"Inimitable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... end of the sixteenth, and beginning of the seventeenth, century, shone that constellation of English musicians, whose inimitable madrigals are still, and long will be, the delight of every lover of vocal harmony. It is to Italy, however, that we are indebted for this species of composition. The madrigal is a piece of vocal music adapted to words of an amorous or cheerful cast, composed for four, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... are nonsense. But in the lighter sorts of prose, which aim at entertainment, and in poetry, which is dependent on meter and harmony, form is of preeminent importance. The story of "Rip Van Winkle," for instance, owes its perennial charm to the inimitable grace and humor with which ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... which are told with inimitable spirit and vigor in his 'Autobiography.' Arago's work required him to occupy stations on the summits of the highest peaks in the mountains of southeastern Spain. The peasants were densely ignorant and hostile to all foreigners, so that an escort of troops was required ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... With inimitable ease, the beautiful woman mentioned a very considerable sum. The skeptical man got up to give a few orders, and a short time afterwards the money ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... are simply inimitable, and will delight boys and girls of mature age, as well as their juniors. No happier combination of author and artist than this volume presents could be found to furnish healthy amusement to the young folks. The book Is an artistic one ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... Moriarity I never could be quite sure when I came to the end in pronouncing it. I'm glad his name is not Moriarity—not because it is Irish, for I like the Irish; so does Brown, for he is married to one of them. Any one who has been in Cork and heard the fine old Irishman say in his musical and inimitable voice, "Tis a lovely dye," such a one will ever after have a snug place in his affections for the Irish, whether he has kissed the "Blarney stone" or not. If he has heard this same driver of a jaunting-car rhapsodize about ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... to his 'painfulness,' we have that so well expounded and illustrated in John Bunyan's Mr. Fearing, that all I need to do is to recall that inimitable character to your happy memory. 'He was a man that had the root of the matter in him, but at the same time he was the most troublesome pilgrim that ever I met with in all my days. He lay roaring at the Slough of Despond for above a month ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... University, home though she be of nearly every English poet worth reading, rejected the Siege of Corinth, though the work of a Trinity man; would not take in the Thanksgiving Ode of Mr. Wordsworth, of St. John's College; declined Leigh Hunt's Story of Rimini; vetoed the Headlong Hall of the inimitable Peacock, and, most wonderful of all, would have nothing to say to Scott's Antiquary, being probably disgusted to find that a book with so promising a title was only ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... rather the mere possibility of failure, for when I looked round on my competitors I was encouraged by the thought that dear old Woollet knew more about a rate appeal than Littledale himself, while old Peter Ryland, with his inimitable Saxon, was quite as good at the irremovability of a pauper as Codd was in accounting for the illegal removal of a duck, and both in their several branches of knowledge more learned than Alderson or Bayley. ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... friends into the wide-verandahed house, sat down with them in the cool trellised room, where the wine shone on the lamp-lighted tablecloth; tasted of their exotic food—the raw fish, the bread-fruit, the cooked bananas, the roast pig served with the inimitable miti, and that king of delicacies, palm-tree salad; seen and heard by fits and starts, now peering round the corner of the door, now railing within against invisible assistants, a certain comely young native lady in a sacque, who seemed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... happiest in these efforts; and there was something pathetic in his earnestness and perseverance in attempting a thing so many can do, but which he could not do for want of a better training; while he could do the inimitable so easily. ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... had lost her head completely was sufficiently manifested by the fact that she had begun to cry—which made it necessary for her to use her handkerchief with inimitable skill to prevent the tears from encroaching on her ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... were fully realized, and Aunt Pen had fallen asleep behind her veil, Debby took out a book, and indulged in her favorite luxury, soon forgetting past, present, and future in the inimitable history of Martin Chuzzlewit. The sun blazed, the cars rattled, children cried, ladies nodded, gentlemen longed for the solace of prohibited cigars, and newspapers were converted into sun-shades, nightcaps, and ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... The result of this labour was that in 1878 Baden-Powell passed the Garrison Class, taking a First Class and Extra Certificate (Star) for Topography. During the lectures he distinguished himself by making inimitable caricatures, for which he was sometimes taken to task by the authorities. Also he could not help poking fun at the examiners in the papers themselves. Asked, "Do you know why so-and-so, and so-and-so?" Baden-Powell would ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... wild. It was his first glimpse of the mixed peoples. A dozen loungers, handsome, careless, graceful with the inimitable elegance of the half-breed's leisure, chatted, rolled cigarettes, and surveyed with heavy-eyed indolence such of the town as could be viewed from the shade in which they lay. Three girls, in whose dark cheeks glowed a rich French comeliness, were comparing ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... in some way or other did not please her, to hear it sent down again in the return lift accompanied by a reprimand that was very much to the point, and was audible to the assembled room. The whole table on those occasions would break into laughter, for her reprimand was always spiced with inimitable humour, which penetrated even ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... portraits of the Cornaro family by Titian, is said to have been one of the finest things on record. The sly and pungent humour, and the banter with which the counsel derided and laughed down this witness, were inimitable. The printer won his case; but he eventually consented to remove his steam presses from the neighbourhood, on the Duke paying him a certain sum to be determined by the ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... my dear rustic, you're quite in the wrong box. The Frenchman means this as the very highest compliment. Beautiful, however, she must have been; and a Cinderella, I hope, not a Cinderellula, considering that she had the inimitable walk and step of the Andalusians, which cannot be accomplished without something of a ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... and deftly touched with a gentle humor. It is a dainty book—daintily illustrated."—New York Tribune. "A wholesome, bright, refreshing story, an ideal book to give a young girl."—Chicago Record-Herald. "An idyllic story, replete with pathos and inimitable humor. As story-telling it is perfection, and as portrait-painting it is true to the ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... Paris. He died on the 26th of August 1890 at his country seat, Mircesti. His best title to fame consists in the fact that he gave the first impetus to the collection of Rumanian popular songs and first drew attention to their inimitable ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Kuh-i-Kwajah mountain, or whether the owner of the animal had visited the place, or whether the place had been named merely in honour of the legend of the "animal of laughter." All I can say is that when Mahommed, with a grave face, had finished his inimitable story, Gul Khan and I were also seized with such uncontrollable fits of hilarity that, notwithstanding our mournful surroundings of graves and dead-houses, we, too, very nearly went to swell the number of victims of Mahommed ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... her noble speech and behaviour were to me, at the time when the bare recollecting and transcribing them obliged me to drop my pen. The women had tears in their eyes. I was silent for a few moments.—At last, Matchless excellence! Inimitable goodness! I called her, with a voice so accented, that I was half-ashamed of myself, as it was before the women—but who could stand such sublime generosity of soul in so young a creature, her loveliness giving grace to all she said? Methinks, said I, [and ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... the invitation carefully. Was it genuine? Or was it a plant? He was no handwriting expert, but he had a feeling that it was a disguised script. There is an inimitable looseness of design in the chirography of an illiterate person. He did not find here the awkwardness of the inexpert; rather the elaborate imitation of an amateur ignoramus. Yet he was not sure. He could give no definite ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... scenery on paper, just for the love of it; for when the pictures were done she would give them away or throw them away without the least compunction. She had a fine sense of the ludicrous and was all the time seeing funny things, which she described in a manner quite inimitable. She had grown up in New York, before her father's death, in the most select of Knickerbocker circles, but there was not a trace of aristocracy in her ways. She was sociable with the ostler and the office-boy, and agreeable ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... of peculiar elegance and beauty, emblematical of the victory, executed by the inimitable Louis Pingo, Esq. principal engraver of the Royal Mint in the Tower of London, was struck on the occasion, by command of his majesty; who ordered one to be given, and in future worn by, each of the captains, all of whom afterwards received the honour of knighthood. The ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... Reader in this Tragicall Age where the Theater hath been so much out-ailed, congratulate thy owne happinesse, that in this silence of the Stage, thou hast a liberty to reade these inimitable Playes, to dwell and converse in these immortall Groves, which were only shewd our Fathers in a conjuring glasse, as suddenly removed as represented, the Landscrap is now brought home by this optick, ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher
... Medicis, whose very "bends are adornings." What loftiness and awe have I seen expressed in the step of an actress, not yet deceased, when first she advanced, and came down towards the audience! I was ravished, and with difficulty kept my seat! Pass we to the mazes of the dance, the inimitable charms and picturesque beauty that may be given to the figure while still unmoved, and the ravishing grace that dwells in it during its endless changes ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... visit their courts. There is endless variety in the poems of Hafiz, and they are replete with surpassing beauty of thought, feeling, and expression. The grace, ease, and fancy of his numbers are inimitable, and there is a magic in his lays which few even of his professed enemies have been able to resist. To the young, the gay, and the enthusiastic his verses are ever welcome, and the sage discovers in them a hidden mystery which reconciles him to their subjects. His tomb, near Shiraz, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... gazing upon their richly-coloured, luxuriant, and feathery foliage, reflected in vivid freshness upon the bosom of that transcendently natural mirror;—there, copse-wood, equally foreign and lovely, closed all interstices—whilst fruits of tempting form and colour, and flowers of inimitable hues, flashed like gems in the unclouded sunlight. I bowed down my head for a draught of the cool, clear waters, and immediately upon tasting them, felt through my frame a pleasant, vivifying thrill;—I felt also as if I had at once thrown off the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... says the inimitable Abercrummie, {3} 'stands upon an ascending ground from east to west, and lyes open to the south. It hath one principals street, with houses upon both sides, built of freestone; and it is beautifyed with the situation of two castles, one at each end of this street. That ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pronunciation, rendered him very popular. In private he was exceedingly kind to the poor and to children, giving to the former a third part of his small income of L100 a-year, and writing for the other his inimitable hymns. Besides these, he published a well-known treatise on Logic, another on 'The Improvement of the Mind,' besides various theological productions, amongst which his 'World to Come' has been preeminently popular. In 1728, he received from Edinburgh and Aberdeen an unsolicited diploma of Doctor ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... The only thing that apparently distinguished them from those who lacked their advantages, who looked up reverently to them and read enviously of their doings in the papers, was their assurance, a quality ostensibly inimitable; yet she imitated it with seemingly flawless art. A contradiction that defied ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... humanity of heathendom. The after-fortunes of the Christian legend, on the other hand, and the naive ferocities and fantasticalities of the medieval world provoked him rather to scherzo,—audacious and inimitable scherzo, riotously grotesque on the surface, but with a grotesqueness so penetrated and informed by passion that it becomes sublime. Holy-Cross Day and The Heretic's Tragedy both culminate, like Karshish and Clean, in a glimpse ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... and in this I am borne out by Chaucer, no mean authority, who, in his well-known picture of the parson, in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, amongst the various items of piety and virtuousness with which, in that inimitable piece of character-painting, he credits the "pore persoun of a toun," distinctly states (I quote Mr. Wright's ...
— Notes and Queries, 1850.12.21 - A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, - Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. • Various
... glow of romance. And while none are more familiar with everything concerning the early history of Pueblo, it is equally true that none are more ready to gratify an appreciative listener, and the writer is indebted for much that follows to their inimitable recitals. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... illustration exactly as well as any other. Let any one turn to his character of Somers, for whom he had so much admiration, and then turn to Clarendon's character of Falkland;—'a person of such prodigious parts of learning and knowledge, of that inimitable sweetness and delight in conversation, of so flowing and obliging a humanity and goodness to mankind, and of that primitive simplicity and integrity of life, that if there were no other brand upon this odious and accursed civil war ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... to the circumstance that we Germans are as yet nearer to barbarism than the French;—perhaps even the most remarkable creation of Richard Wagner is not only at present, but for ever inaccessible, incomprehensible, and inimitable to the whole latter-day Latin race: the figure of Siegfried, that VERY FREE man, who is probably far too free, too hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too ANTI-CATHOLIC for the taste of old and mellow civilized nations. ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of the softest tints and colors, he made glowing appeals to the eternal and holy tranquillity of the state of being to which they were both fast hastening, and which had its type in the mysterious and imposing calm of that tranquil and inimitable void. He drew his moral in favor of a measured enjoyment of our advantages here, as well as of rendering love and justice to all who merited our esteem, and to the disadvantage of those iron prejudices which confine the best sentiments in the fetters of opinions ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... not tell over again the story, told with such inimitable picturesqueness here: how the two spies, swimming the Jordan in flood, set out on their dangerous mission and found themselves in the house of Rahab, a harlot; how the king sent to capture them, how she hid them among the flax-stalks bleaching on the flat roof, confessed ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... posterity as trophies won from the depths of nescience; but his work, designed by his own genius, executed by his own hand, tracery and all, and every single stone signalized by his own private mark, indelible, characteristic, and inimitable—his work is the only record of his name. How deeply are its foundations rooted in space, and how lasting its materials ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... sang duets, to which Rupert played accompaniments on the banjo, while Ducky and Billykins led the applause, and Sylvia posed as audience, aping the languid, bored look of a fine lady at a concert with such inimitable mimicry that she came in for nearly as much applause as the proper performers from such of the other passengers as ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... and beckon. A voice comes from the garden bed; it is the complaint of the pansy. "Here I lie," it says, "with all my jewels low in the dust. Where is the purple of my amethysts, the yellow of my topaz, the inimitable sheen of my milk-white pearls? Alas and alack for pansies when the rain beats them earthward!" The marigold, like a yellow-haired boy with his straw hat well back from his flying mane, whistles softly to himself for joy, and buries his hands in the pockets ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... to find artistic value in the turns; and red-nosed comedians were lauded to the skies for their sense of character; fat female singers, who had bawled obscurely for twenty years, were discovered to possess inimitable drollery; there were those who found an aesthetic delight in performing dogs; while others exhausted their vocabulary to extol the distinction of conjurers and trick-cyclists. The crowd too, under another influence, was become an object of sympathetic interest. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... of Norwich, and consisting of translations from his prized volume, appeared in 1826. Dr. Jessop surmises that these translations must have brought him in a very respectable sum, but Mr. Augustus Birrell, in his own inimitable way, expresses his doubt on the point. "I hope it was so," he writes, "but, as Dr. Johnson once said about the immortality of the soul, I should ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... whether he characteristically had taken the matter into his own hands, the histories I have read do not tell. But they do tell of his galloping up, breathless on a lathered horse, making the little force understand the danger of their position, pleading with his inimitable eloquence and advancing the reasons for their retreat at once. The men were stubborn; they did not want to retreat. But he talked. He proved that the English could take the scrap of a fort in four hours; he exhorted and urged, and ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... John B. Gough can forget his marvelous eloquence, his wit and his pathos, his scintillating humor, his inimitable dramatisms. He did not have the polished brilliancy of Everett or the elegant scholarship of Phillips, and yet when these numbered thousands of admirers, Gough numbered his tens of thousands. In his autobiography this man tells ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... impressed by the wonderful rings, suspended around it as if by a miracle. No previous inspection of pictures of these rings can rob them of their effect upon the eye and the mind. They are overwhelming in their inimitable singularity, and they leave every spectator truly amazed. Sir John Herschel has remarked that they have the appearance of an "elaborately artificial mechanism." They have even been regarded as habitable bodies! What we are to think of that proposition we shall ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... Skag followed her among the people going back to the village. Once she whirled with an inimitable movement, flinging her fingers toward Skag, in a gesture that seemed to focus the eyes of the whole world upon him. (And in that instant, the American men could not have spoken a word—for the richness of ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... favorable to an adventurous cast of incidents, that they would everywhere pass for romances, if severed from the documents which attest their fidelity to facts. In the former class stand the admirable novels of De Foe; and, on a lower range, within the same category, the inimitable "Vicar of Wakefield;" upon which last novel, without at all designing it, I once became the author of the following instructive experiment. I had given a copy of this little novel to a beautiful girl of seventeen, the daughter of a statesman ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... very much alike all the world over! This great dagoba was put up by one of the Cingalese kings, Dutugemunu, to celebrate his great victory over the Tamils, just as Rameses II. put up the inimitable temple of Abu Simbel to celebrate his victory over the Syrians. Before Dutugemunu came to the throne the Tamils had usurped all power and made one of their own men, called Elala, king, and the young prince, exiled from his capital city, met ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... Clayton, with inimitable assurance. "But it IS so, I can assure you nevertheless. I don't believe he got once a nail's breadth off the Bible truth. He told me how he had been killed—he went down into a London basement with a candle to look for a leakage of gas—and described himself as ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... admired those done a great way off, and a great while ago; he could not bear any thing painted by any of his own countrymen. One day being in an auction-room where there was a number of capital pictures, and among the rest an inimitable painting of fruits and flowers, the connoisseur would not give his opinion of the picture until he had examined his catalogue; when, finding it was done by one of his own countrymen, he pulled out his eye-glass, exclaiming: 'This fellow has spoiled a fine piece of canvass; ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... writing, and in Addison's hands it fulfilled to perfection the needs of the essay style. He avoids verbiage and excessive adornment, he is content to tell what he sees or knows or thinks as simply as possible (and even with a tendency towards the conversational), and he has an inimitable feeling for just the right word, just the most elegantly turned phrase and period. Do not imagine this sort of thing is the result of a mere gift for style: true, it could not happen without that, but neither can it happen without ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... and on the rim of despair, we witness the exquisite budding of the melody in D. It is an aubade, a nocturne of the morn—if the contradictory phrase be allowed. There is morning freshness in its hue and scent, and, when it bursts, a parterre of roses. The close of the section is inimitable. All the more sorrow at what follows: wild disorder and the luxuriance called tropical. When B major is compassed we sigh, for it augurs us a return of delight. The ending is not that of a sonata, but a love lyric. For Chopin is ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... began to ring. The organ of St. Pierre, touched by his master hand, taught the gay airs to which the new noels were cast. And all Avignon presently would be singing them, and soon the chorus would swell throughout the Comtat and Provence. The inimitable Troubadour of Bethlehem died just as he had tied together the eighth of his little sheaves.... His noels have been reprinted many times; and, thanks be to God, they will be printed again ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... (up on the American Continent, not down as with us) and sat in the full draught of the night-air. A pleasant young Irishman named Martin, a near relative of the Miss Martin who collaborated with Miss Somerville in the inimitable Experiences of an Irish R.M. noticed this. "By Gad! that fellow will get fever if he sits in the draught from the swamps. I'll go and warn him." I told Martin that the South American spoke no English. "That's all right," cried ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... speaks the language nearly with the same facility as he does his mother language. He is married to an amiable Englishwoman. I wish him all possible happiness. And now let me tell you something of the so often imitated, but perhaps inimitable ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... kill him off, too, was more than his augmented stock of human nature could endure. After all, the lad's death had been purely accidental, wanton. It was just that he should live—with one of the author's inimitable suggestions of future greatness; but, at the end, the parting was almost as bitter as the other. Orth knew then how men feel when their sons go forth to encounter the world and ask no more of ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... sorts and sizes; of course I mean within limits, though limits down perhaps rather more than limits up. There are always artists—he's beautiful and inimitable to the cher confrere; and then gros bonnets of many kinds—ambassadors, cabinet ministers, bankers, generals, what do I know? even Jews. Above all always some awfully nice women—and not too many; sometimes an actress, an artist, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... and a stone, deeply hollowed at the top, was produced, containing beef fat and a piece of rag for a wick, which burned with a strong flaring light. The women gathered themselves up and sat round a large calabash of poi, conveying the sour paste to their mouths with an inimitable twist of the fingers, laying their heads back and closing their eyes with a look of animal satisfaction. When they had eaten they lay down as before, with their chins on their pillows, and again the row of great brown eyes confronted me. Deborah, Kaluna, and the women talked ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... at that time profuse of legendary lore, he inserted it in the shape of a note to Waverley, the first of his romantic offences. Had he then known, as he now does, the value of such a story, it is likely that, as directed in the inimitable receipt for making an epic poem, preserved in the Guardian, he would have kept it for some ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... not close, however, without an exhibition of the peculiar aptitude of the Buss for disastrous action! On the 8th that inimitable vessel—styled by Teddy Maroon a "tub," and by the other men, variously, a "bumboat," a "puncheon," and a "brute" began to tug with ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... braids fell into the big pocket made of her up-turned skirt. She looked like some elfin sprite painted in pastels, with all the soft greens of foliage, and the wonderfully mellow tints of crimsoned gold shed from the sunset, surrounding the picture and forming an inimitable background. ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... was in those days admirably effectual, but it would be considered ridiculous in ours—except from the lips of such original geniuses as Mr Spurgeon, who hit upon this vein and made a fortune of souls as well as money. He is, however, inimitable, and any attempt at entering into his domain would probably have the same result as that which attended an imitation of Latimer by a country minister, mentioned by Fuller. 'I remember,' he says, 'in my time (about the middle of the seventeenth ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... and powerful class, were bound together by more than official ties, and hence, as a "family compact," they were enabled to act together as one man. This class, with few exceptions, were members of the Church of England. They regarded her—apart from her inimitable liturgy and scriptural standards of faith—with the respect and love which her historical prestige and assured status naturally inspired them. They maintained, without question, the traditional right ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... which is apparent in Aristotle and Hippocrates, although the form of them is different. But the writings of Plato, unlike the writings of Aristotle, seem never to have been confused with the writings of his disciples: this was probably due to their definite form, and to their inimitable excellence. The three dialogues which we have offered in the Appendix to the criticism of the reader may be partly spurious and partly genuine; they may be altogether spurious;—that is an alternative which must be frankly admitted. Nor can we maintain of some ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... the 'Gates of Calais.' 'You are an artist, I presume; I noticed you from the end of the gallery, when you first stepped back to look at my best picture. I painted all the objects in this room from nature and still life.' 'Your Green-grocer's Shop,' said I, 'is inimitable; the drops of water on that savoy appear as if they had just fallen from the element. Van Huysun could not have pencilled them with greater delicacy.' 'What do you think,' said he, 'of my Butcher's Shop?' 'Your pluck is bleeding fresh, and ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... absence being nigh expired, the lovers were in great perplexity; and nothing seemed so likely to contribute to their comfort during such unavoidable separation as a miniature portrait of each from the hands of this inimitable painter. Leonora sat first, and the lover was in raptures. Hour by hour he watched the progress of his work in a little gloomy chamber, where the artist, like some automaton fixture, was always found in the same place, occupied too as it ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... que j'ai traversee, se trouve presque couverte de ces masses; les uns sur les sommets des montagnes les plus elevees, les autres sur la pente et dans les vallees. Plusieurs de ces masses sont arrangees les uns sur les autres avec un art inimitable, les autres ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... species, to our valuable friend the justly celebrated naturalist J.J. AUDUBON, as a small tribute of respect to his eminent talents, and the highly important services he has rendered science. The drawing which accompanies this paper, is from his inimitable pencil. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... unanimated nature, and in many of his finest poems most beautifully he has enforced it. His thoughts are original and his style new and unborrowed: all that he has written is distinguished by a happy carelessness, a bounding elasticity of spirit, and a singular felicity of expression, simple yet inimitable; he is familiar yet dignified, careless, yet correct, and concise, yet clear and full. All this and much more is embodied in the language of humble life—a dialect reckoned barbarous by scholars, but which, coming from the lips of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the way, had no love for Canning, and failed to a quite noteworthy extent to understand him—like the rest, took a gloomy view of the situation, which he summed up in his own inimitable fashion. 'Politics, domestic and foreign, are very discouraging; Jesuits abroad, Turks in Greece, "No Poperists" in England! A panting to burn B; B fuming to roast C; C miserable that he can't reduce D to ashes; and D consigning to eternal perdition the first three ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... then, looking at the other, who rode behind him, she caught at the tree with crooked hands and began to sink slowly to her knees. He was tall and slight, he rode with inimitable grace. As she stared, he took off his sombrero, rested his hand on the saddle-horn, and looked haggardly, eagerly, up the trail toward the house. His face was whiter, thinner, worn by protracted mental pain, but it was the beautiful, living ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... intimacy. While thus acknowledging a debt, I must also avow that another motive strongly prompts me upon this occasion. I am not aware of any one, to whom with such propriety a volume of anecdote and adventure should be inscribed, as to one, himself well known as an inimitable narrator. Could I have stolen for my story, any portion of the grace and humour with which I have heard you adorn many of your own, while I should deem this offering more worthy of your acceptance, I should also feel more confident ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... portion. Countless incandescent lamps were glowing in all the colors of the rainbow. The luminary effect gave us the impression as if a fiery serpent was meandering along these iridescent glass-tubes with inimitable velocity. ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... 5. Forms of Air (Clouds). Hardly more manageable than flames, and of no ornamental use, their majesty being in scale and color, and inimitable in marble. They are lightly traced in much of the cinque cento sculpture; very boldly and grandly in the strange Last Judgment in the porch of St. Maclou at Rouen, described in the "Seven Lamps." But the most elaborate imitations are altogether of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... stirred; and a kind of monotonous fitness, comparable to the words and air of "Sandy's Mull," preserved among the infinitesimal occurrences recorded. Some people work, in this manner, with even a strong touch. Mr. Trollope's inimitable clergymen naturally arise to the mind in this connection. But even Mr. Trollope does not confine himself to chronicling small beer. Mr. Crawley's collision with the Bishop's wife, Mr. Melnotte dallying in the deserted banquet-room, are typical incidents, epically conceived, fitly embodying ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... large a portion, he desired Hartley to proceed with his communication. Hartley accordingly proceeded to inform him of the particulars preceding his birth, and those which followed after it; while Middlemas, seated on a sea-chest, listened with inimitable composure to a tale which went to root up the flourishing hopes of wealth which he had lately ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... occurs so early in the play, since what follows is necessarily inferior in force. Dryden, while writing this scene, had unquestionably in his recollection the quarrel betwixt Brutus and Cassius, which was justly so great a favourite in his time, and to which he had referred as inimitable in his ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... protest against "Welch venison;" and indeed we do not understand by what conjuration allspice and claret can communicate the flavour of venison to mutton. We confess our fears that the flavour of venison (especially of its fat) is inimitable; but believe you may procure prime eight-toothed wether mutton, keep it the proper time, and send it to table with the accompaniments (Nos. 346 and 347, &c.) usually given to venison, and a rational epicure ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... snarled Denver to his companion in that inimitable, guarded whisper. "How we ever coming ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... did not often abound in the graces of metaphor, or sparkle with the brilliancy of wit, they were always animated, elegant, and classical. The strength of his oratory was intrinsic; it presented the rich and abundant resource of a clear discernment and a correct taste. His speeches are stampt with inimitable marks of originality. When replying to his opponents, his readiness was not more conspicuous than his energy: he was always prompt and always dignified. He could sometimes have recourse to the sportiveness of irony, but he did not often seek ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... working professions fare any better than trade at the hands of Plato. He draws for us an inimitable picture of the working lawyer,[118] and of his life of bondage; he shows how this bondage from his youth up has stunted and warped him, and made him small and crooked of soul, encompassing him with difficulties ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... is the handsomest species of this family. In grace and elegance of manner he has no equal. Such a gentle, high-bred air, and such inimitable ease and composure in his flight and movement! He is a poet in very word and deed. His carriage is music to the eye. His performance of the commonest act, as catching a beetle, or picking a worm ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... and words that afterwards contributed to the fortune of Puff; and it is amusing to observe how long this subject was played with by the current of Sheridan's fancy, till at last, like "a stone of lustre from the brook," it came forth with all that smoothness and polish which it wears in his inimitable farce, The Critic. Thus it is, too, and but little to the glory of what are called our years of discretion, that the life of the man is chiefly employed in giving effect to the wishes and plans ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... have been nourished in early youth on Mr Thackeray's inimitable The Rose and The Ring will remember how at the christening of Prince Giglio, the Fairy Blackstick, who was his godmother, said, "My poor child, the best thing I can send ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... although it is true,' which is what many people feel about Christianity. 'Dombey and Son' was the outlet for that curious psychology of Dickens which could get the best out of a pathetic incident by approaching it from a grotesque angle. It came, as Chesterton points out in his own inimitable way, 'into the inner chamber by coming down the chimney.' Which demonstrates the ever nearness of pathos to humour, of the absurd ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... will the gates of Paradise to themselves, and to become, at odd moments, one with the angels! But what purpose does it serve to speak of the faithless and of their harmless, smiles? As the Abbe Gelon has in his inimitable manner observed, "The heart is a fortress, incessantly assailed by ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... Burns had an inimitable ear for ballad feeling and for ballad rhythm and music. But, except for some vigorous satiric, political, and bacchanalian chants of his own, and the recasting of a few of the old-fashioned and lively rhymes like The Carl o' Kellyburn ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... scanty now, but he still can catch a salmon, and the bright zeal and loyalty of his soft brown eyes and the sprightly elevation of his tail are still among dogs as pre-eminent as they are to mankind inimitable. ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... I solicit nothing. I may allow myself to accept,—voilia tout." He bowed again, with the inimitable grace of the old regime, and stepped ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... meant to say, any of it;" he sighed angrily. "It's just what I meant not to say—confound it! You've done gloriously; you've played the thing through to perfection; you've made an inimitable success of it; but Wallencamp doesn't offer scope wide enough for your powers. I offer you a field hitherto untilled, left to the wandering winds and the birds of the air, extensive enough in its ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... this production, and its English translation by the Rev. W. Berwick, declaring them to be "of equal merit, and that they scarce deserve to be mentioned." But to the merit of this work we have testimony infinitely higher than the opinion of the Reverend Doctor. Thus, Howell, in his inimitable "Familiar Letters," a book which cannot be too highly commended, or too often read, says, "if you desire to read with pleasure all the virtues of this modern herb, you must read Dr. Thorius's Potologis, an accurate peece, couched in a strenuous heroic verse, and continuing its strength ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... of childish scorn she threw into the question was inimitable. Dora with difficulty ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... an equally sanguinary two days' conflict had been in progress. The Greeks attacked and finally captured the Bulgarian entrenched positions. Time after time their charges failed to reach, but eventually their persistent courage and inimitable elan won home, and the Bulgarians fled in utter rout and panic, leaving everything, even many ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... pretty Columbine and the agile Harlequin. Therefore Pulcinella had to be more boisterous and extravagant than ever; and he danced and capered, with despair in his heart; and the audience yelled, and shouted 'bravo, bravissimo!' Pulcinella was actually called before the curtain. He was pronounced inimitable. ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... choleric and sensitive, prompt to resent an insult, though quite free from malice or vindictiveness. He had not yet reached that high sense of his position when he could afford to treat the envious crowd with contempt. [24] He records in the satires which he now wrote, painting with inimitable humour each incident that arose, the attempts of the outsiders to obtain from him an introduction to Maecenas, [25] or some of that political information of which he was supposed to be the confidant. [26] At this period ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... and scarce paralleled by any. But a Tombstone can neither contain his character, nor is Marble necessary to transmit it to posterity; it is engraved in the minds of this generation, and will be always legible in his inimitable writings, nevertheless. He having served twenty years successfully in Parliament, and that with such Wisdom, Dexterity, and Courage, as becomes a true Patriot, the town of Kingston-upon-Hull, from whence ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... discipline were as original as they were persevering, and could the third-story room of the building occupied by the subject of this sketch be given tongue, it would tell a tale of frolic and drollery that would only find parallel in the inimitable pages of Marryatt. Convenient apparatus for the stewing or roasting of oysters, poaching of eggs, or the mixing of refreshing drinks, could be readily stowed away from the inspecting officer, or a roast goose or turkey be smuggled by a trusty darkey ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... that wherever any of our novelists has introduced a tradesman, he has either been an invention altogether, or a caricature. Even Bailie Nicol Jarvie never lived in the Saut Market in half such true flesh and blood as he does in Rob Roy. At all events, the inimitable Bailie is known to the universe at large by the additions made to his real character by the prodigal hand of his biographer, and the ridiculous contrasts in which he is placed with the caterans and reivers of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... Moon," the English equivalent of the original title being, "Comic History of the States and Empires of the Moon and the Sun." This entertaining satire is as fresh as it was on the day it was written: flying machines and gramophones, for instance, are curiously modern. His inimitable inventiveness makes him the most delightful of French writers between ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... learned professor writes, "Kinmont Willie is under vehement suspicion of being the work of Sir Walter Scott." Mr. Kittredge's entire passage on the matter is worth quoting. He first says—"The traditional ballad appears to be inimitable by any person of literary cultivation," "the efforts of poets and poetasters" ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... 147: Our Bard remarks upon it, "I could easily throw this into an English mould; but, to my taste, in the simple and the tender of the pastoral song, a sprinkling of the old Scottish has an inimitable effect."] ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... a ball or an evening party, you will gather the honey, natural or affected of her insinuating voice; her empty words will enchant you, and she will know how to give them the value of thought by her inimitable bearing." ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... Fichte (1762-1814) talks in certain of his writings as though he believed himself to be the universe, and his words cause Jean Paul Richter, the inimitable, to break out in his characteristic way: "The very worst of it all is the lazy, aimless, aristocratic, insular life that a god must lead; he has no one to go with. If I am not to sit still for all time and eternity, if I let myself ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... all their circumstances, more distinct impressions were produced on the mind, and proofs of fortitude and equanimity were here given to which I had hitherto known no parallel. No wonder that a soul like Clithero's, pervaded by these proofs of inimitable excellence, and thrillingly alive to the passion of virtuous fame, and the value of that existence which he had destroyed, should be overborne by horror at the view ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... At the gallows I have known one repent, and I hope thou wilt be the second." The character of William the Quaker pirate is a masterpiece of shrewd humour. He is the first Quaker brought into English fiction, and we know of no other Friend in latter-day fiction to equal him. Defoe in his inimitable manner has defined surely and deftly the peculiar characteristics of the sect in this portrait. On three separate occasions we find William saving unfortunate natives or defenceless prisoners from the cruel and wicked barbarity of the sailors. At page 183, for example, ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... turn aside from the dust and heat of the day, and drink of the living streams of knowledge. There is a "daily beauty in his life," on which mankind may meditate, and grow better. It exhibits no lofty and almost useless, because inimitable, example of excellence; but presents a picture of active, yet simple and imitable virtues, which are within every man's reach, but which, unfortunately, are not exercised by many, or this ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... feed upon angels' food. O, come, Mr. World," she added as she spoke more earnestly, "linger no longer, carry out the resolution which you have already broken repeatedly, and you will never regret so wise an action." Thus did Miss Church-Member urge upon him a course which, in her inimitable missionary spirit, she made really attractive to him. Although he appreciated her genuine earnestness, yet he could not be induced to ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... craftsmen, and, literally, manufacturers, workers by hand, who associated themselves, as chance, tradition, or the accessibility of material directed, in towns which thenceforward occupied a leading position in commerce, as producers of a staple of excellent, or perhaps inimitable, quality; and the linen or cambric of Cambray, the lace of Mechlin, the wool of Worstead, and the steel of Milan, implied the tranquil and hereditary skill of multitudes, living in wealthy industry, and ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... the deep in the shape of trout and sewin. This latter fish, the sewin, we may add in passing, is a luxury of which the Usk has great reason to boast; for it is better than any thing we remember of the salmon kind, except the inimitable grilses ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... charge, which set all the rest of the animals in a panic, he reached for his keeper, who with prodding spear and shouts, interposed himself in his path and tried to check him. But the man's inimitable dexterity and good fortune enabled him to dodge the beast and escape by a hair's breadth. The next minute, the elephant reached the public highway, down which he swung awkwardly but swiftly, on an excursion that was destined to be the most tragic ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... and lively young lady, who had been abroad, gave a very happy imitation of the almost inimitable Jenny Vertpre, in the French vaudeville of the "Cat metamorphosed to a Woman," in that scene where she betrays her original nature. She purred, she frolicked, she pounced on an imaginary mouse, caught it, tossed it up in the air, and went through all the manoeuvres of a ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... period of the history of new Greece, during which your Majesty at the head of his Government has succeeded, by his military talents, in bringing into realization the great achievements of ancient Greece, whose majestic relics are serving still as an inimitable example to the ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... the sweet devotion of Fra Angelico, the innovations of Masolino and Masaccio, the theory of perspective of Paolo Uccello, the varied works of Fabriano, Antonello da Messina, the Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, the Bellini, and their contemporaries, culminated in the inimitable painting of the Cinquecento—in works still unsurpassed, ever challenging artists of later centuries to the task of equalling or ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... tyrant. But when men affect a virtue which they cannot easily reach, they fall into a vice, which bears the nearest resemblance to it. Thus, an injudicious poet, who aims at loftiness, runs easily into the swelling puffy style, because it looks like greatness. I remember, when I was a boy, I thought inimitable Spencer a mean poet, in comparison of Sylvester's "Dubartas," and was wrapt into an ecstasy when I ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... all the letters you send for. I rejoice with you upon the turn this afflicting affair has taken, through your inimitable prudence, and a courage I thought not in you. A wretch!—to give you so much discomposure!—But I will not, if he be good now, rave against him, as I was going to do. I am impatient to hear what account he gives of the matter. I hope he will be able to abandon ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... receded, leaving a sudden sullen gray; the little square room, littered with an upheaval of excelsior, sheet-shrouded furniture, and the paper-hanger's paraphernalia and inimitable smells, darkening ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... I had almost called them; with his taste in weapons; his delight in any that 'he found to be a man of his hands'; his chivalrous point of honour, letting Giant Maul get up again when he was down, a thing fairly flying in the teeth of the moral; above all, with his language in the inimitable tale of Mr. Fearing: 'I thought I should have lost my man'—'chicken-hearted'—'at last he came in, and I will say that for my lord, he carried it wonderful lovingly to him.' This is no Independent minister; this is a stout, honest, big-busted ancient, adjusting his shoulder-belts, twirling ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an inimitable mimic. At that very moment it seemed to Miss Symes that she heard her own voice speaking—her own very gentle, cultivated, high-bred voice. Amongst the girls who listened and roared with laughter might have been seen Sarah Butt, Sibyl Ray, and several ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... ghost-like, through the desolate rooms of the South Sea House, or treads the avenues of the Temple, where the benchers ("supposed to have been children once") are pacing the stony terraces! Then there is the inimitable Sarah Battle (unconquered even by Chance), arming herself for the war of whist; and the young Africans, "preaching from their chimney-pulpits lessons of patience to mankind." If your appetite is keen, by all means visit Bobo, ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... but history justifies the belief, that in the court of Nero, the extravagancies mentioned by Petronius were realized (395) to a degree which authenticates the representation given of them. The inimitable character of Trimalchio, which exhibits a person sunk in the most debauched effeminacy, was drawn for Nero; and we are assured, that there were formerly medals of that emperor, with these words, C. Nero August. Imp., and on the reverse, Trimalchio. The various characters are well discriminated, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... all the sheep shearing. Then at last Bodo comes back for his supper, and as soon as the sun goes down they go to bed; for their hand-made candle gives only a flicker of light, and they both have to be up early in the morning. De Quincey once pointed out, in his inimitable manner, how the ancients everywhere went to bed, 'like good boys, from seven to nine o'clock'. 'Man went to bed early in those ages simply because his worthy mother earth could not afford him candles. She, good old lady ... would certainly ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... was up to time, and spoke for full half-an-hour with inimitable spirit, emptiness and unfairness. It was evident from his handling of the subject that he had been 'crammed' up to the throat, and that he knew nothing at first hand; in fact, he used no argument not ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... prosperous public, social and domestic life. Particularly is this the case with the portraits of individuals and of civic and gild groups by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Van der Helst and their followers, which form an inimitable series that has rarely been equalled. To realise to what an extent in the midst of war the fine arts flourished in Holland, a mere list of the best-known painters of the period will suffice, it tells its own tale. They are given in the order of their dates: Frans ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... reflected—but no; he would confine himself to a simple statement of facts. That simplicity would tell with a double-knock on the hearts of a susceptible jury. The afflicted, the agonised plaintiff was a public man. He was, until lately, the happy possessor of a spotless wife and an inimitable spring-van. It was was a union assented to by reason, smiled on by prudence. Mr. Bonbon was the envied owner of a perambulating exhibition: he counted among his riches a Spotted Boy, a New Zealand Cannibal, and a Madagascar Cow. The crowning rose was, however, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... always some chance of escape amongst the multitude of laws and law-givers. No tutor or preceptor can be answerable, or ought to undertake to answer for measures which he does not guide. Le Sage, with an inimitable mixture of humour and good sense, in the short history of the education of the robbers who supped in that cave in which dame Leonardo officiated, has given many excellent lessons in education. Captain Rolando's tutors could never make any thing of him, because, whenever they ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... brown flood in the majestic reaches of the lower river. Down on the fore-deck the roustabouts were singing. It was some old-time plantation melody, and Charlotte could not catch the words; but the blending harmony, rich in the altogether inimitable timbre of the African song-voice, rose above the throbbing of the engines and the splash of ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... against the next. It is only five minutes from town, and tramlines pass the door. Nay more, they stop abruptly at the door—such are the improvements effected by R.E. Inside the cellar are three bits of chairs, a table-top on boxes, and an inimitable ancestral smell that no deodorizer known to modern warfare can cope with. And all this is called "Trenches!" Our servants do their best to support the official illusion by neglecting to clean our boots and regarding with surprise and some little sadness any ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... first to break the silence. "Why are we at war?" he asked with an inimitable smile, offering ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... of Matilda's head was inimitable and indescribable. It was not arrogance or affectation; it was perfectly natural to the child; but to a bystander it would have signified that she was aware Maria's views and statements were not to be relied upon and could not be made the basis of either opinion or action. ...
— What She Could • Susan Warner
... out of its priceless treasures, but simply to provide equitably and properly for their preservation and due increase. Here, as we all see, have immense sums been already spent by this Government in excavating, preserving, and in some cases partially restoring such decayed but inimitable structures as the Coliseum, the Capitol, the various Triumphal Arches, the Baths of Titus, Caracalla, &c., all of which labors and expenditures we who visit Rome share the benefit, and it is but the simplest justice ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... to be seated at my desk to write to you, in my new gown and slippers, and with my new sermon, finished, before me. A "combination and a form," indeed, but I say no more. "But how is the sermon?" you 'll say. Why, as inimitable as the writer. But really, I think it is worth something. I did think, indeed, when I took my pen, that I could write a stronger argument for immortality than I ever saw, that is, in any one sermon or thesis. And if I have failed ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... playing with fearful energy, and the devouring stream rushes madly down toward us. It is now about ten miles distant, and heading directly for our bay. In a few days we may be called to announce the painful fact that our beauteous Hilo is no more,—that our lovely, our inimitable landscape, our emerald bowers, our crescent strand and our silver bay are blotted out. A fiery sword hangs over us. A flood of burning ruin approaches us. Devouring fires are near us. With sure and solemn progress the glowing fusion advances through the ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... should keep right on giving as long as they had anything to give. One of their daughters, a strapping, light-hearted colt of a girl, told us some of the things they had seen as she paused in the hall after preparing our rooms. Her sister stood beside her, and together they declaimed in an inimitable sort of recitative. ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... womanhood, and its artfulness was of a gallant sort that scorned to deceive. It defied you, it allured you, it conquered you at a glance. It might have been the last cry from the court of an innocent Louis Quinze. It was, in fine, inimitable; and if only I were a milliner, I would describe for you that gown in some not unbefitting fashion. As it is, you may draft the world's modistes to dredge the dictionary, and they will fail, as ignominiously as I would do, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... fresh and charming, and the rich cadences of her cultivated voice gave Ringfield pleasure, slightly recalling Miss Clairville's accents, and he was happy in experiencing for the first time in his life that amiable naturalness, inimitable airiness, ease and adaptability, which characterize the Anglican clergy and their method of doing things. Attenuated tennis, Lilliputian Badminton, swings, a greased pole, potato and sack races, fiddling, and dancing on a platform, for the French, all these he passed in review with Mrs. ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... accurate criticism, breathes, indeed, the genuine emanations of its great author's mind, expressed, too, in a style so natural to him, and so much like his common mode of conversing, that I was myself but little astonished when he told me that he had scarcely read over one of those inimitable essays before they ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... not pretend to give this in the language or manner of Mr. Polk, which is said to be inimitable; neither do we claim him as a 'Union man.' He has remained quietly at home, and taken no part in the contest; but we are indebted to him, or to some one who has reported it as coming from him, for a genial and laughable account of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the public platform had by this time become so insistent that Riley could no longer resist it, although modesty and shyness fought the battle for privacy. He told briefly and in his own inimitable fashion of these trying experiences. "In boyhood I had been vividly impressed with Dickens' success in reading from his own works and dreamed that some day I might follow his example. At first I read ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... boast"—little further is known than that his genius was not sufficient to rescue him from its too frequent attendant, poverty; he lived in obscurity, and died in want. Wycherley often represented to the Duke of Buckingham how well Butler had deserved of the royal family by writing his inimitable Hudibras, and that it was a disgrace to the Court that a person of his loyalty and genius should remain in obscurity and suffer the wants which he did. The Duke, thus pressed, promised to recommend Butler to his Majesty; and Wycherley, ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... varied aspects of his Sabine retreat in the fierce summer heats, or when the snowy forehead of Soracte purpled in winter sunsets! Scattered through his odes and the occasional poems which he addresses to his city friends, you find these graceful and inimitable touches of rural beauty, each ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Beatrix at first was quite BIT (as the phrase of that day was) and did not "smoke" the authorship of the story; indeed Esmond had tried to imitate as well as he could Mr. Steele's manner (as for the other author of the Spectator, his prose style I think is altogether inimitable); and Dick, who was the idlest and best-natured of men, would have let the piece pass into his journal and go to posterity as one of his own lucubrations, but that Esmond did not care to have a lady's name whom he loved ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... seem to him the most principal, and he studied how to show the subject of the drama in the clearest light. In all this he went to the extreme, but he so wrought "that the print of his cothurnus stamped upon the field of art should remain forever singular and inimitable. Reading his tragedies in order, from the Cleopatra to the Saul, you see how he never changed his tragic ideal, but discerned it more and more distinctly until he fully realized it. Aeschylus and Alfieri are two links that unite the chain in a circle. In Alfieri art once more achieved the faultless ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... the words three times before he put down the paper. The words were: "I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!" They were in the quite inimitable, not to say illegible, ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... correspondence between Lovelace and Belford, and what passes in that infernal brothel, to which Clarissa was conducted, will at once perceive what I have in view. Equally admirable and just is this aphorism of our noble and inimitable poet. ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... every hole there was visibly ensconced a little imp of audaciousness. His eyes were such intrepid and quenchless lights of impudence, that they could look even Irish sang froid out of countenance. And then that inimitable wooden leg! It was a perfect grace. As he managed it, it was irresistible. He did not progress with a miserable, vulgar, dot-and-go-one kind of gait; he neither hopped, nor halted, nor limped; and though he was wood from the middle of his right thigh downwards, his walk might ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... melts into the sea by a network of creeks and inlets, edging the territory (as the flying osprey sees it) with an inimitable lacework of azure waters; the pattern is one of looping channels with oval interstices, and the dentellated border of the commonwealth resembles that sort of lace which was made by arranging on glass ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... great actor moves from London to Windsor, the Brentford Champion must state that "Yesterday Mr. Blazes and suite passed rapidly through our city; the celebrated comedian is engaged, we hear, at Windsor, to give some of his inimitable readings of our great national bard to the MOST ILLUSTRIOUS AUDIENCE in the realm." This piece of intelligence the Hammersmith Observer will question the next week, as thus:—"A contemporary, the Brentford Champion, says that Blazes is engaged to give Shakspearian readings ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... prevented the shot. The savage wheeled, just as was anticipated, but, in the act of doing so, threw himself for a second time over the side of his horse, so as to interpose his body. He did it with such inimitable dexterity that the rancher ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... walls, which transmitted a very pleasant light, gave it an appearance far superior to a marble building, and one might survey it with feelings somewhat akin to those produced by the contemplation of a Grecian temple, reared by Phidias; both are triumphs of art, inimitable in ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... eight thousand and seven hundred quintals, which they called alteres. Those he took up from the ground, in each hand one, then lifted them up over his head, and held them so without stirring three quarters of an hour and more, which was an inimitable force. He fought at barriers with the stoutest and most vigorous champions; and when it came to the cope, he stood so sturdily on his feet that he abandoned himself unto the strongest, in case they could ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... literature and history admirably equips him to enter into the life and spirit of the time of the romance, and the hosts of admirers of the inimitable quatrains of Omar Khayyam, made famous by Fitzgerald, will be deeply interested in a tale based on authentic facts in the career of the famous Persian poet. The three chief characters are Omar Khayyam, Nizam-ul-Mulk, the generous and high-minded Vizier of the Tartar ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... all the more increased when he saw the list of promised performers: La Belle Marie, the famous little toe dancer in her attractive transformations; the Brothers Zincatello, Risley experts at the Hippodrome; Julian Jokes, "in his inimitable Hebrew monologue"; the Seven Sebastians, the world's most marvelous Herculean acrobatic performers; Mlle. Joujou, the popular singing comedienne, Prima Donna and Star, direct from her unusual and most distinguished triumph at the Palace ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... The windmill, towering its conical roof and rusty weather-vane a little distance off, and stretching out its gray skeleton arms as if to creak more freely in the sweep of gales from the river, was one of those rembrandtesque relics which prove so picturesquely that Time is an artist inimitable by man. A clay oven near the cot completed this group of erections, around and behind which the silver birches and young elms grew ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... were concealed the fine skin and well-tended person of a lady, filled her with expectation of romance. If the Millsborough Herald had taught her to despise the "low moral tone" of those who ride in carriages and know not hardship, the Penny Pansy, in its own inimitable manner, had compelled her to believe that they possessed a distinction which she could ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... talked, however, I was observing our hostess, who was talking with the others; very little, I noticed, with her young Inglese. She is altogether charming—full of frankness and freedom, of that inimitable disinvoltura which in an Englishwoman would be vulgar, and which in her is simply the perfection of apparent spontaneity. But for all her spontaneity she's as subtle as a needle-point, and knows ...
— The Diary of a Man of Fifty • Henry James
... identify the house which the creator of Paul Dombey had in mind when he painted the inimitable portrait of Mrs. Pipchin, "ogress and child queller," whose castle "was in a steep bye street.... where the small front gardens had the property of producing nothing but marigolds, whatever was sown in them; and where snails were constantly discovered ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... then a sudden plunge proved. Sometimes one of the group appeared alone on the ground, when no person was about (except behind the blinds), and then he talked with himself for company, a very charming monologue in the inimitable bluebird tone, with modifications suggesting that a new and wonderful song was possible to him. He was evidently too full of joy ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... what care he has remembered everything! Consider the grace of those beautiful folds, the beauty of the hair, the loveliness of the hands: and then, as Burckhardt reminds us, as a piece of work founded and cast in bronze, it is almost inimitable. ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... and saw its magnificent cathedral—unfinished it has been left, and unfinished it will remain, of course,—the fashion of cathedrals being passed away. But even what exists is inimitable, the choir particularly, and the grand front. Beauvais is called the Pucelle, yet, so far as I can see, she wears no stays—I mean, has no fortifications. On we run, however. Vogue la galere; et voila nous ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott |
