Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 18, 2025
The member of Parliament who mimics the crowing of a cock during debate, or the street boy who beguiles his leisure by barking like a dog, has a disinterested pleasure in the exercise of his skill; but advanced thinkers seem pretty well agreed that the first men who imitated the voices of dogs, and cocks, and other animals, did not do so merely for fun, but with the practical purpose of indicating to their companions the approach of these creatures.
All the while he was himself writing prose and verse, in grasp if not in vigour as far beyond the stretch of Pope, as Pope is in "worth and wit and sense" removed above his mimics. The point of the paradox is not merely that he deserted, but that he sometimes imitated his model, and when he did so, failed.
Altered to 'huge' in the Emblems, 1724. A familiar phrase, denoting persons who have been always frivolous and childish, or those who have passed into second childhood. 'On the shelf' is a common saying of ladies when they are too old to get married. Ed. The name of a bird that mimics gestures. Ed. Indelible, as when raw material is dyed before it is wove, every grain receives the dye. Ed.
The lady is wise not to attempt to name the "hundred others" presumably ejusdem generis with Shakespeare and Molière. "There have always been, since the beginning of the ages, mimics and improvisators who did without the text of others."
Besides its own calls, whistles, and song, it reproduces the song of the blackbird and thrush absolutely correctly, and mimics with equal nicety the calls of the curlew, the corncrake, and the jackdaw.
And often would they linger beneath the portico of some house where, "haunted with great resort," Pleasure and Pomp held their nightly revels, to listen to the music that, through the open windows, stole over the rare exotics with which wealth mimics the southern scents, and floated, mellowing by distance, along the unworthy streets; and while they stood together, silent and each feeding upon separate thoughts, the artist's pale lip would curl with scorn, as he heard the laugh and the sounds of a frivolous and hollow mirth ring from the crowd within, and startle the air from the silver spell which music had laid upon it.
That a person can outwardly feign to be other than himself is manifest from actors and mimics. They know how to represent kings, emperors and even angels in tone of voice, speech, face and gesture as though they were really such, when they are nevertheless only actors.
A passage over perilous deeps, roofed by infinity and sempiternal things, surrounded too with evanescent forms, that like these crystals, trodden underfoot, or melted by the Föhn-wind into dew, flash, in some lucky moment, with a light that mimics stars! But to allegorise and sermonise is out of place here.
This they propose for us to imitate; they permit us to have mimics and music at our feasts, but forbid philosophy; she, forsooth, being very unfit to be wanton with us, and we in a bad condition to be serious.
They were found to be great mimics, both in gesture and sound, and would repeat any word of our language, with great correctness of pronunciation. Their imitations of sounds were truly astonishing. Their mimicry became at length annoying, and precluded our getting at any of their words or ideas. It not only extended to words or sounds, but actions also, and was at times truly ridiculous.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking