"Imitative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he was totally deficient in the imitative faculty; and the Professor, that he was equally so in the rhythmic, and instanced several consoling false quantities in the few effusions submitted to him. Added to this, Sir Austin told Lady Blandish that Richard had, at his best, done what no poet had ever been known to be capable of doing: he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... movements of large limbs, or finer accessory motions, is amazing. Nearly every external stimulus is answered by a motor response. Dresslar[5] observed a thirteen months' old baby for four hours, and found, to follow Preyer's classification, impulsive or spontaneous, reflex, instinctive, imitative, inhibitive, expressive, and even deliberative movements, with marked satisfaction in rhythm, attempts to do almost anything which appealed to him, and almost inexhaustible efferent resources. A friend has tried ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... selected by Mr. Parsons was not of these half dozen; but the plain, hard-headed builder who had erected it for the original owner was shrewd and imitative, and had avoided ambitious deviations from the type he wished to copy—the red sandstone, swell front variety, which ten years before would have seemed to the moral sense of Benham unduly cheerful. Mr. Parsons was so fortunate as ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... the brilliancy of the hue is equal, whether it be produced by the chemistry of man, or the chemistry of flowers, or the chemistry of skies. We deal with color as with sound—so far ruling the power of the light, as we rule the power of the air, producing beauty not necessarily imitative, but sufficient in itself, so that, wherever color is introduced, ornamentation may cease to represent natural objects, and may consist in mere spots, or bands, or flamings, or any other condition of arrangement ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... something queer about her, and soon discovered that she had been staining her lids with black kohol, like the hanums, so that, having found a box, she must have guessed its use from the pictures. Wonderfully clever!—imitative as a mirror. Two mornings ago I found an old mother-of-pearl kittur, and sitting under the arcade, touched the strings, playing a simple air; I could just see her behind one of the arch-pillars on the opposite side, and she was listening with apparent eagerness, and, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... not interminable—his hundred-paged Introduction. He abominates Pope's Homer, and groans to think how it has corrupted the English ear by its long domination in our schools. He takes up, with leathern lungs, the howl of the Lakers, and his imitative bray is louder than the original, "in linked sweetness long drawn out." Such sonorous strictures are innocent; but his false charge of licentiousness against Pope is most reprehensible—and it is insincere. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... (probably the Italian conversazione best translates it,) but is applied to a series of short narratives, or rather anecdotes, told alternately in verse and rhymed prose, with all the brilliance of rhetoric, the richness of alliteration, antithesis, and imitative sound, and the endless grammatical subtilties of which the Arabic language is capable. The work of Hariri is considered the unapproachable model of this style of narrative throughout all the East. Rueckert called his translation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... whose service the narrator, a girl of 16, enters just before the marriage of Mary to William III. The descriptions of persons and manners at the courts of Charles II. and William III. are life-like and accurate. The language is simple, and imitative of the quaint quiet ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... was some fragments of the grandiose but shadowy Ossian which first stirred the imitative impulse in this poet of trenchant and clear-cut form. "The first composition I ever was guilty of," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett (Aug. 25, 1846), "was something in imitation of Ossian, whom I had not read, but conceived through two or three scraps in other books." And long afterwards Ossian was ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... qualities. A complaisant medical faculty of San Francisco attested to its merits; a sympathetic press advertised the excellence of the hotel; a novelty-seeking, fashionable circle—as yet without laws and blindly imitative—found the new hotel an admirable variation to the vulgar ordinary "across the bay" excursion, and an accepted excuse for a novel social dissipation. A number of distinguished people had already visited it; certain exclusive families had secured the best rooms; there were a score ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and then, with a wonderful display of the imitative faculty, he went through a clever pantomime, turning his black face into a grotesque copy of Mallam's, as he made believe to pour rum out of a bottle, drinking again and again, smiling in an imbecile manner at first, and then beginning ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... tendency and check this great waste of human power and energy brings me to the only important cause of self-destruction which seems to me removable, and that is newspaper publicity. No argument is needed to prove that man is essentially an imitative animal. In dress, in behavior, in speech, in modes of thought, and in social conventions, we are all prone to do what we see others do; and when unhappy men and women learn, from the newspapers, that scores of other unhappy people are daily escaping from their troubles through ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... created a large standing army the soldiery of which wore uniforms, underwent regular drill, obeyed words of command, and carried arms of precision. He had devoted great pains to the manufacture of a formidable artillery, and what with presents from the British Government and the imitative skill of native artificers he was possessed at the outbreak of hostilities of several hundred cannon. His artisans were skillful enough to turn out in large numbers very fair rifled small-arms, which they copied from British models; and ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... noting, perhaps, that those delightful half-illusions which imitative art seeks to produce are greatly favoured by such a temporary attitude of the interpreting imagination. In the theatre, for example, we are prepared for realizing the semblance of life that is to be unfolded before us. We come knowing that what is to be performed ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... bestowing rain was regarded as specially important. In the lowest systems the rain-giver may be a sacred stone, dipped in a stream,[582] or a royal or priestly magician who is held responsible and is punished if the expected result is not attained.[583] In such cases the procedure is often one of imitative magic.[584] ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... yourself to amuse me. You brought me way up to town on a wedding journey. For the first time in my life I saw there idle women in the world, who wore soft clothes and were always dressed up. You bought me finery. I was clever and imitative. I pined for all the excitement and beauty of city life when we were back on the farm, in the life you loved. I cried for it, as a child cries for the moon. I never dreamed of getting it. And you surprised me by selling the farm, and coming nearer the town to live. Just ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... In like manner, before one plays or sings a single note, he must have the idea of that note in mind; in other words, the idea is the antecedent to the movement, and absolutely essential. To have such an idea, memory is necessary. It is impossible to sing a tone after another, as an imitative effort, unless one has the power to retain that tone in memory for at least a brief period of time; and before this same tone can be reproduced on sight of it as represented by a written note, the memory of the sound to which it answers must first be recalled; and not only ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... with young while the girl is undergoing her period of separation, the foetus is given to her, and she lets it slide down between her shirt and her body so as to fall on the ground like an infant.[122] Here the imitation of childbirth is a piece of homoeopathic or imitative magic designed to facilitate the ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... chiefly gold and silver, of this splendid coinage. "In his introduction Mr. Lane-Poole deals with various historical, geographical, and other problems suggested by the coinage, and with difficulties of classification presented by the early imitative issues of the East India company and the French compagnie des Indes." This volume, the fourteenth, completes the cataloguing of all the Muhammadan coins in the museum.—Journal Royal Asiatic Society ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... business was that Tempest himself seemed not to see the effect of his attitude on the house at large. He did not realise how much the juniors were impressed by what he said and how he looked, or how much his example counted with others of a less imitative turn. He looked upon his grievance as his own affair, and failed to give himself credit for all the influence ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... out this simple direction, however, we are confronted by another of the peculiar characteristics of music. Music, in distinction from the static, concrete and imitative arts, is always in motion, and to follow it requires an intensity of concentration and an accuracy of memory which can be acquired, but for which, like most good things, we have to work. We all ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... be properly distributed in that manner. An act is so much of the drama as passes without intervention of time or change of place. A pause makes a new act. In every real, and therefore in every imitative action, the intervals may be more or fewer, the restriction of five acts being accidental and arbitrary. This Shakespeare knew, and this he practised; his plays were written, and at first printed ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... and beliefs. It is suggested that too much stress has been laid on environment; and, though it is readily admitted that similar needs and experiences may in some cases have given rise to similar expedients and explanations, it is urged that man is an imitative animal and that inventive genius is far from common.(1) Consequently the wide dispersion of many beliefs and practices, which used generally to be explained as due to the similar and independent working of the human mind under like conditions, ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... from the adult; semi-erect attitude of some; mastoid processes of; influences of the jaw-muscles on the physiognomy of; female, destitute of large canines; building platforms; imitative faculties of; anthropomorphous; probable speedy extermination of the; Gratiolet on the evolution of; canine teeth of male; females of some, less hairy beneath than ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... dance, song, or in plastic art, for a definite practical purpose. His dances are magical dances, his images are made for a magical purpose, his songs are incantations. Thus the theory that art is a disinterested expression of the imitative faculty is scarcely warranted by the little we know of art's beginnings. We shall adopt, provisionally, the hypothesis that the earliest art with which we are acquainted is that of savages contemporary ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... think, will be news to many non-slaveholders in the gentleman's district. Thomas Jefferson tells us that man is an imitative animal; therefore, if the assertion of the gentleman from Mississippi be correct, we must wonder why slaveholders do not relieve themselves of their negroes, that they may become equally noble, proud, prosperous, and elevated, with ...
— Slavery: What it was, what it has done, what it intends to do - Speech of Hon. Cydnor B. Tompkins, of Ohio • Cydnor Bailey Tompkins
... her strange winning personality—as rare and as independent of birth and circumstances as genius—had soon made that phenomenon plain. And now what was to be done? The girl was quick, observant, imitative, docile, and in the presence of strangers, her gravity of manner gave the impression of uncanny self-possession. It really seemed as though anything might be possible. At Helen's suggestion, then, the three stayed where they were for a week, for June's wardrobe was sadly in need of ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... the business of art was held to be 'the sublime and beautiful.' In our day it has fallen to be the imitative and voluptuous. In both periods the word passionate has been freely employed; but in the eighteenth century passion meant irresistible impulse of the loftiest kind: for example, a passion for astronomy or for truth. For us it has ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... of North Queensland jungles which have marked individualistic characters is that known as the koel cuckoo, which the blacks of some localities have named "calloo-calloo"—a mimetic term imitative of the most frequent notes of the bird. The male is lustrous black, the female mottled brown, and during most parts of the year both are extremely shy, though noisy enough in accustomed and quiet haunts. The principal note of the male ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... accompanying truth or advantage. For example, in eating and drinking there is pleasure and also profit, that is to say, health; and in learning there is a pleasure and also truth. There is a pleasure or charm, too, in the imitative arts, as well as a law of proportion or equality; but the pleasure which they afford, however innocent, is not the criterion of their truth. The test of pleasure cannot be applied except to that which has no other good or evil, no truth or falsehood. But that which has truth must be judged ...
— Laws • Plato
... here, I bet ye;" and catching deaf Mr. Hollar's eye, the Captain nodded, and pointed to the little table beside him, and made a gesture imitative of the rattling of a dice-box; at which that quiet old gentleman also nodded sunnily; and up got the Captain and conveyed the backgammon-box to the table, near Hollar's elbow, and the two worthies were soon sinc-ducing and catre-acing, with the pleasant clatter that accompanies ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... the Pale Face Chief and of his countrymen is as the hurricane," I said, scarce believing my own ears. For a lad is imitative by nature, and I had not listened to the interpreters for three ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... is quite true," returned Mrs. Bernard: "the gentleman of whom I spoke, has a little monkey, which frequently affords him much amusement, by his sagacious, imitative tricks. As he was one day sitting near the pen in which the monkey was confined, he observed him making many ineffectual efforts to regain a nut which had rolled beyond his reach. After several vain attempts, he took up a stick, and with this he endeavoured to draw it towards ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... who not only feels its influence but wishes to perpetuate it. The same remark applies to a great state—to everything, in short, that man produces. Philologists wish to perpetuate the influence of antiquity and they can set about it only as imitative artists. Why not as men who form ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... mother from the den into the open world, their lessons of life begin. These lessons are acquired partly through imitation and also through design upon the part of the wise old dam. Nearly all small creatures are imitative, so, as the old bear did only those things that were for her good, the cubs soon learned by imitation which of the wild creatures to be upon good terms with and which were ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... you think reason is not fully able to take care of itself. With these leading hints, and your own natural tendencies, which I am glad to see are eminently fitted for the great objects of diplomacy—being ductile, imitative, yielding, calculating, and, above all, of a foreign disposition—I think you will be able to get on very cleverly. Cultivate, above all things, your foreign dispositions, for you are now on foreign duty, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... once into the service of his pen, it results that there is something "newspapery" and superficial about most of his prose. It is reporter's work, though reporting of a high order. His poetry too, though full of glow and picturesqueness, is largely imitative, suggesting Tennyson not unfrequently, but more often Shelley. His spirited Bedouin Song, for example, has an echo of Shelley's Lines to ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... Chinamen. There were few white servants and no Chinawomen so employed. Chinamen make good house servants, being quick, obedient, patient, quick to learn and tirelessly industrious. They do not need to be taught a thing twice, as a general thing. They are imitative. If a Chinaman were to see his master break up a centre table, in a passion, and kindle a fire with it, that Chinaman would be likely to resort to the furniture for ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... lingered, for the worst was yet to come. He lingered, nursing a colossal scruple. Poor Spinks's honour was dear to him because it was less the gift of nature than the supreme imitative effort of his adoring heart. He loved honour because Rickman loved it; just as he had loved Flossie for the same reason. These were the only ways in which he could imitate him; and like all imitators he exaggerated ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... how he learned to play the piano. He probably never did learn. He played it, though, as he whistled—brilliantly. No doubt it was as imitative and as unconscious, too, as his whistling had been. They say he didn't know one note from another, and doesn't to ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... those Lesson Leaves that they flutter about here so much; and—well, altogether it was an amazing sight! She was certainly talking to them with all her might, and they were listening; and it is my opinion that she was trying to play Sunday-school teacher, and give them a lesson. You know she is an imitative little sheep, ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... parts of an organized whole must be assimilated to the more important and essential parts. This and the preceding arguments may be strengthened by the reflection, that the composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the same throughout the radically different, or of the different throughout a ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... for the Admirers of the Imitative Arts, 4to., half bound, uncut, embellished with 125 fine portraits of Eminent English Authors, and celebrated Views of Scenes from Ancient and Modern History, and Men, Antiquities, Public Buildings, and Gentlemen's Seats. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various
... a nation is always the best revealer of its genuine life: the range of its spiritual as well as of its intellectual outlook. This is the case even where poetry is imitative, for imitation only pertains to the form of poetry, and not to its essence. Vergil copied the metre and borrowed the phraseology of Homer, but is never Homeric. In one sense, all national poetry is original, even ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... many other birds feed on them. Stinging-ants, like bees and wasps, are closely resembled by a host of other insects; indeed, whenever I found any insect provided with special means of defence I looked for imitative forms, and was never disappointed ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... words Continu'd, "where thou saidst, that usury Offends celestial Goodness; and this knot Perplex'd unravel." He thus made reply: "Philosophy, to an attentive ear, Clearly points out, not in one part alone, How imitative nature takes her course From the celestial mind and from its art: And where her laws the Stagyrite unfolds, Not many leaves scann'd o'er, observing well Thou shalt discover, that your art on her Obsequious follows, as the learner treads In ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... tension of the irritated body works on the mind, there is no longer a fair fight with those sober reasons. The action of the glands controls the psychophysical reactions, so that the ideas which would lead to opposite response are inhibited. Alcohol and the imitative mood of social gayety may help to dull those hygienic fears, but on the whole the mere sexual longing is sufficient to break down the reminiscence of medical warning. The situation for the boy is then ultimately this: A full knowledge of the chances of disease will start in hours of sexual ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... asked, after a moment's pause; since Johnny seemed to expect some astonishment. "Boys are imitative little monkeys." ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... understand fully what a dance among china cups, what a skating over thin ice, what a tight-rope performance is achieved in this astounding chapter. A false note, one fatal line, would have ruined it all. On the one hand lay brutality; a hundred imitative louts could have written a similar chapter brutally, with the soul left out, we've loads of such "strong stuff" and it is nothing; on the other side was the still more dreadful fall into sentimentality, the tear of conscious ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful struggle. His 'Chronicle' ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... healthier tone. If we are to impress it with our preferences, we ourselves must use the proper tone, which we, in turn, must have caught from our own teachers. It all reverts in the end to the action of innumerable imitative individuals upon each other and to the question of whose tone has the highest spreading power. As a class, we college graduates should look to it that ours has spreading power. It ought to have the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Dr. Gray's eyebrows lifted a little. "They are very imitative," he said. "If you explain to them how necessary it is, for their mother's sake, and set them the example, I will answer for it that they ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... young man who left us before the fire to make a career in the East, after having exhausted all local possibilities, the Bohemian Club included. His figures of the Four Elements are typical of his temperament and he acknowledges in them his indebtedness to Michael Angelo without being in the least imitative. These four figures are allegorically full of meaning, and taken simply as sculpture, they are excellently modeled. His "Fire," showing a Greek warrior defending himself from the fiery breath of a vicious reptile, is novel ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... of ready multiplications as patterns, ensure the wide extension of the prevalent style of imitating past styles, designing patchwork of these; and even admit of its scientific reduction to a definite series of grades, which imitative youth may easily pass onwards from the age of rudest innocence to that of art-knowledge and certificated art-mastery. Our School of Design thus becomes a School of Art, a length a College, dominating the instruction of the nation, to ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... understand, safely, that three is a great deal of secondary work in pots, and pans, and floors, and carpets, and shawls, and architectural ornament, which ought essentially, to be unlike reality, and to depend for its charm on quite other qualities than imitative ones. But all such art is inferior and secondary—much of it more or less instinctive and animal, and a civilized human creature can only learn those principles rightly, by knowing those of great civilized art first—which is always the representation, to the ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... Knights of Malta—a book which, as it hovered between history and romance, was exceedingly dear to me; and Orme's interesting and beautiful History of Indostan, whose copious plans, aided by the clear and luminous explanations of the author, rendered my imitative amusement peculiarly easy. Other moments of these weary weeks were spent in looking at the Meadow Walks, by assistance of a combination of mirrors so arranged that, while lying in bed, I could see the troops march out to exercise, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... Eclogues (selected pieces), written 42-39 B.C. These are closely modelled on Theocritus, and have all the weaknesses of imitative poetry. 'The Eclogues of Vergil have less of consistency but more of purpose than the Idylls of Theocritus. They are an advocacy of the charm of scenery and the pleasures of the country addressed to a luxurious and artificial society of dwellers in ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... and Marullus are in blank verse. Wherever regular metre can be rendered truly imitative of character, passion, or personal rank, Shakespeare seldom, if ever, neglects it. Hence this ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... would imitative art be in its perfection. Not by any means an easy thing, as Reynolds supposes it. Far from being easy, it is so utterly beyond all human power that we have difficulty even in conceiving its nature or results—the ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... woodpeckers, a pair of which occasionally cried loud and long from the five lofty pine stubs in the colt pasture, beyond the Aunt Hannah lot; the yellow-birds that piped, pee-chid-aby, pee-chid-aby, on wavy lines of flight, upon the last days of August, just ere taking wing for warmer climes; the imitative cat-birds that built in the alders along the road across the meadow, whose nests the boys held it lawful to destroy because, forsooth, "they sucked other birds' eggs," a false accusation rendered plausible, perhaps, from their disagreeable feline squalls, and not wholly ingenuous imitations of ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... her the same as I do," cried Paddy, laying hold of the starboard gunwale; whilst Dick, imitative as a monkey, seized the gunwale to ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... music containing imitative passages, the part having the subject must be louder than the rest, especially at its first entrance. This is of course merely a corollary of the general proposition explained under ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... in the Russian manner; and the walls of the interior are covered with large paintings of no merit. But one must not be too critical: a kindling of intellectual energy ever seems, in most countries, to precede excellence in the imitative arts, which latter, too often survives the ruins of those ruder and nobler qualities which assure the vigorous existence of states ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... construction and worse cement. She is rich, she is sharp, she uses her quill; she is emphatically not marriageable. Bath might still accept her as a rival queen, only she is always behindhand in seizing an occasion. Now you will catch sight of her fan working in a minute. She is envious and imitative. It would be undoubtedly better policy on her part to continue to cut me: she cannot, she is beginning to rustle like December's oaks. If Lady Wilts has me, why, she must. We refrain from noticing her until we have turned twice. Ay, Richie, there ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... or geologically correct—how should they be?—he studied them, perhaps, in his painting-room from broken stones and bits of coal. The truth is, however, that he gave us more of Nature than any merely imitative rendering could do. As the great portrait painter looks beyond the features of his sitter to give the mind and character of the man, often thereby laying himself open to complaint as to his mere likeness painting; so the great landscape painter will at all times sink individual ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... have left few features of interest on the outside. Were Gothic architecture still a living and not merely imitative and academic art, one would welcome a complete renewal of all outside work—not an imagined harking back to the work of the fifteenth century but showing the lapse of the centuries from the fifteenth to the twentieth ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... bonny book of thine Where the extreme waste-paper basket gapes, There shall thy futile fancies peak and pine, With other minor poets, pallid shapes, Who come a long way short of the divine, Tormented souls of imitative apes. ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... sympathies were attracted by the vigor and purity of its influence. His tastes, his interests, his activities, his career, would have been the same had that great light never shone. If he had been the ductile, echoing, imitative nature that the more ardent disciples of the faith supposed him to be, he would have been absorbed and swept away by the flood. But he was as untouched by it as Charles Lamb by ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... among them Kaltschmidt, contend that there was but one primitive language, which was purely onomatopoeic, that is, imitative of natural sounds. This has been stigmatized as the "bow-wow" theory, but its advocates might derive an argument from the epithet itself, as not only our children, but the natives of Papua, call the dog a "bow-wow." They have, however, ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... another laugh at this, and Captain Miles hearing what had been said, every word being distinctly audible on the poop, began speaking to Mr Marline about the imitative habits of negroes. ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... are the epitaph, not only of imitative poetry, but also of such eclectic art as the Caracci instituted. Very little of it bears examination now. We regard it with listlessness or loathing. We turn from it without regret. We cannot, or do not, wish to keep it in ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... ain't no fool, if he does chaw hay," said another, and the crowd laughed. They were losing that frenzy, largely imitative and involuntary, which actuates a mob. There was something counteracting in the ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... matter lies in a short phrase: Imitative work is always bad. Music that tries to be something that something else has been may be thrown aside as worthless. It will not endure although it may sometimes please the zanies and jackoclocks of a generation. The critic, therefor, who comes nearest ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... that, on account of their youth, no direct instruction about method of study would be advisable, that teachers should set a good example of study by their treatment of lessons in class, and rely only upon the imitative tendency of children for some effect on their habits of work? Or should extensive instruction be imparted to them, as well as to ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... expression. The Life must come before the Thought. Nothing could be more absurd than the expectation that American literature should spring away into the air from the top of European performance. Our first literature was colonial,—that is, imitative, written for the approbation of European critics,—of course, having somewhat the empty correctness of good school-boy composition. Next followed what we may call fire-weed literature,—the first rank, raw product of new lands. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... plan of the Miscellany is frankly imitative. For some years now there has been published in England an anthology entitled Georgian Poetry. The Miscellany is intended to be an American companion to that publication. The dissimilarities of temperament, range and choice of subjects ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... mind. Orators have found that logic—conviction—may have little or no effect on a feminine audience and yet prove the surest means of convincing an audience of men. School teachers early note that the feminine portion of the school lean towards grammar—which is imitative and illogical—while the boys are generally best in mathematics, which is a ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... could be put into a very short lecture, but as a lecture I am confident that it would prove valueless. Boys are benefited little by advice. They seldom listen to it and less frequently make any practical application of it. Imitative by nature, they are easily influenced by those with whom they associate, and no associate, in my opinion, has so strong a grasp upon them as the hero of some much prized book. He becomes a real being ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... Landon's literary popularity upon the mind of Miss Roberts very probably caused that lady to desire similar celebrity. Indeed, so imitative are the impulses of the human mind, that it may fairly be questioned if Miss Landon would ever have attuned her lyre had she mot been in the presence of Miss Mitford's and Miss Rowden's "fame, and felt its influence." Miss Mitford has chronicled so minutely all the sayings and doings ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... subject of chewing. Whether the rock goat, the filthy animal to which we have before adverted, or the tobacco worm, first taught imitative man to masticate tobacco, we are ignorant. One thing, however, is most certain, that of all modes of using it, chewing seems most vulgar and ungentlemanlike, and it is worthy of particular remark, that in our country it is more used in this manner, among the better class of ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... them only as examples of the kind of study which I would desire to see substituted for that of our modern schools, and of singular success in certain characters, finish of detail, and brilliancy of color. What faculties, higher than imitative, may be in these men, I do not yet venture to say; but I do say that if they exist, such faculties will manifest themselves in due time all the more forcibly because they have ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... had any ulterior motive in his study of German. He simply found he had this imitative faculty; philology had always interested him, so even after he had gone into the motor trade, he used to amuse himself on business trips to Germany by acquiring ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... well-groomed youth in a drawing-room full of well-dressed people. But around him rose an explosive clamour of applause and congratulation, the sincere tribute of appreciation and the equally hearty expression of imitative homage. ...
— When William Came • Saki
... lived in Charles-street, Berkeley-square, in a small house, which he fitted up after his own taste; and an odd melee of the classic and the baronial certain of the rooms presented. One of the drawing-rooms, we remember, was in the Elizabethan style, with an imitative oak ceiling, bristled with pendents; and this room opened into another apartment, a fac-simile of a chamber which Bulwer had visited at Pompeii, with vases, candelabra, and other ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... known to him. In sculpture, we believe that a great secret of the highest success lies in an intuitive eclecticism, whereby the faultless graces of the antique are combined with just observation of Nature. Without correct imitative facility, a sculptor wanders from the truth and the fact of visible things; without ideality, he makes but a mechanical transcript; without invention, he but repeats conventional traits. The desirable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... examined by Messrs. Barton and Vater, one hundred and seventy words have been found, the roots of which appear to be the same; and it is easy to perceive that this analogy is not accidental, since it does not rest merely upon imitative harmony, or on that conformity of organs which produces almost a perfect identity in the first sounds articulated by children. Of these one hundred and seventy words which have this connexion, three- fifths resemble the Manchou, the Tongouse, ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... of criticism has rightly denominated poetry, 'technae mimaetikhae', an imitative art, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets; for they cannot be said to have imitated any thing; they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... it should follow that the best art is that which represents most closely and exactly. He recalls, perhaps, the legend of the two Greek painters, one with his picture of the fruit which the birds flew down to peck at, the other with his painting of a veil which deceived his very rival. The imitative or "illusionist" picture pleads its case most plausibly. A further experience of such pictures, however, fails to bring the beholder beyond his simple admiration of the painter's skill; and that skill, he comes gradually to realize, does not ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... translations in this volume were published first in Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872). Though very sensible that they have the demerits of imitative and even of undergraduate rhyme, I print them again because people I like have liked them. The rest are of different dates, and lack (though doubtless they need) the excuse of having been written, like some of the earlier pieces, during College Lectures. I would gladly have added to this volume ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... it—he must have played with it, dreamed of it, worried it night and day, until he knew it ten times better than its author. Then he portrayed it simply and with irresistible vigour, with a fine economy of line and colour; when colour is added, it is mainly as a gay convention, and not closely imitative of nature. The sixteen toy books which bear his name are too well known to make a list of their titles necessary. A few other children's books—"What the Blackbird Said" (Routledge, 1881), "Jackanapes," "Lob-lie-by-the-Fire," "Daddy Darwin's Dovecot," all by Mrs. Ewing (S.P.C.K.), ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... follow in the wake of; take pattern by; follow suit, follow the example of; walk in the shoes of, take a leaf out of another's book, strike in with, follow suit; take after, model after; emulate. Adj. imitated &c. v.; mock, mimic; modelled after, molded on. paraphrastic; literal; imitative; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the inventor of "historical fiction" in "Henry IV." and "Henry V.," was "the most skilful and instinctive imitator among the early Elizabethan dramatists," and "remained till the end an instinctively imitative follower of fashions set ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... composition into which history has been thus divided, the one may be compared to a map, the other to a painted landscape. The picture, though it places the country before us, does not enable us to ascertain with accuracy the dimensions, the distances, and the angles. The map is not a work of imitative art. It presents no scene to the imagination; but it gives us exact information as to the bearings of the various points, and is a more useful companion to the traveller or the general than the painted landscape could be, though it were the grandest that ever Rosa peopled ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... unvarying characteristic of every social fact whatsoever is that it is imitative. And this characteristic belongs ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... attempts were, like most beginnings, simple and imitative. The birds flew with wings, therefore man put on artificial wings and essayed to fly like the birds. It was not until many grievous disappointments and sad accidents had befallen him, that he unwillingly gave up wings in despair, and set to work to accomplish his ends by more cumbrous ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... same. The least of these illuminators, with his insignificant eyeless face, possesses at his fingers' ends the maximum of dexterity in this art of decoration, light and wittily incongruous, which threatens to invade us in France, in this epoch of imitative decadence, and which has become the great resource of our manufacturers of cheap "objects ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... the inner nature of the enterprise. The "model town," as was the case with imitative towns, proved to be a cunning device with two barbs. It militated to hold the workers to their jobs in a state of quasi serfdom, and it gave the company additional avenues of exploiting its workers ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... "Cathleen ni Houlihan" from the clouds. I needed less help for the "Hour-Glass," for the speech there is far from reality, and so the Play is almost wholly mine. When, however, I brought to her the general scheme for the "Pot of Broth," a little farce which seems rather imitative to-day, though it plays well enough, and of the first version of "The Unicorn," "Where there is Nothing," a five-act Play written in a fortnight to save it from a plagiarist, and tried to dictate them, her share grew more and more considerable. She would not allow me to put her name to these ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... classicism still held sway; the manner and metre of Pope or Thomson ruled the roost of singing fowl. In the main it had done its work, and the bulk of fresh things conceived in it were dull and imitative, even though occasionally, as in the poems of Johnson himself and of Goldsmith, an author arose who was able to infuse sincerity and emotion into a now moribund convention. The classic manner—now more that of Thomson than of Pope—persisted ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... upon the golden mean—is neither too ascetical nor too jocund; is simply good and jolly; has ever so much vivacity, sprightliness, and poetic warmth in his constitution; can preach a lively, earnest, sermon; has a strong imitative faculty; is brisk in action; can tell a good tale; is fine company; would'nt hurt anybody; would step over a fly rather than kill it unkindly; and is just such a man as we should like for a confessor if we were a believer in his Church. ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... Lance, if you did but know how refreshing it is to see anything shabby, and dull, and ugly," Mrs. Grinstead answered with imitative inflections, which set Anna Vanderkist off into a fit of laughter, infecting both her uncle and ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... first place, we always find a complete correspondence between imitative colouring and instinctive endowment. If a caterpillar exactly resembles the colour of a twig, it also presents the instinct of habitually reposing in the attitude which makes it most resemble a twig—standing ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... could cement and consolidate but the blood of the Kings—that was a common crime and a common and indissoluble tie which gave all their consistency and force to both revolutions—a stroke of original sagacity in Cromwell and of imitative dexterity in Robespierre. If Mr. Macaulay admits, as he subsequently does (i. 129), that the regicide was "a sacrament of blood," by which the party became irrevocably bound to each other and separated from the rest of the nation, how can he pretend that Cromwell derived ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... not far off, there is a hall for exhibitions; and sometimes, in the evenings, loud music is heard from it; or, if a diorama be shown (that of Bunker Hill, for instance, or the burning of Moscow), an immense racket of imitative cannon ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... want to improve your accent, nothing can so help you as going to the theater abroad until your ears literally absorb the sounds! All people are imitative. There are few who do not gradually lose the purity of a good foreign accent when long away from Europe, and all speak more fluently when their ears ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... of the sun for the growth of vegetation. By the production of fire the quantity and strength of the heavenly fire is increased. He remarks: [138]—"The custom of throwing blazing discs, shaped like suns, into the air, is probably also a piece of imitative magic. In these, as in so many cases, the magic force is supposed to take effect through mimicry or sympathy; by imitating the desired result you actually produce it; by counterfeiting the sun's progress through the heavens you really help the luminary to ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... soon to sea. And if you launch even your well-built ship at half-tide, what will it do but strike bottom, and stick there? The perpetual tragedy of literary history, in especial, is this. What numbers of young men, gifted with great imitative quickness, who, having, by virtue of this, arrived at fine words and figures of speech, set off on their nimble rhetorical Pegasus, keep well out of the Muse's reach ever after! How many go conspicuously through ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... the people, nourished by the people, living among the people, the Burnses, the Brangers, the Heines are unknown in Russia. I have already stated that originality must not be looked for on Russian soil; that Russian literature is essentially an imitative literature in its forms, hence imitative force must have time to look about, examine, copy, and for this leisure, ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... such cases the movements are imitative merely is untenable, for young animals which have never had any opportunity of watching the physical manifestations of love in older ones, will nevertheless themselves exhibit such manifestations. At most it remains open to dispute whether in these cases it is still permissible to speak ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... of sweeping the streets to the Italians. This general struggle to rise in life, to be at least politically represented by one of the best, as to occupation and social status, has also its negative side. We must remember that the imitative impulse plays an important part in life, and that the loss of social estimation, keenly felt by all of us, is perhaps most dreaded by the humblest, among whom freedom of individual conduct, the power to give only just ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... just. For Camoens was his model; not the Camoens of the epic, but the Camoens of the lyrics and the sonnets, where the passion of tenderness finds its supreme utterance. Braga has noted five stages of development in Joao de Deus's artistic life—the imitative, the idyllic, the lyric, the pessimistic and the devout phases. Under each of these divisions is included much that is of extreme interest, especially to contemporaries who have passed through the same succession of emotional experience, and it is highly probable that Caturras ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... museum is upon them. They may turn boys and girls into nimble virtuosi; they will not make them artists. Because no two ages express their sense of form in precisely the same way all attempts to recreate the forms of another age must sacrifice emotional expression to imitative address. Old-world merry-making can no more satisfy sharp spiritual hunger than careful craftsmanship or half hours with our "Art Treasures." Passionate creation and ecstatic contemplation, these alone will satisfy men in search ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... not be supposed that an able Chinaman, when he masters our culture, becomes purely imitative. This may happen among the second-rate Chinese, especially when they turn Christians, but it does not happen among the best. They remain Chinese, critical of European civilization even when they have assimilated it. They retain a certain crystal candour and ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... lord belongs to the class which neither gods nor men are said to permit", and so on for two or three pages of rather vulgar and heartless merriment at the young lord's expense. [Footnote: Edinburgh Review, xi. 285. It is uncommonly hard to find any trace of poetic power, even of the imitative kind, in the Hours of Idleness. It is significant that the best pieces are those in the heroic couplet; an indication—to be confirmed by English Bards—of Byron's leaning towards the past.] The answer to the sneer, as all the world knows, was English Bards and Scotch ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions—the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love for restraining ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... his religion, clothes, language, customs; there is hardly anything which is Turkish and not borrowed. The religion is Arabic; the language half Arabic and Persian; the literature almost entirely imitative; the art Persian or Byzantine; the costumes, in the Upper Classes and Army mostly European. There is nothing characteristic in manufacture or commerce, except an aversion to such pursuits. In fact, all occupations, except agriculture ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... dead, and fallen, and rotted into compost, that another tree can grow there; and many years will elapse before the new birth can increase and occupy the room the previous one occupied, and flourish anew with a greenness all its own. This on one side. On another; genius is essentially imitative, or rather, as I just now said, gravitative; it gravitates towards that point peculiarly important at the moment of its existence; as air, more rarified in some places than in others, causes the winds to rush towards them as toward a centre: so that if poetry, painting, or ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... there was a limit to Miss Carmen's imitative talent. Admirable as it was, it did not reach to the reproduction of that official seal, which would have been a necessary appendage to the Governor's grant. But there were letters written on stamped paper by Governor Micheltorena ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... beautiful, and richer in stalactites, in proportion as they are narrower, and the circulation of air is less free. By being spacious, and accessible to air, the cavern of Caripe is almost destitute of those incrustations, the imitative forms of which are in other countries objects of popular curiosity. I also sought in vain for subterranean plants, those cryptogamia of the family of the Usneaceae, which we sometimes find fixed on the stalactites, like ivy on walls, when we penetrate for the first time ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... any one genus of plants more universally admired than the others, it is that of the Rose—where is the Poet that has not celebrated it? where the Painter that has not made it an object of his imitative art? ...
— The Botanical Magazine v 2 - or Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... important considerations. Were these letters penned by natives or by half-castes, with foreign blood in their veins and inherited capacities of feeling? Unless we know that, no scientific deduction is allowable. These natives are very imitative. They learn our music easily and rapidly, and with the art of writing and reading they readily acquire our amorous phrases. A certain Biblical tone, suggesting the Canticles, is noticeable. The word "heart" is used in a way foreign to Polynesian thought, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of 160 millions. From the 17th century onwards the once wide empire of the Turks has been gradually dwindling away. The Turks are essentially a warlike race, and commerce and art have not flourished with them. Their literature is generally lacking in virility, and is mostly imitative and devoid of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... a walk to the rick-yard in his best clothes on a Sunday morning and stand in the lane, at a due distance, to contemplate his own thatching walking about to get each rick from the proper point of view. As he curtsied along, with his eyes upturned to the straw knobs imitative of golden globes at the summits of the beehive ricks, which indeed were gold of the best sort, you might have imagined him to be engaged in some pagan act of adoration. Kester was an old bachelor and reputed ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... akin to that of beauty. Her abandonment was complete. She had gone through the night unscathed, and was now renewing herself in calm, oblivious sleep. Her ingenuous girlishness was apparent then. It seemed as if all her wise and sweet behaviour of the evening could have been nothing but so many imitative gestures. It seemed impossible that a being so young and fresh could have really experienced the mood of which her gestures had been the expression. Her strong virginal simplicity made Constance ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett |
