chimera

I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.

"There have been eccentric inventors, starving their families while they sought such chimeras as perpetual motion.

These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favourites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, eminent services; of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employments persons qualified to exercise them, with many other wild, impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, "that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational, which some philosophers have not maintained for truth."

And there was Don Quixote observing all these strange proceedings attentively without uttering a word, and attributing the whole to chimeras of knight-errantry.

While such whims and chimeras were flitting across my fancy I began to look askance at Mrs.

He preserved this opinion even after the feast, with the remnants of which he repaired his own long abstinence; but when in the evening he made his master's bed, the chimeras of Planchet faded away.

In other days, to seek the sources of the Nile--fontes Nili quoerere--was regarded as a mad endeavor, a chimera that could not be realized.

Unfortunately, a chimera bombinating in a vacuum is, nowadays, only too capable of producing secondary causes.- Editor.]

Hence those strange monsters in lace and embroidery, in silks and brocades, with vast wigs and hoops; which, under the name of lords and ladies, strut the stage, to the great delight of attorneys and their clerks in the pit, and of the citizens and their apprentices in the galleries; and which are no more to be found in real life than the centaur, the chimera, or any other creature of mere fiction.

As to being taken up, himself, for a rioter, and punished with the rest, Mr Dennis dismissed that possibility from his thoughts as an idle chimera; arguing that the line of conduct he had adopted at Newgate, and the service he had rendered that day, would be more than a set-off against any evidence which might identify him as a member of the crowd.

Thus roving on In confus'd march forlorn, th' adventrous Bands With shuddring horror pale, and eyes agast View'd first thir lamentable lot, and found No rest: through many a dark and drearie Vaile They pass'd, and many a Region dolorous, O're many a Frozen, many a Fierie Alpe, Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death, A Universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutterable, and worse Then Fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceiv'd, GORGONS and HYDRA'S, and CHIMERA'S dire.

"Good heavens!" cried Mazarin, "does the poor prince flatter himself with that chimera?"