derived from the Latin imitare, to represent or repeat a sound or action, either exactly or nearly in the same manner as they were originally exhibited.

in Music, admits of two different senses. Sound and motion are either capable of imitating themselves by a repetition of their own particular modes, or of imitating other objects of a nobler and more abstracted nature. Nothing perhaps is so purely mental, nothing so remote from external sense, as not to be imitable by music. Dramatic or theatrical music contributes to imitation no less than painting or poetry; it is on this common principle that we must investigate both the origin and the final cause of all the fine arts. But this imitation is not equally extensive in all the imitative arts. Whatever the imagination can represent to itself is in the department of poetry. Painting, which does not present its pictures to the imagination immediately, but to external sense, and to one sense alone, paints only such objects as are discoverable by sight. Music might appear subjected to the same limits with respect to the ear; yet it is capable of painting every thing, even such images as are objects of ocular perception alone. By a magic almost inconceivable, it seems to transform the ears into eyes, and endow them with the double function of perceiving visible objects; and it is the greatest miracle of an art, which can only act by motion, that it can make that very motion represent absolute quiescence. Imitation, in its technical sense, is a reiteration of the same air, or of one which is similar, in several parts where it is repeated by one after the other, either in unison, or at the distance of a fourth, a fifth, a third, or any other interval whatever.

in Oratory, is an endeavour to resemble a speaker or writer in those qualities regarding which we propose them to ourselves as patterns. The first historians amongst the Romans were, according to Cicero, very dry and jejune, till they began to imitate the Greeks, and then they became their rivals. It is well known how closely Virgil has imitated Homer in his Æneid, Hesiod in his Georgics, and Theocritus in his Eclogues. Terence copied from Menander, and Plautus from Epicarmus, as we learn from Horace (lib. ii. Ep. ad August.), who himself owes many of his beauties to the Greek lyric poets. Cicero appears, from many passages in his writings, to have imitated the Greek orators. Thus Quintilian said of him, that he expressed the strength and sublimity of Demosthenes, the copiousness of Plato, and the delicacy of Isocrates.