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A great, raw-boned fellow from some mountain clearing jerked at the lacing of his shoes and in a moment was marching barefoot, the offending leather swinging from his arm. To right and left he found imitators. A corpulent man, a merchant used to a big chair set in the shady front of a village store, suffered greatly, pale about the lips, and with his breath coming in wheezing gasps.

A pocket encyclopaedia and a copious store of adjectives have enabled many a youth to roar out brilliant articles "as gently as a sucking dove." But all men of power have their imitators, and are open to parody and spurious coining.

But men read "The Golden Bowl" and "The Wings of the Dove" because they were skilful rather than because they were interesting. They were novelists' novels, like the professional matinees that "stars" give on Tuesday afternoons for the benefit of rivals and imitators in art. But to stop here would be to misunderstand totally the greatest craftsman that has come out of America.

He accounted for it by concluding that much both of the sentiments and expression of the poem had been derived from conversations with Johnson. "He imitates you, sir," said this incarnation of toadyism. "Why, no, sir," replied Johnson, "Jack Hawksworth is one of my imitators, but not Goldsmith. Goldy, sir, has great merit."

Bunyan, in his Pilgrim's Progress, does not, like his unread imitators, attempt to personify Christianity and Valour: he dramatizes for you the life of the Christian and the Valiant Man.

Round the room of a tavern in Drury Lane, where was held a club of virtuosi, he painted a Bacchanalian procession, and presented the house with his labours. He had many imitators; for there are followers of bad as well as of good examples. Among others, Riario, Johnson, Brown, besides Lanscroon, Scheffers, and Picard, who worked with him under Verrio.

It was no longer an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth; now not only was good to be done to those who were good to us, but to those also who did us evil; not only were we to love our friends, but to love and assist our enemies also; not only should evil deeds be avoided, but evil thoughts were likewise forbiddenyea, we were asked to be, in all our thoughts and deeds, imitators of the Shepherd who leads us.

I believe nine-tenths of German literature is wasted on Europeans for lack of clearness and directness of style; although the involved obscurities which are common to German philosophers and critics and historians alike do not seem to derogate from their literary fame at home, and have even found imitators in England, like Coleridge and Carlyle.

I don't think nearly so many young ladies six years ago painted their eyelids and dyed their hair: a few of them there might be, imitators of the slang invented by schoolboys and circulated through the medium of small novelists; they might use such expressions as "stunning," "cheek," "awfully jolly," etc.

Like Spars and Tophania, of whom they were imitators, they chiefly sold their poisons to women who wanted to get rid of their husbands; and, in some few instances, to husbands who wanted to get rid of their wives. Their ostensible occupation was that of midwives. They also pretended to be fortune-tellers, and were visited by persons of every class of society.