"Impostor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... horse-play with them, to his last days. It does not appear that he listened at keyholes, or, at least, that he "was caught at it". In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of power and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last; but with an impostor and a rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of Jupiter Scapin, or a ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and his goods despoiled by a reckless Redwood packer. The murderer had coolly said that he was only "serving out" the tool of a fraudulent imposture on the Government, and that he dared the arch-impostor himself, the so-called Minyo chief, to help himself. A wave of ungovernable fury surged up to the very tent-poles of Elijah's lodge and demanded vengeance. Elijah trembled and hesitated. In the thraldom of his selfish passion for Mrs. Dall he dared ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... mysterious reputation of the magician. Epimenides, numbered by some among the seven wise men, was revered throughout Greece as one whom a heavenlier genius animated and inspired. Devoted to poetry, this crafty impostor carried its prerogatives of fiction into actual life; and when he declared—in one of his verses, quoted by St. Paul in his Epistle to Titus—that "the Cretans were great liars," we have no reason to ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "You!—you vile impostor! You beggar and vagabond! You do not possess an onza of gold," roared Garcia, bursting forth into a fit of vituperation. "Don't listen to him; don't heed him; it's a trick—a plan. I take possession. The money ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... thought of Chinese servants as men—seemed ever to have disturbed with a recurring, habitual foot its almost cloistral quietude. Now with memories of his own home fresh in his mind, dinner in the kitchen, the soiled tablecloth, the sizzling pans on the stove, he felt he had no place there and was an impostor. Their greeting increased his discomfort. They were so kind, so hospitable, making him come into the dining room and take a cup of coffee. It was an uprush of that angry loyalty, that determination ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... surprise that the Golden Gate had not yet opened for so distinguished, though collective, an artist, my friend answered that, according to Fick, Peppmuller, and many other learned men, they were Homer. 'But an impostor from Chios has got in somehow,' he said; 'they don't pay the least attention to the Germans in the ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... motionless and dumb. Then he led him from the cabin, and conjured him to declare if in truth he had seen this sea of the north. Vignan, with oaths, affirmed that all he had said was true. Returning to the council, Champlain repeated the impostor's story—how he had seen the sea, the wreck of an English ship, the heads of eighty Englishmen, and an English boy, prisoner among ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the case may yet save you. This scoundrel who has promised to marry you, and who belongs to a rank immeasurably above your own, is already notorious for what are termed, by such as himself, affairs of gallantry; while the wretched impostor whom he has brought with him to act the part of clergyman is the marker at a low billiard-table, and no more a clergyman ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... suppress you altogether. For if you accepted he was relieved of you with every appearance of humanity, and if you made objections (after requesting his assistance, mind you) it was open to him to drop you as a sort of impostor. You might have had to decline that berth for some very valid reason. From sheer necessity perhaps! The notice was too uncommonly short. But under the circumstances you'd have covered yourself ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... of science, the real M.D. of Cambridge University and owner of those other letters of attainment, was the drunken wastrel who had sunk low enough to serve as the impostor's ghost. If G. de Boursy-Williams, of all those lying capitals, were a member of the London Pharmaceutical Society and properly-qualified dentist, which perhaps might be the case, he certainly possessed no other claim upon the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... encouraging her, how could the girl spend much time in doubt or any at all in despair? She felt that she was a much better girl—morally as well as physically—in this environment than she had been for many, many months. Instead of being conscience wrung in playing the part of impostor and living under an assumed name and identity, she felt a ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... very sorry for you," said Starr sweetly, though her heart was heating violently in spite of her efforts to be calm and to tell herself that she must get rid of this wretched impostor without making a scene for the servants to witness: "I am very sorry, but you have made some great mistake. There isn't anything I can do for you now, but later when I come back to New York if you care to look me up I will try to do something ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... of heroic exploits. This was the great highway between the St Lawrence and the Upper Lakes for explorers, missionaries, war parties, and traders. Up this stream, one hundred and eighteen years before, Champlain had pushed his way, persuaded by the ingenious impostor Nicolas Vignau that here was the direct road to Cathay. At St Anne's the expedition made a brief halt to ask a blessing on the enterprise. Here the men, according to custom, each received a dram of liquor. When they had again taken their places, paddles dipped at the word ...
— Pathfinders of the Great Plains - A Chronicle of La Verendrye and his Sons • Lawrence J. Burpee
... most amply every promise he had given of freeing the country from tyranny, religious despotism and, generally, from what he termed "lies." As for the killing of Gomata-Smerdis, it was an act of public justice, approved by all sensible persons as soon as it was known by what frauds that impostor had seized ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... intolerable,—namely, in the family at home, or in the camp or barrack abroad. Catholic servants are not only denied the right to attend their duties in many families, but actually forced to hear the disgusting ranting or ludicrous prayer of any impostor who may take on himself the office of preacher. And Catholic soldiers are punished by fine and severe corporal chastisements for refusing to attend the service of an heretical chaplain. And no senator, zealous for liberty, raises his voice on behalf of the Catholic ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... successfully carried out his bidding. A certain Magus having fraudulently usurped the throne of Persia; Ortanes, a grandee of that realm, discovering the fraud, disclosed it to six others of the chief nobility, telling them that it behoved them to free the kingdom from the tyranny of this impostor. And when some among them asked for time, Darius, who was one of the six summoned by Ortanes, stood up and said, "Either we go at once to do this deed, or I go to the Magus to accuse you all." Whereupon, all rising together, without time given to any to change his mind, they went forth and succeeded ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... in a battle, and by that he won the right to be leader of the band. He has taken my brother's name, and he calls himself Pacheco. Senors, I swear to you I speak the truth—I swear by all the saints! My brother is dead, and there is an impostor in his place." ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... handkerchief spread on his knees, and his straw hat resting on the handkerchief, Baltic looked at his flushed host calmly and solemnly without moving a muscle, or even winking an eye. Brace did not know whether to treat the ex-sailor as a madman or as an impudent impostor. The situation was ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... to John and looking at him knowingly). Do you know what it is, Mr. Murray? Your brother's nothing short of an impostor. ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne
... his life, defaults and sins, and impose just correction and penance. Evil-doers shunned his eye. More readily than on Sabbatai men believed on him, inasmuch as he claimed but the second place, and an impostor, said they, would have claimed the first. Couched in the tropes and metaphors of Rabbinical Hebrew, Nathan's letter ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... at the time when the ballad was made (say 1620-60). But Colonel Elliot believes that the perversion was inflicted on an Elliotophile ballad by a Scottophile impostor about 1800-1802. The name of this desperate and unscrupulous character was Walter Scott, Sheriff of Ettrick Forest, ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... his legs under the water, and kept them so; and about 10 p.m. his soul quitted the body. When he died, his knees were under water, but the rest of his body above." Evidence of Radha Sircar and Sham Chum Baboo, before the Mofussil Court of Hoogly, September 1838, in the enquiry on the impostor Kistololl, who personated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... ready in one hand and a florin in the other, intending to give him the former if he survived and the latter if he killed himself—for his loss would be my gain in a literary way, and I was willing to pay a fair price for the item —but this impostor ended his intensely moving performance by simply adding some powder to the liquid and polishing the spoon! Then he held it aloft, and he could not have shown a wilder exultation if he had achieved an immortal miracle. The crowd applauded in a gratified way, and it seemed to me that history speaks ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... proper place in company with Blackmore's Alfred and Wilkie's Epigoniad, were pronounced to be fifteen hundred years old, and were gravely classed with the Iliad. Writers of a very different order from the impostor who fabricated these forgeries," &c., &c. Our first objection to these criticisms is their undue strength and decidedness of language, which proclaims prejudice and animus on the part of the writer. Macaulay ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... the Incas, was falling under suspicion as a lazy fortune-hunter, seeking haven in the meager opulence of a mountain farm! Yet he dared not confess that wealth now because such admission would stamp him an impostor. ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... hear," said Andrew loudly; and he stopped and looked back directly. "A miserable, contemptible impostor. I could cure his wretched cough in two minutes with ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... Himself—theoretically a perfect arrangement, but in practice open to the gravest perils. It not merely paved the way to imposture, but invited it; and the most dangerous imposture is that which imposes on the impostor himself. It created an oligarchy of the most insidious and unassailable type: a communion of earthly "saints," who might be, and occasionally were, satans at heart. It is essentially at variance with democracy, which it regards as a surrender to the selfish license of the lowest range of unregenerate ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... he could not be induced to reveal even for the sum of 340,000 livres, which was offered him in compensation. People began to doubt whether he had a real secret, or whether he was a rank impostor. A royal commission was appointed to examine into the matter. Our Benjamin Franklin, then in Paris, was one of the commissioners. Their report was unfavorable. They found no proof of the existence of a fluid such as animal magnetism, ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... all the useful and polite literature of that age; and at the same time was not more celebrated for his abilities than admired for his piety. At length he took priest's orders, and performed the duties of his office with great assiduity and punctuality. Publicly declaring Mahomet an impostor, he was sentenced to be beheaded, and was accordingly executed, A. D. 850; after which his body was honourably interred by ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... left, it is ready to swallow you. Be still! If once you fall, call as loud as you will, no man on earth shall hear your cries: prepare a tale however plausible or however true, the whole world shall execrate you for an impostor. Your innocence shall be of no service to you. I laugh at so feeble a defence. It is I that say it: you may believe what I tell you. Do you know, miserable wretch!" added he, stamping on the ground with ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a good deal of sternness, "if you were silly enough to hint to this fellow what you say you did, and he was impostor enough not to deny it on the spot in the most unequivocal terms, then he adds the character of a designing villain to that of a senseless fop. In the name of homely American common sense, can you not see, as plain ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... and inventions which encounter no collegiate hindrance, excepting this, that the average liberal education, as it is called, gives so little knowledge of physical science, that the educated classes often fail to distinguish between the real inventor and the deluded, or delusive, impostor. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... angles have a mysterious and awful equality to one another." The dislike of schoolboys for Euclid is unreasonable in many ways; but fundamentally it is entirely reasonable. Fundamentally it is the revolt from a man who was either fallible and therefore (in pretending to infallibility) an impostor, or infallible and ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... in the days to come, when it was too late, that George was a miserable impostor, who could evidently have known nothing whatever about the matter. If you had seen these clothes after - but, as the ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... to be disappointed, finding as I did that the block was fast. Oh, Poole, how I did tug and strain at it, feeling all the while that I had been boasting and bragging to your father, and that after all I was only a poor miserable impostor who had been professing to know a great deal, when I was as ignorant as could be, and that I was being deservedly punished in that terrible ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... North Sea, from which, it was believed, the coveted passage to China would be found. Champlain's hopes rose with this information, but before he could act upon it Du Vignau was proved to be an impostor. Champlain, therefore, with reluctance, sorrowfully commenced his journey homeward to Quebec, whence, toward the latter part of August, he again sailed for France, in order to promote the interests of the colony, so much dependent ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... my name is Thomas Lester, and that instead of being a tramp or burglar molesting a lonely woman, I am now respectfully soliciting admission into my own house? Yes, madam, I assure you on the honour of a gentleman that I am no impostor!' ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... that seem'd as hard. "Though my o'erweighty limbs have ta'en from me The power to move," said he, "I have an arm At liberty for such employ." To whom Was answer'd: "When thou wentest to the fire, Thou hadst it not so ready at command, Then readier when it coin'd th' impostor gold." And thus the dropsied: "Ay, now speak'st thou true. But there thou gav'st not such true testimony, When thou wast question'd of the truth, at Troy." "If I spake false, thou falsely stamp'dst the coin," Said Sinon; "I am here but ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... of the utmost intimacy. Not to be behindhand with him, I spoke of my own estates and property as if I was as rich as a duke. I told all the stories of the nobility I had ever heard from my mother, and some that, perhaps, I had invented; and ought to have been aware that my host was an impostor himself, as he did not find out my own blunders and misstatements. But youth is ever too confident. It was some time before I knew that I had made no very desirable acquaintance in Captain Fitzsimons and his lady; and, indeed, went to bed congratulating myself upon my wonderful ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... spoken by Garrick, for the benefit of Mrs. Elizabeth Foster, grand-daughter to Milton; the Prologue and Postscript to Lander's impudent forgeries concerning that poet, by which Johnson was imposed on, as well as the rest of the world; a letter to Dr. Douglas, for the same impostor, after he had been detected, acknowledging and expressing contrition for the fraud; and the Life of Cheynel, in ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... when a choice book was sold. Never can I forget what the great Quaritch said to me when he was showing me the inner shrine of his treasure-house, and I felt it honest to explain that I could only look, lest he should think me an impostor. "I would sooner show such books to a man that loved them though he couldn't buy them, than a man who gave me my price and didn't know what he had got." With this slight anecdote I would in passing pay the tribute of bookmen to the chief hunter of ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... implements and processes, of which it was declared that the plaintiff was the first and only inventor. The answer to the complaint alleged the disappearance and death of Benedict, and declared the plaintiff to be an impostor, averred the assignment of all the patents in question to the defendant, and ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... boys laughed and jeered; but King Robert said to himself: "They will not laugh long," because his heart was glad now, for they were going to Rome, where his own brother ruled, and now surely he would be restored to his rights, for his brother would see and know that the new king was an impostor. Thus the splendid train rode to Rome, and the emperor ...
— A Child's Story Garden • Compiled by Elizabeth Heber
... of consolation. On the heath beside him the Christ stood once more, and as the disciple felt the sacred presence he could bear for the first time to let the chafing pent-up current of love flow into the new channels, so painfully prepared for it by the toil of thought. 'Either God or an impostor.' What scorn the heart, the intellect, threw on the alternative! Not in the dress of speculations which represent the product of long past, long superseded looms of human thought, but in the guise of common manhood, laden like his fellows with the pathetic ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... been talking, you little impostor?" cried Ferrers. "How dare you talk in such a manner? I've a great mind to kick you from Land's End to John o' ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... chiefly directed towards his neighbor, the ruffler, in whom he recognized a famous impostor of the day, with whose history he was sufficiently well acquainted to be able at once to identify the individual. We have before stated, that a magnificent coal-black beard decorated the chin of this worthy; but this was not all—his costume was in perfect keeping with his beard, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... outlook into her nature and feelings; no cautious insight into his own. He had taken part in a most unpremeditated act of pure and simple love; and that it was real and pure love on each side, he no more doubted than he doubted that he lived. And yet, had he been an impostor when, on that hill over there, he told Roberta March he loved her? No, he had been honest, he had loved her; and, since the time that he had been roused to action by the discovery of Junius Keswick's ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... of being applauded, was pelted with a hailstorm of ridicule. He was an "impostor," a "ventriloquist," a "crank who says he can talk through a wire." The London Times alluded pompously to the telephone as the latest American humbug, and gave many profound reasons why speech could not be sent over a wire, because of the intermittent nature ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... asked eagerly. "No, there he is!" she pointed to Captain Rudstone. "Liar, thief, impostor!" she said, half-hysterically. "You are unmasked at last—and by a woman! ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... Watersheds to witness his su-su-su-pernal incompetence, and then he talks as though there were untold reserves of knowledge behind him that he is too modest to bring forward. For a bland, circular, absolutely sincere impostor, you're a miracle, ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... an impostor! but no adventurous gambler, as you suppose. I will proceed. About seven months after his marriage, he abandoned Juliet altogether! Yet he did not forget her entirely. He may have felt remorse for the ruin he had wrought—or perhaps a slight degree of affection for his unborn—; ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... the Gaelic text of Inisthona has perished? The fact that it survives in English is only a greater miracle, for which we are indebted solely to the patience and fidelity of a man who has been called a liar and an impostor. ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... is the greatest of revealers,—it lays bare the soul. The soul of the cheat shuns nothing so much. "Always be ready to speak your minds" said Blake, "and a base man will avoid you." But to insist that he also shall speak his mind is to go a step further, it is to take from the impostor his wooden leg, to prohibit his lucrative whine, his mumping and his canting, to force the poor silly soul to stand erect among its fellows and declare itself. His occupation is gone, and he does not ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... against your own consent—I being only in one ship, you in a hundred and more? Imagine however that I could even succeed in deluding you to Phasis. When we land there, you will know at once that we are not in Greece; and what fate can I then expect—a detected impostor in the midst of ten thousand men with arms in their hands? No—these stories all proceed from foolish men, who are jealous of my influence with you; jealous, too, without reason—for I neither hinder them from out-stripping me in your favor, if ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... Chinese say, "It never pays to respect a man who does not respect himself." If the world sees that you do not honor yourself, it has a right to reject you as an impostor; because you claim to be worthy of the good opinion of others when you have not your own. Self-respect is based upon the same principles as respect for others. The scales of justice hang in every heart, and even the murderer respects the judge who condemns him; ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... make up a wretched tumult, sounding in my ears like drums. Where was the use of going on, of proving any body's guilt or any body's innocence, if the utmost issue of the whole would be to show my father an impostor? Then, and only then, I knew that love of abstract justice is to little minds impossible, that sense of honor is too prone to hang on chance of birth, and virtue's fountain, self-respect, springs but ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... you do, Macumazahn?" he said, holding his head on one side and nodding his white lock. "I hear you are Christians here, and I want to try a new religion. Mine must be a bad one seeing that my people wanted to kill me for exposing an impostor." ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... and masquerade, So gay by well-plac'd lights, and distance made; False coin, and which th' impostor cheats us still; The stamp and colour good, but metal ill! Which light, or base, we find when we Weigh by enjoyment and examine thee! For though thy being be but show, 'Tis chiefly night which men to thee allow: And chuse t'enjoy thee, when thou ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... day Sophia was wedded to Sir William Thornhill; and my son George, now freed from justice, as the person supposed to be wounded by him was detected to be an impostor, led Miss Wilmot to the altar. As soon as I had awakened that morning, I had heard that my merchant had been arrested at Antwerp, and that my fortune ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... subtlety of Mahomet's mind, and the extreme ignorance of his followers, we give the story of that impostor's night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem, and from thence ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... Embassy entertainments; and also that he was admitted to the exclusive dinner-parties of the Countess de Strode, 'which are,' he observed, in the moderated tone of an astonishment devoting itself to propagation, 'the cream of society.' Indubitably, then, my father was an impostor: more Society proved it. The squire listened like one pelted by a storm, sure of his day to come at the close of the two months. I gained his commendation by shunning the metropolitan Balls, nor did my father press me to appear ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sort.' Am I a humbug, an impostor, an adventuress, a puppet and play-actress? Or is it that I have forfeited my right, my rank of gentlewoman, my position in ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... the unlucky, or rather the lucky, Chevalier, nothing human ever received a hotter shower of surmise and sarcasm. That he was "an impostor, a swindler, a spy," was the Earl's conviction, declared in the most public manner. The whole body of matrons looked round on their blooming innocents, as if they had been snatched from the jaws of a legion of wolves and thanked their own prudence which had not trusted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... intellectual pretensions is, that nine-tenths of those you come in contact with do not know whether you are an impostor or not. I dread that certain anonymous criticisms should get into the hands of servants where I go, or that my hatter or shoemaker should happen to read them, who cannot possibly tell whether they are well or ill founded. The ignorance of the world leaves one at the ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... for the better sustentation of good morals and good-breeding, and for the prevention of quarrelling, or unseemly and abusive conversation, any person who should call or designate any other person in the said town by the name of thief, villain, rascal, rogue (schurke), cheat, charlatan, impostor, wretch, coward, sneak, suborner, slanderer, tattler, and sundry other titles of ill-repute, which I cannot recollect now, and could not render into English were I to recall them, should, upon complaint of the person aggrieved, and upon proof of the offence by the evidence of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... impostor,' rejoined Mr. Tadpole; 'but he is a baronet and a county member, and very much looked up to by the Wesleyans. The other men, I know, have refused him ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... who gave him some pandects from Jupiter; he was obeyed without contradiction, and he reigned happily. His instructions were good, his charlatanry did good; but if some secret enemy had discovered the imposture, if he had said: "Exterminate an impostor who prostitutes the name of the gods in order to deceive men," Numa ran the risk of being sent to ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... played his part in the comedy. When I wondered how she could play HER part I had to perceive that her good faith was complete and that what kept it so was simply her extravagant fondness. She loved the young impostor with a simple, blind, benighted love, and of all the heroes of romance who had passed before her eyes he was by far the ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James
... terror and mental agony with it—making his life a misery. And now what was to be done? He was ruined. Let him fly to the utmost parts of the earth, let him burrow in the recesses of the cities of the earth, and his shame would find him out. He was an impostor, a bigamist; one who had seduced an innocent woman into a mock marriage and then taken her fortune to buy the silence of his lawful wife. More, he had threatened to bring an action for divorce against a woman to whom he knew he was not really married and made it a lever to extort large sums ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... marked fault it was vanity; he was a queer compound of Actaeon and Narcissus—having a gun in one hand and flourishing a looking-glass in the other." Grosart is much too severe when he styles Audubon "a great dilettante impostor." ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... invented by a mother to prevent her own child from receiving the bounty of his father, which was accordingly the consequence, if the person whose life Johnson wrote, was her son; or shall we not rather believe that the person who then assumed the name of Richard Savage was an impostor, being in reality the son of the shoemaker, under whose wife's care[501] Lady Macclesfield's child was placed; that after the death of the real Richard Savage, he attempted to personate him; and that the fraud being known to Lady Macclesfield, he was therefore repulsed ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... Forbear, foul ravisher, libidinous swine! Free the forced lady, or thou diest, impostor. But that I'm loth to snatch thy punishment Out of the hand of justice, thou shouldst, yet, Be made the timely sacrifice of vengeance, Before this altar, and this dross, thy idol.— Lady, let's quit the place, it is the den Of villany; fear nought, you have a guard: And he, ere ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... the left shoulder—after which he sent a basket of red roses to the Duke of Winterset. In a few days he had another captain to fight. This was a ruffling buck who had the astounding indiscretion to proclaim M. de Chateaurien an impostor. There was no Chateaurien, he swore. The Frenchman laughed in his face, and, at twilight of the same day, pinked him carefully through the right shoulder. It was not that he could not put aside the insult to ...
— Monsieur Beaucaire • Booth Tarkington
... Bristol (Maty's Review, ii. 253. Clarendon Papers, iii. App. xcvi.; and Mr. Todd, Memoirs of Bishop Walton, i. 138). These have so firmly established Gauden's claim, that, whoever denies it must be prepared to pronounce that prelate an impostor, to believe that the bishops Morley and Duppa gave false evidence in his favour, and, to explain how it happened, that those, the most interested to maintain the right of the king, namely Charles II., his brother the duke of York, and the two earls of Clarendon and Bristol, yielded to the deception. ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... could put in a man's shoulder without help, and she was not to be imposed upon. Once a cheat came to her with his head done up in a bandage, and asked her to set his dislocated wrist for him; it was not dislocated, and he wanted to show Miss Wallin up as an impostor. She saw through that, and dislocated his wrist on the spot, telling him to go back to the fools that sent him. Such a woman should have been kept at Epsom; she was worth more than mere cathartic waters. But Epsom could not keep her; she desired more than anything ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... prediction believed sometimes effects its own fulfillment; and Josephine, whose ambition seems to have been most ardent, may have been inspired with romantic hopes by the foolish promise of an ignorant impostor, that she would rise to great eminence, and have been stimulated to greater exertions to realize those hopes. This may have urged her to intimacy with the corrupt and immoral Directory, with whom a beautiful and accomplished woman could not fail to be a favorite; may have secured ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... named Maria boasts to Miramillia that she has attained perfect felicity by entrapping the Marquis de Savilado into a marriage. She too undertakes the shirt, but in a few days Miramillia hears that the supposed Marquis has been exposed as an impostor and turned into ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... the tail of the document, which is torn, I see she goes on to ask the bereaved family to seek her a new place. It is extraordinary that people should have been so deceived in so careless an impostor; that a few sprinkled 'God willings' should have blinded them to the essence of this venomous letter; and that they should have been at the pains to bind it in with others (many of them highly touching) in their memorial of harrowing days. But the good ladies were ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cried Hendon, colouring slightly, "do not thou condemn me —wait, and thou shalt see. I am no impostor—she will say it; you shall hear it from the sweetest lips in England. I an impostor? Why, I know this old hall, these pictures of my ancestors, and all these things that are about us, as a child knoweth ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... many a fraud and of many a crime, and that a dog's death had been too good a death for him. What wonder that every decent person in the town spoke of him with horror? But the horror they had of him who had so deceived them was but a little thing when compared with the hideous dread that the impostor inspired ere he had lain for a week in his grave in Berwick. Men who lived in those days had many an evil thing to dread, for wolves, ghouls, and vampires were as terribly real to them as in our day are the microbes of cancer, of fever, ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... the improvised prayer-room with this ironic sense of coming back to Judaism by the Christian prison door. But the service shook him terribly. He forgot even to be amused by the one successful impostor who had landed himself in an unforeseen deprivation of rations during the whole fast day. The passionate outcries of the old-fashioned Chazan, the solemn peals and tremolo notes of the cornet, which had once been ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... look ye, you impostor!—you—didn't you come here to pay your addresses to this lady? and wasn't I to bring you into parliament, for your quiet ...
— The Dramatist; or Stop Him Who Can! - A Comedy, in Five Acts • Frederick Reynolds
... represented as "stars" (chap. 1:20) and who possess "the keys of the kingdom of heaven." Mat. 16:19; 18:18. How appropriate, then, that a fallen "star," possessing "the key of the bottomless pit," should be a symbol of a religious impostor, and that the smoke which darkened the heavens, eclipsing the sun, the source of light, should represent a prominent delusive faith! I have already mentioned the fact that the symbols of this vision lead to a series of events entirely separate ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... Bluewater, who made you a captain, a commander, a rear-admiral? Do you believe me an impostor, because I wear this riband on authority no better than that of the house of Hanover? Am I, or am I not, in your judgment, a vice-admiral of ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... capable of being explained away by the supposition that perhaps the ambassador was presented to one of the princes and not to the king himself. The king appears to have been in doubt as to whether the traveller was not an impostor in representing himself as an envoy from Persia, and may have refrained ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... at the bottom of the large beech chest under the linen.' She had long forgotten the breeches and even the box, but she found them just as he had described. In the face of such evidence it seemed impossible to doubt that this man was the genuine Martin Guerre. Yet he proved after all to be an impostor, whose real name was Arnauld Du Tilh. Yet strange as it may seem, on the impostor's trial, although confronted with the man whom he was personating, he was able to answer questions about the past life of the Guerre family more minutely and accurately than the rightful claimant. Being disavowed, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... whole show if you don't tell your Uncle Stalky. Cough it up, ducky, and we'll see what we can do. Notion, you fat impostor—I knew you had a notion when you went away! Turkey said ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... fellow in town who claims to be the man that murdered Sheriff White some months ago. We consider him an impostor, seeking admission into society above his level, and hope people will stop inviting him ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... During all that time she had lain on a bed near the fire, had shared all the life of the family, and had never once moved from her couch. Now, while husband and wife talked together and the darkness deepened in the room, this old impostor slipped from her bed and glided stealthily out of ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... killed in each case. Caesar was anxious to make himself master of her treasures, to seize her alive, and to take her back for his triumph. However, as he had given her a kind of pledge, he did not wish to appear to have acted personally as an impostor, since this would prevent him from treating her as a captive and to a certain extent subdued against her will. He therefore sent to her Gaius Proculeius, a knight, and Epaphroditus, a freedman, giving them directions ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... only permitted to join in their discussions, but was regarded by these harmless folk somewhat in the light of a prodigy. To a mind predisposed to religious mania (for it would be unjust to stigmatize Joanna altogether as a wilful impostor) the result was peculiarly unfortunate; she was visited with dreams, which she quickly accepted as spiritual manifestations, instead of being, as they really were, indications of ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... perceiving that such an opportunity of acquiring lands in eastern Asia should not be lost to Spain. He accordingly wrote to Queen Isabella, and at the end of 1491 Columbus spoke again before the learned men of the realm. Some of them treated him as an impostor, but others believed his words; and when, after the fall of Granada, the Court had a free hand, it was decided to equip Columbus for his ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... acting, or heard such enthusiastic applause. Round followed round, until, worked up to frenzy at the libel upon his name, and, as he thought, his art, he vociferously exclaimed, "Ladies and gentlemen, that man's a d—d impostor! ("Turn him out! throw him over! break his neck!" shouted the gods. "Shame shame!" called the boxes. "You're drunk," exclaimed the pit to a man.) I repeat that man is—("Take that!"—an apple in Fitzflam's eye.) I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... Mackie may have reasons, proofs; and be not an impostor after all, dressing up a tale that over-sanguine Charles may bring her back again to Scotland. Well—well! I am full of sadness and perplexities: but we shall hear it out ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Sterne's life to pieces, holding up the shreds and warning the reader that any nobility apparent in his book will be nothing better than a sham. Sterne is scarcely arrived at Calais and in conversation with the Monk before you are cautioned how you listen to the impostor. "Watch now," says the critic; "he'll be at his tricks in a moment. Hey, paillasse! There!—didn't I tell you?" And yet I am as sure that the opening pages of the Sentimental Journey are full of genuine feeling as I ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... stand'st thou here, impostor? So old, and yet so wicked,—Lie for gain? And gain so short as age can ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... this eternal truth and necessary fiction; namely, "that there is only one God, and Mahomet is the apostle of God:" from hence, in the idiom of the Koran, the belief of God is inseparable from the apostolic character of Mahomet. The fertile and politic imagination of this impostor admirably adapted his tenets to the prevailing and established customs; he tolerates polygamy, &c. and to add to the sanctity of his pernicious doctrines, he represents himself as having been visited by the angel Gabriel, in the cave of Hera, where he communicated to ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... a brother Henry, and yet I cannot say that Henry was an impostor. He came into existence in a curious way, and I can think of him now without malice as a child of smoke. The first I heard of Henry was at Pettigrew's house, which is in a London suburb, so conveniently situated that I can go there and back in one day. I was testing some new Cabanas, ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... about Mohammed, that he was a scheming impostor, a falsehood incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be no longer tenable ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... told me to come again. So I continued visiting him till he would see me no longer, and do what I might I could not obtain a glance of him. The canon now became impatient, more especially as he had given me a few pesetas out of the charities of the church. He frequently called me a bribon and impostor. At last, one morning I went to him, and said that I had proposed to return to Madrid, in order to lay the matter before the government, and requested that he would give me a certificate to the effect that I had performed a pilgrimage to Saint James, which I imagined would be of assistance ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Conde; but the scruples infused into the king long induced him to hesitate ere he removed the interdict which prohibited its representation. Neither were these scruples yet removed. Permission was, indeed, given to represent the piece, but under the title of the "Impostor," and calling the principal person Panulphe, for it seems the name of Tartuffe was particularly offensive. The king, having left Paris for the army, the president of the parliament of Paris prohibited any further ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Huanacocha, "my first and most serious charge against the young man who sits there, and whom we have for these many months past honoured and served as the re-incarnated Manco Capac, the father and founder of our nation, is that he is an impostor, with no right or title whatsoever to the service and reverence which we ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... the Aldermen and the Mayor considered her an impostor, and did not think she was wise at all, and they wished her to take her Black Cat and move beyond the limits of the city. She sang it beautifully; it sounded like the very finest Italian ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... ironically. "But I will do it—not so much, perhaps, because he is a prize-fighter, as because he is an impostor. Now go to the writing-table and draft me a proper letter to ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... bumptious self-assertiveness (I mean the expression in its complimentary sense) has already made you a bos'n's mate, and it will make an admiral of you in time, if you work it properly, you dear, incompetent old impostor! My dear fellow, I'd give my right arm for one tenth ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... increase my pay. They asked the Viceroy to give me 130 T per month (about $186) and house, but the Viceroy said I was but a boy; that I had seen no years and had only come here a week ago with no one to vouch for me, and that I might turn out an impostor. But he would risk 100 T on me anyhow, and as soon as I was reported favorably on by the college I would be raised—the agreement is to be for three years. For a few months I am to command a training ship—an ironclad that is in dry dock at present, until a captain in the English Navy ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... but those of the devil and of the British agents. My children, your conduct has much alarmed the white settlers near you. They desire that you will send away those people, and if they desire to have the impostor with them, they may carry him. Let him go to the lakes; he can hear the ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
... regular system of collaboration, which he never concealed. But whereas Dumas could turn out books that live, whoever his assistants were, could any of his assistants write books that live, without Dumas? One might as well call any barrister in good practice a thief and an impostor because he has juniors to "devil" for him, as make charges of this kind against Dumas. He once asked his son to help him; the younger Alexandre declined. "It is worth a thousand a year, and you have only to make objections," ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... young king found a bride in Austria. Yet the project counteracted the negotiations set on foot by Louis to secure Frederick II. for his own side, and induced the Emperor to take up a position of neutrality. An impostor appeared in Flanders who gave out that he was the old Count Baldwin, sometime Latin Emperor of the East, who had died in prison in Bulgaria twenty years before. Baldwin's daughter, Joan, appealed to Louis for support against the false Baldwin, whereupon Henry recognised his claims ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... my name is Hudson. I have come this morning to ask you to our house to live during your stay here. There will be no boat out for some days as yet." Still he looked half-doubtfully at the man whom he addressed, as though possibly he might be some impostor, so strange did he appear, unshaven, with long hair, and in garments which ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough
... details of the humorous persecution of this impostor by Swift, see "Prose Works," vol. i, pp. 298 et seq.—W. ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... deal like an impostor, in truth, as I stepped into the street, disdaining to inquire of any of the people of the Star and Garter where an American agent might be found. The day was gray and cheerless, the colour of my own spirits as I walked toward the east, knowing that the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... written. You know that in this volume the key to your inmost soul was contained. If I had been a profound and malignant impostor, what plenteous materials were thus furnished ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... of all this," said Sir Frederick Langley; "but we are here a body of gentlemen in arms and authority for King James; and whether you really, sir, be that Sir Edward Mauley, who has been so long supposed dead in confinement, or whether you be an impostor assuming his name and title, we will use the freedom of detaining you, till your appearance here, at this moment, is better accounted for; we will have no spies among ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... nature disavows, seemed suspicious to the more clear-sighted patriots. The boldest of them followed you, tore the mask from your visage, and cried—Citizens, this hero is but a courtier, this sage but an impostor. Now, thanks to you, the Revolution can no longer bite, you have cut the lion's claws; the people is more formidable to its conductors; they have reassumed the whip and spur, and you fly. Let civic crowns strew your paths, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... wife," said he, "you are right. Our son should be known as my heir; but every one believes I died long ago when I was a child. If you went out among them with the boy and told them he was my son, they would laugh at you, and either think you were an impostor or that you were crazy. If we could but gain possession of the necklace, then I could go out from the garden with you, and if I showed myself to my people they would be obliged ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... Holy Land.... Printed for J. Johnston, Cheapside.... Of whom may be had, by the same author, a new ed. (the third) of Farewell to England: with three other poems...." It was, no doubt, the success of his first venture which had stimulated the "Cheapside impostor," as Byron called him, to forgery on a ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... as time passed by, things went not so gaily with the impostor on the throne of Allthetime. And it was the Crown that did it—that wonderful ...
— The Uncrowned King • Harold Bell Wright
... very patiently, and went away with the air of a detected impostor, and soon got back safely to ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... might, by obtaining them, call on us in their extremity, when the urgency of the occasion should allow us no time for inquiry, and the peremptory mandate of our obligation compel us to do a brother's duty to a base impostor. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... ALESSANDRO DI, assumed name of an arch-impostor, his real name being Giuseppe Balsamo, born in Palermo, of poor parents; early acquired a smattering of chemistry and medicine, by means of which he perpetrated the most audacious frauds, which, when detected in one place were repeated with even more brazen effrontery ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... it. He shrank from that fact with the repugnance of an honest nature for what is not straightforward; but the matter was past helping. He should be obliged to play the impostor everywhere and with every one. He would mingle with men, shake their hands, share their friendships, eat their bread, and accept their favors—and deceive them under their very noses. Life would become one long trick, ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... a letter to Mr. Drake, our governor, ordering him to surrender Kissendas and the treasures immediately. The man whom he sent down arrived in a small boat, without any state or retinue; and Mr. Drake, believing that he was an impostor, paid no attention to the demand, but expelled him from the settlement. Two days ago a letter came from the viceroy; or, as we generally call him, the nabob, to Mr. Drake, ordering him instantly to demolish all the fortifications which he understood ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... futtock- shrouds, some unseen arm should all at once tumble me overboard. Therefore I held my peace; while Jarl went on to declare, that with regard to the character of the brigantine, his mind was now pretty fully made up;—she was an arrant impostor, a shade of a ship, full of sailors' ghosts, and before we knew where we were, would dissolve in a supernatural squall, and leave us twain in the water. In short, Jarl, the descendant of the superstitious old Norsemen, was full of old Norse ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... such questions, charge, after careful investigation, that a great fraud has been committed in this folio; that its marginal readings, instead of being as old as they seem, and as Mr. Collier has asserted them to be, are modern fabrications, and that, consequently, Mr. Collier is either an impostor or a dupe. The charge is not a new one. The weight that it carries, and the impression that it has produced, are owing to the position of the men who make it, and the evidence which they have published in its support. It was made, however, six years ago,—but vaguely. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... claim. He claimed to be God-Man, to be divine; to have come from heaven. He said: "Before Abraham was I am" (John viii. 58). I could not understand this; and I was driven to the conclusion—and I challenge any candid man to deny the inference, or meet the argument—that Jesus Christ is either an impostor or deceiver, or He is the God-Man—God manifest in the flesh. And for these reasons. The first commandment is, "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me" (Exod. xx. 2). Look at the millions throughout Christendom who worship Jesus Christ as God. If Christ be not God this is idolatry. We are ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... of September, so that the reactionaries could elect their own false delegates to this Congress. I tell you now, the Lettish soldiers have many times said, 'No more resolutions! No more talk! We want deeds-the Power must be in our hands!' Let these impostor delegates leave the Congress! The Army is ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... person of a Melitopol peasant called Belozvorof, who announced that on a given day he would ascend into heaven. On the day appointed a great crowd collected, but he failed to keep his promise, and was handed over to the police as an impostor by the Molokanye themselves. Unfortunately they were not always so sensible as on that occasion. In the very next year many of them were persuaded by a certain Lukian Petrof to put on their best garments and start for the Promised Land in the Caucasus, where ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... some ray of light to gladden it. His first impression was that the visitor belonged to the Fourth Alabama, and would readily recognize him as an impostor; but he was in a measure relieved to find that none of the family gave the soldier more than a friendly greeting, which proved him to be a stranger to them as well as to himself. Yet he might belong to the Fourth Alabama; and then it occurred to him that the man ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... allowance for the shock of the fall from being Lady Clare to finding herself the child of a nurse". But the expression is Miss Ferrier's: "Oh that she had suffered me to remain the beggar I was born"; and again to her lover: "You have loved an impostor ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... in a voice husky with rage, while every syllable I uttered seemed as new fuel to my fury, "scoundrel! impostor! accursed villain! you shall not—you shall not dog me unto death! Follow me, or I stab you where you stand!"—and I broke my way from the ball-room into a small ante-chamber adjoining—dragging him unresistingly with ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Ghost. What sayest thou? Hast thou committed it? Nay, I know thou hast not, if thou wouldst be saved by Christ. Yea, it is impossible that thou shouldst have done it, if indeed thou wouldst be saved by him. No man can desire to be saved by him, who he yet judgeth to be an impostor, a magician, a witch. No man can hope for redemption by that blood which he yet counteth an unholy thing. Nor will God ever suffer such an one to repent, who has, after light and profession of him, thus horribly, and devil-like, contemned and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... epoch.... At a dinner party one of the guests refers to Howells as the "foremost novelist who is never read." The book is dedicated to "Cherubina, dulcissime rerum." Saltus returned to the central theme of "Enthralled" in a story called "The Impostor," printed in "Ainslee's" for ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... be an impostor, she carries marks but too evident and too dreadful in her countenance of the sufferings ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... there was the inevitable admixture of quackery about our reforming sage; his warmest admirers cannot but admit that he savours somewhat strongly of the holy impostor. Those charms and amulets, those dark gnomic aphorisms which constitute the stock-in-trade of all religious cheap-jacks, the bribe of future life, the sacerdotal tinge with its complement of mendacity, the secrecy of doctrine, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... world. This is the same religion that failed to successfully meet the hordes of Mohammed. Mohammed wrested from the disciples of the cross the fairest part of Europe. It was known that he was an impostor. They knew he was because the people of Mecca said so, and they knew that Christ was not because the people of Jerusalem said he was. This impostor wrested from the disciples of Christ the fairest part of Europe, and that fact sowed the seeds of distrust and infidelity ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... dressing, he found himself persistently thinking of the strange name, "Tantibba." "It is odd how that name haunts me," he thought. "I wish I could see it written: I haven't the least idea how it is spelled. I wonder if she is an impostor. Her garden didn't look like it." Presently he sauntered out: the morning stir was just beginning in the village. The child to whom he had spoken at "Tantibba's" gate, the night before, came up, driving the same flock of goats. The little fellow, as he passed, pulled the ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... tongues, crazy for the water that he had held to our mouths, the Governor arrived, dropped into a chair, hid his face in his hands, and, before we had time to speak to him, exclaimed: "Kill me, kill me! I am a miserable impostor. The combinazione has fallen through. Pechero! the combinazione has fallen through!" And he cried and sobbed, threw himself on his knees, tore out his hair by handfuls and rolled on the carpet; he called us all by our nicknames, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... of jealousy? Now, what's the event? Octavia is removed; But Cleopatra's banished. Thou, thou villain, Hast pushed my boat to open sea; to prove, At my sad cost, if thou canst steer it back. It cannot be; I'm lost too far; I'm ruined: Hence, thou impostor, traitor, monster, devil!— I can no more: Thou, and my griefs, have sunk Me down so low, that I want ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... du Tilh, an Impostor, who deceived a Man's Wife and Relations, and puzzled, for a long Time, the Parliament of France. Memoirs of the famous Madam de Brinvilliers, who poisoned her Father, and two Brothers, and attempted the Life of her Sister, &c. The Misfortunes ...
— The Annual Catalogue (1737) - Or, A New and Compleat List of All The New Books, New - Editions of Books, Pamphlets, &c. • J. Worrall
... devout fell in fits and trances or were convulsed with strange throes called the jerks, and all sorts of superstitions grew up easily among them. The wildest of these perhaps was that of the Leatherwood God which flourished in Guernsey County, about the year 1828. The name of this fanatic or impostor, who was indeed both one and the other, was Joseph C. Dylks, and his title was given him because of his claim to be the Supreme Being, and because he first appeared to his worshipers on Leather-wood Creek at the town of Salesville. The leatherwood tree which gave this creek its name had ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... Nacena—even to your tenderest secret; which has been revealed to us in the dialogue just held between yourself and Mam Shebotha. Every word of that we've heard, with the lies she's been telling you. And let me tell you, that of all the wicked impostor's promises, there's but one she could have kept—that to rid you of her you deem a rival. And she could only have done that by doing murder; which was what she meant by ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... houses, has not been blessed with a princely private fortune. Not far from Woodstock is Minster Lovel, near the village of Whitney. Some fragments of the house remain, and it has its tale of interest, like all these old houses. Lord Lovel was one of the supporters of the impostor Simnel against Henry VII., and his rebellion being defeated in the decisive battle at Stoke in Nottinghamshire, Lord Lovel escaped by unfrequented roads and arrived home at night. He was so disguised that ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... three days, a far fiercer hatred against Christ would have been moulded. For observe: into what state of mind would this marvel have been received? Into any good-will towards Christ, which previously had been defeated by the belief that He was an impostor in the sense that He pretended to a power of miracles which in fact He had not? By no means. The sense in which Christ had been an impostor for them was in assuming a commission, a spiritual embassy with appropriate functions, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... revealed by Ormuzd to Zoroaster. If more closely pressed, however, they would have to admit that they cannot understand one word of the sacred writings in which they profess to believe, nor could they give any reason why they believe Zoroaster to have been a true prophet, and not an impostor. 'As a body,' says Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji, 'the priests are not only ignorant of the duties and objects of their own profession, but are entirely uneducated, except that they are able to read and write, and that, also, often very imperfectly. They do not ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... the role of impostor, but it might be justifiable in this case. Mr. Dalton, I want to make improvements here that shall benefit the people directly, and I don't want to begin by having them laugh at ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... Shakespeare, and who was assassinated by a servant whose name he had omitted in his will. Milton lived for some time in a house in Holborn that opened at the back on Lincoln's Inn Fields. Fox Court leads us to the curious inquiry whether Savage, the poet, was a conscious or an unconscious impostor; and at the Blue Boar Inn Cromwell and Ireton discovered by stratagem the treacherous letter of King Charles to his queen, that rendered Cromwell for ever the King's enemy. These are only a few of the countless associations ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... not. But you will find that a good many people find fault with me. You have no idea what the critics say sometimes. They declare that I am an impostor, a copyist; they say that ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him.' Are there any who give counter-evidence; that say, 'We have tried it. It is all a sham and imagination. We have asked this Christ of yours to forgive us, and He has not. We have asked Him to cleanse us, and He has not. We have tried Him, and He is an impostor, and we will have no more to do with Him.' There are people, alas! who have gone back to their wallowing in the mire, but it was not because Christ had failed in His promises, but because they did not care to have them fulfilled any more. Jesus Christ does not promise that His salvation shall ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... she was awakened. And, lest this should not be sufficient, here stood one before whom she had abased and humbled herself, whose insolence she had borne meekly and lovingly, whose feet she had set upon her neck. Here he stood, insolent and unfeeling still; a false impostor, whom might God ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... of things in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, as the great criterion of the truth of my story. I have described the apartments, and now, in this volume, have added many further particulars, with such a description of them as my memory has enabled me to make. I have offered, in case I should be proved an impostor, to submit to any punishment which may be proposed— even to a re-delivery into the hands of my bitterest enemies, to suffer what they may ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... an expensive manner; and she went in a coach every morning to St. James's end of the town, on pretence of soliciting for her husband's commission, and to obtain her own fortune. But it was at length discovered that the woman was an impostor; and the poor country people were obliged to sell their horses by auction towards defraying the expenses of the inn before they could set out on their return home, which they did on foot, ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... cry of "Hakeem" on her lips. Djabal stabs himself on her body, thus "exalting" himself to her. But he has first committed his Druses to the care of Lois, to be led back to their mountain home. He remains Hakeem for them, though branded as an impostor by the rest of the world. Directly, or indirectly, he has done the work of ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... (1743-1793), Italian alchemist and impostor, was born at Palermo on the 8th of June 1743. Giuseppe Balsamo—for such was the "count's" real name—gave early indications of those talents which afterwards gained for him so wide a notoriety. He received the rudiments ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... killing him. As long as he remained alive his friends would never question his calculations, and the fiasco which was possible under any circumstances would then be assured. I had with me an Eastern drug, which I had bought from an Indian fakir once in Murzapoor. The man was an impostor, whose tricks did not impose on me. But the drug, however he came by it, was reliable. It was a poison which produced a mild form of cerebritis that dulled but did not deaden the mental powers. It acted almost identically whether administered ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... Let a man become earnest in prayer, earnest in work, or rise in any way above the dead level in which so many are content to rest, and he will be often spoken of in tones of pity, sneered at as a fanatic, or denounced as an impostor. This suspicion with which earnestness in the Church of Christ is often regarded may be accounted for. (a) There has been a vast deal of zeal in the Church about religion which has not been zeal for religion: about matters of ritual, Church government, ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... of three hundred a-year as a bounty, for which I could make no return, was I own humiliating to my pride. It made the question continually recur—'Whether it did not give me the air of an impostor? A kind of swindler of sentiment? A pretender to superior virtue, for the purpose of gratifying vice?' It seemed at a blow to rob me of all independence; and leave me a manacled slave to the opinions, not only of Mr. Evelyn, but, by a kind ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... by a usurper who had no great talent to recommend him, nor much political strength behind his brilliant personal courage, their first instinct was to refuse submission to his authority, and to drive him out as an impostor. It was not until they had been chilled and disappointed by the scornful coldness of the Empress Queen's imperious bearing that they saw how much pleasanter it would be to rule Stephen than to serve Maud. Yet ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... antique—but that these so-called Ossianic poems were ever discovered and translated as they stand in their present form, I believe in no wise. As Dr. Johnson wrote to Macpherson, so I would say, 'Mr. Macpherson, I thought you an impostor, and think so still.' ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... says that "If an innovator should appear, holding out hope to those in despair, and curing disorders which the faculty have recorded as irremediable, he is at once, and without inquiry, denounced as an empiric and an impostor." He, too, cites the inevitable names of Galileo and Harvey, and refers to the feelings excited by the great discovery of Jenner. From the treatment of the great astronomer who was visited with the punishment of other heretics by the ecclesiastical authorities ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... asks Jurgen, more hurt than angry, "that you suspect me of uncandid dealing and, in short, of being an impostor!" ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... with truth that she was crushed by pure grief. There was fear of all things, fear of solitude, fear of sudden change, fear of terrible revelations, fear of some necessary movement she knew not whither, fear that she might be discovered to be a poor wretched impostor who never could have been justified in standing in the same presence with emperors and princes, with duchesses and cabinet ministers. This and the fact that the dead body of the man who had so lately ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... great men's levees, or whispering in some minister's ear. That the more you fed him, the more hungry and importunate he grew. That he often passed for the true son of Virtue and Honour, and the genuine for an impostor. That he was born distorted and a dwarf, but by force of art appeared of a handsome shape, and taller than the usual size; and that none but those who were wise and good, as well as vigilant, could discover his ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift |
