DICTIONARY ONE.COM • More 'Personation' Quotes from Famous Books

... started when I made my appearance, and acknowledged that the personation was exact. Taking the arm of the surgeon and the master, we set off, the master carrying the pistols, which had been prepared; and in a quarter of an hour we arrived at the place of meeting. My disguise was so complete that we had not hesitated to walk ...

— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat

... a picture. The figure is at once Punch and the oldest of the Chelsea pensioners; it distracts one between pity, terror, and disgust, but is altogether absorbing; one watches it as one would watch some feeble ancient piece of mechanism, still working, which may snap at any moment. In such a personation, make-up becomes a serious part of art. It is the picture that magnetises us, and every wrinkle seems to have been studied in movement; the hands act almost by themselves, as if every finger were a separate actor. The passion of fear, the ...

— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... off beautifully—at least so thought both actors and spectators. The dignity of the Bailli and the meddling of the drummer were alike delightful; Fly was charmingly arch and mutinous; Mysie very straightforward; and the least successful personation was that of Gillian, who had a fit of stage-fright, forgot sentences, and whirred her spinning-wheel nervously, all the worse for being scolded by her brothers behind the scenes, and assured that she was making a mull ...

— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge

... are closely allied in sound as well as in sense. Mr. FECHTER evidently regards them as completely identical; and in his acting, as in his pronunciation, uniformly prefers the former to the latter. He has recently exemplified this by his personation of CLAUDE MELNOTTE, in that most tawdry specimen of the cotton-velvet drama, the LADY OF LYONS. This melancholy event took place a few nights since at the French Theatre, that mausoleum of the illegitimate French drama. Miss CARLOTTA LECLERCQ, an actress who deserves ...

— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various

... a personation is consistent with truth and righteousness may be reasonably questioned. But very few persons would have thought of raising the question ...

— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt

... any person can, with some care and practice, make up a disguise; the great difficulty is to support that disguise by a suitable manner and voice. But to an experienced actor this difficulty does not exist. To him, personation is easy; and, moreover, an actor is precisely the person to whom the idea of disguise ...

— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman

... still exists, or did exist very recently, in his own handwriting, at Dulwich College; it is without heading or date, and relates almost exclusively to the dresses worn by himself in his personation of various characters upon the stage. It is of interest, seeing that it demonstrates the assumption by Alleyn of various parts, if not in Shakespeare's plays, at any rate in the earlier dramas upon which the poet founded certain of his noblest ...

— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... allied in sound as well as in sense. Mr. FECHTER evidently regards them as completely identical; and in his acting, as in his pronunciation, uniformly prefers the former to the latter. He has recently exemplified this by his personation of CLAUDE MELNOTTE, in that most tawdry specimen of the cotton-velvet drama, the LADY OF LYONS. This melancholy event took place a few nights since at the French Theatre, that mausoleum of the illegitimate French drama. Miss CARLOTTA LECLERCQ, an actress ...

— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various

... because he had already been through it twenty or thirty times. It had pictures of all the gods and goddesses, demigods and heroes; and he tried to make poems upon their various characters and exploits. But Apollo was his favorite, and I believe it was with some hope of employing them in a personation of the god that he coveted those red-topped sharp-toed calf-skin boots. He had a notion that if he could get up a chariot by sawing down the sides of a store-box for the body, and borrowing the hind-wheels of the baby's willow wagon, and then, drawn by the family dog Tip at a ...

— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells

... falsehood comprises simple falsehoods, forgery, personation, and perjury; again distributable like the private offences. In the case of trusts, there are two parties—the trustee and the beneficiary. Offences under this head cannot, for various reasons, be conveniently referred to offences against property or condition, which also ...

— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... repentance! Yes, the preacher was right. This was his punishment for the part he had taken in the fraudulent personation of Clifford Matheson. It came to Dean like a blinding flash of light that God was demanding of him whether he would repent or no—whether he would vow to run ...

— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg

... from another's fiction. Most of the characters that she assumed for days and sometimes weeks at a time were purely original in conception; some so much so as to be vague to the general understanding. I remember that her personation of a certain Mrs. Smith, whose individuality was supposed to be sufficiently represented by a sun-bonnet worn wrong side before and a weekly addition to her family, was never perfectly appreciated by her own circle although she lived the character for a month. Another creation known as "The ...

— The Queen of the Pirate Isle • Bret Harte

... one's self at the expense of a drunken man; yet we allow ourselves to be amused with representations of drunkenness on the stage and in comic narratives. Nobody is ashamed to laugh at Cassio in the play of Othello, when he has put an enemy into his mouth to steal away his brains. The personation which the elder Wallack used to give us some years ago, of Dick Dashall, very drunk, but very gentlemanly, was one of the most irresistibly comic things ever known. I have a mind to give you a translation of a German ballad on a tipsy man, which has been set ...

— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... and three thousand men flocked to Perkin's standard. They failed to take Exeter; Perkin was seized at Beaulieu and sent up to London to be paraded through the streets amid the jeers and taunts of the people. Two years later a foolish attempt at escape and a fresh personation of the Earl of Warwick by one Ralf Wulford[25] led to the execution of all three, Perkin, Wulford, and the real Earl of Warwick, who had been a prisoner and probably the innocent centre of so many plots since the accession of Henry VII. Warwick's death ...

— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard

... kinfolk, and now his hobby was to refine the language of the stage and to elevate the actor's profession. He was an industrious and thoughtful player, who gave careful attention to the little matters of mimicry and personation and seldom failed to please. Another was Beil, a greater actor in point of natural endowment, who relied more upon vigorous realism than upon studied refinements. Then there was Beck, who was at his best as a portrayer of youthful enthusiasm and sentiment. ...

— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... feel it now, this baseness committed—I reverted to myself, and came back again to the truth. One after another I mentioned all the circumstances connected with my private marriage, and with the movements of Armadale and Midwinter, which rendered any discovery of the false personation (through the evidence of other people) a downright impossibility. 'So much,' I said, in conclusion, 'for the object in view. The next thing is to tell you plainly of a very serious obstacle that stands in ...

— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... doctor. So the Crusade came off as arranged, with the result that the Christian forces, on arriving in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, found that the Octopus responsible for the personation of the Saracens had just gone to bed. It was an ill-advised Crusade, because if the Christians had only had a little patience, the released prisoner would have looked round as soon as his janitor was asleep. As it turned out, no sooner were the ...

— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... as it were, symbolised and allegorised, by the living beings with which it was connected—as Edith was the representative of stainless Truth—as Gurth was the type of dauntless Duty—as Hilda embodied aspiring Imagination—so Haco seemed the personation of Worldly Wisdom. And cold in that worldly wisdom Haco laboured on, now conferring with Alred and the partisans of Harold; now closeted with Edwin and Morcar; now gliding from the chamber of the sick King.—That ...

— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Prosopopeia, or the Counterfait in personation.] But if ye wil faine any person with such features, qualities & conditions, or if ye wil attribute any humane quality, as reason or speech to dombe creatures or other insensible things, & do study (as one may say) to giue them a humane person, it is not Prosopographia, ...

— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham

... earlier generations of mankind, ecstasism has been practiced, and civilized man has thus an inherited appetite for narcotics, to which the enormous propensity to drunkenness existing in all nations bears witness. When the great actor in his personation of Rip Van Winkle holds his goblet aloft and says, "Here's to your health and to your family's, and may they live long and prosper," he connects the act of drinking with a prayer, and unconsciously demonstrates the origin of the use of stimulants. ...

— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell

... master workman. The sculptor has done well. He does not merely show you the physical man—the mass, the strength, of bone and sinew and muscle; he reveals the man within—the big, courageous soul. Strangers often think this statue a personation of the force which in a few brief generations has erected from a wilderness our vast and splendid America. And it is that; but to Arthur and Adelaide, standing before it in a June twilight, long after the events above chronicled, it is ...

— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips

... is probably a personation of the perished city of Maguelonne, as one of the Marys is the Mar or Mere; and Martha, there can hardly be a question, is the Syrian prophetess who accompanied Marius, but who in her place inherited the attributes and cult of Martis, the Phoenician ...

— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould