, and the work of Giovanni became an ideal standard, which his contemporaries essayed to follow. Luigi Vivarini was so successful as his imitator that his paintings are often incorrectly assigned ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... he said to the steward, who, having so far completed his morning work, and consumed his morning meal, was smoking his pipe, seated on the rail beside Tips. Tips was an admirer of the Irishman, and, in consequence, an imitator as far as ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... totally neglected by the followers of Cowley. I mention Davenant here, and separate from the other poets, who were distinguished about the time of the Restoration, because I think that Dryden, to whom we are about to return, was, at that period, an admirer and imitator of "Gondibert," as we are certain that he was a personal and ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... upon a performance which is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... heathen antiquity. He made a separate book of shining commonplaces and remarkable passages extracted from the works of Cicero, of whom he was a great admirer, though he seems to have been not an happy or diligent imitator in his style. From a view of these pieces we may form an idea of what stock in the science the English at that time possessed, and what advances they had made. That work of Beda which is the best known and most esteemed is the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... exact reproduction are such that the disciple is on the same level as the creator, and so it is with their fruits. These are useful to the imitator, but are not of such high excellence as those which cannot be transmitted as an inheritance like other substances. Among these painting is the first. Painting cannot be taught to him on whom nature has not conferred ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... laid our account at the best with meeting a fine forward boy who would speak, perhaps not very well either, by rote; and taking the most prominent favourite actor of his day, as a model, be a mere childish imitator. We considered that when young people do any thing with an excellence disproportioned to their years, they are viewed through a magnifying medium; and that being once seen to approach to the perfection of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... Proutize Nature, by breaking smooth buildings into rough ones, but only drawing what you see, with Prout's simple method and firm lines. Don't copy his colored works. They are good, but not at all equal to his chalk and pencil drawings; and you will become a mere imitator, and a very feeble imitator, if you use color at all in Prout's method. I have not space to explain why this is so, it would take a long piece of reasoning; trust ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... Joan of Arc, if she were to be compared to a confessed impostor; but Joan of Arc might have been the reality which the Nun attempted to counterfeit; and the history of the true heroine might have suggested easily to the imitator the outline of her part. A revolution had been effected in Europe by a somnambulist peasant girl; another peasant girl, a somnambulist also, might have seen in the achievement which had been already accomplished, ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... cat. But it is necessary to be very fond of cats in order to perceive their qualities. The dog is 'up in every one's face,' so to speak; always in evidence; always on deck. But the cat is a shy, reserved, exclusive creature. The dog is the humble friend, follower, imitator, and slave of man. He will lick the foot that kicks him. The cat, instead, will scratch. The dog begs for notice. The cat must be loved much and courted assiduously before she will blossom out ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... elevation or vigour; which we do not regret, because we can hardly conceive but that they would be less pleasing if they were in any respect different from what they are. Each possesses a perfect facility and command over his own peculiar manner, which has secured him from having any successful imitator. Yet as they were both employed in representing the fortuitous and transient follies, which the face of society had put on in their own day, rather than in portraying the broader and more permanent distinctions of character and manners, it may be questioned whether they can be much ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... Don Manuel Armijo, Governor of New Mexico; at least that of his first beginnings. With such and many similar deeds since, is it likely he would look with any other than a lenient eye on the doings of Gil Urago, his imitator? No, senor, not even if you could prove the present commandant of Albuquerque, in full, open court, to have been the individual who robbed yourself and murdered ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... homage to every change of bill, anxious to chronicle success, and looking with glad eyes at the possible advent of a new impetus to the jaded theatrical machine. They had worked themselves into the most appreciative state of mind. Lo, and behold! After a few weeks, M. Antoine's American imitator evaporated. Lack of funds! ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... have owed to Heine, in form or substance, he was no servile imitator. In fact, with the exception of the thirtieth, no one of his Rimas seems to be inspired directly by Heine's Intermezzo. The distinguishing note in Heine's verse is sarcasm, while that of Becquer's is pathos. ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... flesh, to be meat for the worms to feed on. Wherefore also thou hast denied the God of all, and called them gods that are not, the inventors of all wickedness, in order that, by wantonness and wickedness after their example, thou mayest gain the title of imitator of the gods. For, as your gods have done, why should not also the men that follow them do? Great then is the error that thou hast erred, O king. Thou fearest that we should persuade certain of the people to join with us, and revolt from thy hand, and place themselves in that ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... providence, but complain of it. And it were a good office to reconcile mankind to the gods, who are undoubtedly best to the best. It is against nature that good should hurt good. A good man is not only the friend of God, but the very image, the disciple, and the imitator of Him, and a true child of his heavenly Father. He is true to himself, and acts with ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... possibly trace the Greek original in a few references to conversations of animals—although no plays are now called after them—and the names, places, and money he introduces are generally Greek. Still, we cannot regard him as a mere servile imitator—much of his own genius is doubtless preserved in the plays. In some, we can clearly recognise his hand, as where he alludes to Roman customs, or indulges in puns. For instance, where a man speaks of the blessing ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... innovation by appointing special judges to administer a more regular justice than that which was administered in the local courts of the earls and bishops, or even in the national assembly. In this respect he was the imitator, probably the unconscious imitator, of Charlemagne, and the precursor of Henry II., the institutor of our Justices in Eyre. The powers and functions of the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, lie at first enfolded in the same germ, and are alike ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... century, and they strove for a continuation of the tradition of the earlier Sevillan group. The more important writers of the later Sevillan school were Arjona, Blanco, Lista and Reinoso. Manuel Maria de ARJONA (1771-1820), a priest well read in the Greek and Latin classics, was an imitator of Horace. Jose Maria BLANCO (1775-1841), known in the history of English literature as Blanco White, spent much time in England and wrote in English as well as in Castilian. Ordained a Catholic priest he later became an Unitarian. The best-known and most influential writer of the group was ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... is only in cases of abnormally increased sensibility—for instance, in some of the stages of hypnotism and thought transmission—that the motor counterpart of a mental state can be imitated with such faithfulness and completeness that the imitator is thereby enabled to partake of all the intellectual elements of the state existing in another. The hedonic qualities, on the other hand, which are physiologically conditioned by much simpler motor counterparts, may of course be transmitted with far greater perfection: ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... something diverting in it, I reached your two books off the shelf, and set into a steady reading of them, till I had nearly finished both before I went to bed,—the two of your last edition, of course, I mean, And in the morning I awoke determined to take down the "Excursion." I wish the scoundrel imitator could know this. But why waste a wish on him? I do not believe that paddling about with a stick in a pond, and fishing up a dead author, whom his intolerable wrongs had driven to that deed of desperation, would turn the heart of ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... Marlowe, aut diabolus; it is inconceivable that any imitator but one should have had the power so to catch the very trick of his hand, the very note of his voice, and incredible that the one who might would have set himself to do so: for if this be not indeed the voice and this the hand of Marlowe, then what we find in these verses is not the ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and encouragement, which he wrote from his dungeon. He sent a message to the woman who had betrayed him, assuring her of his forgiveness, and exhorting her to repentance. His calmness, wisdom, and gentleness excited the admiration of all. When; therefore, this humble imitator of Christ was led through the streets of Antwerp to the stake, the popular emotion was at once visible. To the multitude who thronged about the executioners with threatening aspect, he addressed an urgent remonstrance that they would not ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... indulged in the warmest enthusiasm, and venture to play on the borders of the wildest extravagance. The habitual dignity, which long converse with the greatest minds has imparted to him, will display itself in all his attempts, and he will stand among his instructors, not as an imitator, but a rival. ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... times that now ensued, the continuity of classicism is seen in two forms of literature—namely, philological criticism and poetry. The acknowledged model of Latin poetry was Virgil, and his greatest imitator was Claudian, who had made himself a Latin scholar by study, much as the moderns do. Claudian is commonly called the last of the heathen poets. He has also been called the transitional link between ancient and modern, between heathen and Christian poetry.[2] One characteristic ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... garden by the lake: we pass through a winter-parlour, a morning-room, and a north-parlour protected from the heat. Every detail seems to be complete; and yet we hear nothing of a library. The explanation seems to be that the Bishop was a close imitator of Pliny. The villa in Auvergne is a copy of the winter-refuge at Laurentum, where Pliny only kept 'a few cases contrived in the wall for the books that cannot be read too often.' But when the Bishop writes about his friends' houses we find many allusions ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... middle state of improvement finds himself again approaching nearer to the habits, the wishes, and the opinions of our common mother. As the real gentleman is more simple in manners than the distant imitator of his deportment; as fashions and habits are always more exaggerated in provincial towns than in polished capitals; or as the profound philosopher has less pretensions than the tyro, so does our common genus, as it draws nearer to the consummation of its destiny and its highest attainments, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... 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) 544; celluloid. imitator, echo, cuckoo|, parrot, ape, monkey, mocking bird, mime; copyist, copycat; plagiarist, pirate. V. imitate, copy, mirror, reflect, reproduce, repeat; do like, echo, reecho, catch; transcribe; match, parallel. mock, take off, mimic, ape, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... such short glimpses of the water-world as our present appliances afford us are full enough of pleasure; and we will not envy Glaucus: we will not even be over-anxious for the success of his only modern imitator, the French naturalist who is reported to have fitted himself with a waterproof dress and breathing apparatus, in order to walk the bottom of the Mediterranean, and see for himself how the world goes on at the fifty-fathom line: we ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... the pair retire). Well, thank goodness, we've seen the last of that beastly black-board. I didn't come here to add up sums. What is it next? Oh, a "Farmyard Imitator." I expect that will be rather rot, Father, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 8, 1893 • Various
... result of the spiritual influence of A. E. is seen in the poetry of Susan Mitchell. She is not an imitator of his manner, but she reflects the mystical faith. Her little volume, The Living Chalice, is full of the beauty that rises from suffering. It is not the spirit of acquiescence or of resignation, but rather dauntless triumphant affirmation. ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... for the youthful aspirants were the best poets of antiquity and such modern classicists as Melndez, Cienfuegos, Jovellanos, and Quintana. Two of Espronceda's academic exercises have been preserved. They are as insipid and jejune as Goethe's productions of the Leipzig period. As an imitator of Horace he was not a success. What he gained from the Academy ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... Hermione,—a conception far, far above the reach of such a mind as Greene's. In the matter of the painted statue, Shakespeare, so far as is known, was altogether without a model, as he is without an imitator; the boldness of the plan being indeed such as nothing but entire success could justify, and wherein it is hardly possible to conceive of anybody but Shakespeare's having succeeded. And yet here it is that we are to look for the idea and formal cause of Hermione's character, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... morality peculiar to artists or to art, and that this morality might well be the very reverse of the common morality. Yes, my friend, I am much afraid that man marches straight to misery by the very path that leads the imitator of nature to the sublime. To plunge into extremes—that is the rule for poets. To keep in all things the just mean—there is the rule for happiness. One must not make poetry in real life. The heroes, the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... were small, her frail body and limbs straight and supple as those of a young dancer. While she excelled at lively games in the great playground under the trees, her complexion was extremely delicate, even to paleness. Being naturally a clever imitator and always desirous of the good opinion of Sister Agnes, Fouchette had acquired graceful and lady-like manners that would have been creditable to any fashionable pension of Paris. Continuous happiness had left ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... prolixity, slovenly repetition of the same turn, culpable instances of carelessness frequently occur: the first word, Latin or Greek, is always the best. The metres are similarly treated, particularly the very predominant hexameter: if we transpose the words—his clever imitator says—no man would observe that he had anything else before him than simple prose; in point of effect they can only be compared to our doggerel verses.(24) The poems of Terence and those of Lucilius stand on the same level of culture, and have the same relation to each other as a carefully prepared ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... make an English poet. But it is equally evident that they have mastered their material, and not allowed their material to master them. Watson, it is true, has attained to a much less firm and spontaneous style than Davidson, but it would be false to say of him that he is, in point of diction, the imitator of any poet in especial, or that he moulds his style upon Tennyson more than on Milton, or upon Milton more than on Wordsworth. And what is true of their form is true of their matter. They think ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... revival of the prophetic past had nothing scholastic or antiquarian about it. John was a disciple, not an imitator, of the great men of Israel; his message was not learned from Isaiah or any other, though he was educated by studying them. What he declared, he declared as truth immediately seen by his own soul, the essence of his power being a revival, not in letter ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... of a certain Ithomiine (Methona) and its Pierine mimic (Dismorphia orise) depends on a diminution in the size of the scales; in the Danaine genus Ituna it is due to the fewness of the scales, and in a third imitator, a moth (Castnia linus var. heliconoides) the glass-like appearance of the wing is due neither to diminution nor to absence of scales, but to their absolute colourlessness and transparency, and to the fact that ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... mature youth; and we find more traces of it in the poetry of Kirke White than in that of almost any other poet; simply because he wrote at the age in which it is natural to indulge in it, and because, being less an imitator, and more original, than most juvenile poets, he gave it as portion of the internal experience from which he drew. But it is a dream not restricted to young poets: the ignorant, half-grown lad, who learns, for the first time, "about the great ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... observing us at this time it would have seemed that I was but a hanger-on, and a feeble imitator of Marshall. I took him to my tailor's, and he advised me on the cut of my coats; he showed me how to arrange my rooms, and I strove to copy his manner of speech and his general bearing; and yet I knew very well indeed that mine was a rarer and more original nature. I was willing ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... abridge our levies on Pope's imitator. In Dress the Man of Taste's aim seems to have been to emulate his own footman, and at this point comes in the already quoted reference to velvet "inexpressibles"—(a word which, the reader may be interested to learn, is as old as 1793). His "pleasures," ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... kept the arts and cast aside the religion. This rationalistic art is the art commonly called Renaissance, marked by a return to pagan systems, not to adopt them and hallow them for Christianity, but to rank itself under them as an imitator and pupil. In Painting it is headed by Giulio Romano and Nicolo Poussin; in Architecture by Sansovino ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... ages which followed it, developing itself in correspondence with their development. For Lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill became his genius, had affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he created anew all that he copied; and none among the flock of mock-birds, though their notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, or Claudian, have sought even to fulfil a single condition of epic truth. Milton was the third epic ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... inclines towards Richardson, though I dare say I am one in a hundred in thinking so. First of all, beyond anything I may have already urged, he had the supreme credit of having been the first. Surely the originator should have a higher place than the imitator, even if in imitating he should also improve and amplify. It is Richardson and not Fielding who is the father of the English novel, the man who first saw that without romantic gallantry, and without bizarre imaginings, enthralling stories may be made from ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... meaning should be attached to a bird's notes—some of which are "the least disagreeable of noises"—will probably never be discovered. They do seem to express almost every feeling of which the human heart is capable. We wonder if the Mocking Bird understands what all these notes mean. He is so fine an imitator that it is hard to believe he is not doing more than mimicking the notes of other birds, but rather that he really does mock them with a sort of defiant sarcasm. He banters them less, perhaps, than the Cat Bird, but one would naturally ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... not so difficult to discover. The faculties, which when a man finds in himself, he resolves to be a painter, are, I suppose, intenseness of observation and facility of imitation. The man is created an observer and an imitator; and his function is to convey knowledge to his fellow-men, of such things as cannot be taught otherwise than ocularly. For a long time this function remained a religious one: it was to impress upon the popular ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the memory of so hateful a writer, that makes us so poor a recompense for the loss of Menander, who cannot be recalled. But, without showing any mercy to the indecent or malicious sallies of Aristophanes, any more than to Plautus, his imitator, or, at least, the inheritor of his genius, may it not be allowed us to do, with respect to him, what, if I mistake not, Lucretius[27] did to Ennius, from whose muddy verses he gathered jewels, "Enni de ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... "The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity."—EMERSON, Address to the Senior Class ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and with a brilliancy of colour which remains unfaded after fifty years. By far the most costly of his pigments was the intense crimson which is manufactured out of the very spirit and, essence of cochineal. I had lately become a fervent imitator of his works of art, and I was allowed to use all of his colours, except one; I was strictly forbidden to let a hair of my paint- brush touch the little broken mass of carmine which was all that he possessed. We believed, but ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... the earliest times down to the capture of Agrigentum (seven books), and the remaining four books dealt with the life of Dionysius the elder. He afterwards added a supplement in two books, giving an account of the younger Dionysius, which he did not, however, complete. He is described as an imitator, though at a great distance, of Thucydides, and hence was known as "the little Thucydides." As an historian he is deficient in conscientiousness and candour; he appears as a partisan of Dionysius, and seeks to throw a veil over his discreditable actions. ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... to be as abusive as Horace upon the occasion—but if there is no catachresis in the wish, and no sin in it, I wish from my soul, that every imitator in Great Britain, France, and Ireland, had the farcy for his pains; and that there was a good farcical house, large enough to hold—aye—and sublimate them, shag rag and bob-tail, male and female, all together: and this ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... falsehood, that he might 'ride in gilt coaches, escorted by the flunkeyisms, and most sweet voices.' Nor to appreciate the secret of our character-test, can the assertion of any historian, from Clarendon down to Carlyle's last imitator, be credited, that 'a universal rising of Royalists combined with Anabaptists' broke out in March 1655. On the contrary, it must be accepted as a preliminary condition in this investigation that England was, at that time, in a state of immovable tranquillity, ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... exercises itself in the imitation of the work of nature; it imitates its order, it reconstitutes on the small scale adapted to our minds, the great external order of events. Now, this work of imitation is only really possible if the imitator has some means at his disposal analogous to those ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... been written to-day or a century ago, and it will be as fresh a century hence. No one of the arts has had fewer great masters. A new composer, therefore, has a right to claim our attention. If, perchance, we discover that he has the gift of genius, and is not merely a clever imitator, we cannot ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... Elizabeth, and Lord Bacon (Milton stands alone in the age which he illumined.); the colder spirits of the interval that succeeded;—all resemble each other, and differ from every other in their several classes. In this view of things, Ford can no more be called the imitator of Shakespeare than Shakespeare the imitator of Ford. There were perhaps few other points of resemblance between these two men than that which the universal and inevitable influence of their age produced. And this is an influence which neither the meanest scribbler nor the sublimest ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... I mean by being natural. When I say that an actor is natural, I mean that he appears to act in accordance with his ideal, in accordance with his nature, and that he is not an imitator or a copyist—that he is not made up of shreds and patches taken from others, but that all he does flows from interior fountains and is consistent with his own nature, all having in a marked degree the highest characteristics ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... speak, was wont for many years to entertain curious audiences by reproducing those swelling tones in which he rolled out his defense of popular sovereignty, and it is not improbable that Douglas owes to the marvelous imitator of sounds a considerable part of such fame as he has among uneducated men in our time. Among historical students, however seriously his deserts are questioned, there is no question of the ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... turns up from time to time in which is inscribed, in fair large Italian lettering, the name, Ben Jonson. With respect to Jonson's use of his material, Dryden said memorably of him: "[He] was not only a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all the others; you track him everywhere in their snow. ... But he has done his robberies so openly that one sees he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch, and what would be ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... at the words, "Quia Jehovah sustentat me." The Te Deum was until recently known only by Dr. Boyce's perversion. Dr. Boyce is reputed to have been an estimable moral character, and it is to be hoped he was, for that is the best we can say of him. He was a dunderheaded worshipper and imitator of Handel. Thinking that Purcell had tried to write in the Handelian bow-wow, and for want of learning had not succeeded; thinking also that he, Dr. Boyce, being a musical doctor, had that learning, he took ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... for some time tried poetry, but without any distinct success except occasionally in Southern Passages and Pictures (1839). But in fiction, which he began in 1833 with Martin Faber, he was more successful, though rather an imitator of Cooper. The Yemassee (1835) is generally considered his best novel. He was less happy in his attempts at historical romance, such as Count Julian and The Damsel of Darien. During the war, in which he was naturally a strong partisan of the ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin |
