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More "Bombast" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... success, instead of being heart-sickened by long neglect and coarse rebuffs, and smothering his aspirations in a convent. In striking contrast with this pale figure is the portly and imposing one of Robert William Elliston, type of theatrical charlatans, embodiment of bombast and puffery, monarch over the realm of pasteboard, immortalized by Lamb, and surely not undeserving of the honor. With him may be said to have ended the line of the eccentrics, which fills a large space in Mr. Fitzgerald's volume. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... well and out of prison perhaps the cheap bombast in all this would have been apparent at once. But I was neither well nor free. And Polly's heart was breaking; I didn't need Whitredge's word for this—I knew it by all ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... And so the bombast rolls, and one brags against the other like systole and diastole which balance each other in the same heart. But the worst of the matter is, that Prince Henry and Hotspur, as we have already noticed, have both the same soul and the same inspiring motive in love of honour. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... chastened English prose, we have men of genius who have fallen into evil habits. Bulwer, who knew better, would quite revel in a stagey bombast; Dickens, with his pathos and his humour, was capable of sinking into a theatrical mannerism and cockney vulgarities of wretched taste; Disraeli, with all his wit and savoir faire, has printed some rank fustian, and much slip-slop gossip; and George Meredith at times ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... opportunity. There is a good deal of swagger about him; he believes in carry a stick and turning it; in admiring himself and letting other people know that he is of a cypher; there is much conceit and ever so much bombast about him; he likes giving historical lectures; thinks he is an authority on everything appertaining to Elizabeth, Mary, the Prince of Orange, &c.; is fond of attacking Bishop Goss, and getting into a groove of garrulous declamation concerning Papists; still he ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... torch to the wooden images set up by his political predecessors. He made a speech that is unintelligible, all wind, sound and bombast, but ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... Nothing escapes him; he is letting us go to what end we will, only, if we do not act at once, to draw us to a sudden halt. Now to this meddling Englishman: we have offered him a million—five millions for four. He laughs. He is a millionaire. With characteristic bombast he declares that money has no charms. For six months, since his father's death, we have hounded him, in vain. It is something I can not understand. What is Leopold to these Englishmen that they risk a princely fortune to secure him his throne? ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... buzzing thing, Some starveling songster on a tiny wing,— (N.B. They call the insect Bob, I know, I heard a printer's devil call it so)— So fondly tells his admiration vast No one can call the chastened strains bombast, Though epitheted substantives immense Claim for each lofty sound the caret ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... any other time should I advise you to go any further," said Madeline laughingly, for it was hard to take the bombast of Mr. Early very seriously. He made her think now of a sort of pouter pigeon. And Sebastian remained only partly satisfied as to the effect which he wished to produce. He wanted to give her something to think about, and so make way for the more impassioned ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... savors of bombast to many Americans, but in the history of political and military oratory in their own land they can find an endless number of speeches that, in that particular quality, rival if they do not surpass it. The ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... extraordinary effect of anger and fear on animals was observed centuries before America was discovered. Statius, a writer who fully equals Mr Slick both in his affectation and bombast, ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... his own destiny according to his private goodwill and pleasure.[9] The greatest of Richardson's successors in the history of English fiction adds to this explanation. "Those," says Sir Walter Scott, "who with patience had studied rant and bombast in the folios of Scuderi, could not readily tire of nature, sense, and genius in the octavos of Richardson." The old French romances in which Europe had found a dreary amusement, were stories of princes and princesses. It was to be ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... to look very much shocked at this piece of bombast. Lancelot evidently meant it as such, but he eyed her all the while as if there was ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... we had done with the nauseous talk about campaigns, and standard-bearers, and glorious victories (imperial triumphs) and all the bloated army-bumming bombast which is so rife for the six months preceding an election? To read almost any one of our political papers during a canvass is enough to make one sick and sorry.... An election has no manner of likeness to a campaign, or a battle. It is not even ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... of nature, written with God's own finger." We shall see, however, that this "book of nature" taught Paracelsus some very strange lessons. Modesty was not one of these. "Now at this time," he declares, "I, Theophrastus Paracelsus, Bombast, Monarch of the Arcana, was endowed by God with special gifts for this end, that every searcher after this supreme philosopher's work may be forced to imitate and to follow me, be he Italian, Pole, Gaul, German, or whatsoever or whosoever ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... nor was I fully carried away by their influence till after my uncle had procured me several opportunities of proving my proficiency in my calling. I may say without vanity that my speeches won approval; but I was revolted by the pompous, flowery bombast, without which I should have been hissed down, and though my parents rejoiced when I went home from Niku, Arsmoe, or some other little provincial town, with laurel-wreaths and gold pieces, to myself I always seemed an impostor. Still, for my father's sake, I dared not give up my profession, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the crowd of his old flatterers, and little noticed their altered language or their graver brow. In a little while, finding they had ceased to be amusing, he effaced their works, not as dangerous, but as dull; and recognized only thenceforward, as art, the innocuous bombast of Michael Angelo, and fluent efflorescence of Bernini. But when you become more intimately and impartially acquainted with the history of the Reformation, you will find that, as surely and earnestly as Memling and Giotto strove in the north and south ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... (loquitur). — The mischief a secret any of them know, above the consuming of coals and drawing of usquebaugh! Howsoever they may pretend, under the specious names of Geber, Arnold, Lulli, or bombast of Hohenheim, to commit miracles in art, and treason against nature! As if the title of philosopher, that creature of glory, were to be fetched out of a furnace! I am their crude, and their sublimate, their precipitate, and their ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... months ago!" he stammered painfully; "but that's not p-possible. They—they've given me up. They've f-forgotten me. They th-think I'm dead. After fifteen years? My God, Pete! Why didn't you tell me?" He pleaded the last with a shaken sort of sharpness, in pitiful contrast to the bombast ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... to his Excellency the Prime Minister, a renegade American from New Hampshire, all jaw, vanity, bombast and ignorance, a lawyer of "shyster" calibre, a fraud by nature, a humble worshipper of the sceptre above him, a reptile never tired of sneering at the land of his birth or glorifying the ten-acre kingdom that has adopted him—salary, $4,000 a year, vast ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... wander from the subject; you wish to escape the prison as well as the gallows, in spite of your philosophical bombast. ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... Seek ye Bombast Paracelsus, Read what Flood the Seeker tells us Of the Dominant that runs Through the cycles of the Suns— Read my story last and ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... situation to one of his fellow-passengers with the air of a lord. Nothing could overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was written on his brow. He was then in his ill days; but I can imagine him in Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder. As we moved in the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society. I do not think I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or interesting; but there was entertainment in the man's demeanour. You might call him ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of his authorities during the Saxon period, when stripped of the bombast and inaccurate style of the monkish historians, is, that the Scots had sometimes been defeated by the English, had received peace on disadvantageous terms, had made submissions to the English monarch, and had even perhaps fallen into some dependence on a power which was so much superior, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... of the great body politic, of which we ourselves are a part, and are they not entitled to their opinion and modes of expressing it, providing it be done with decorum and with a proper respect for the opinions of their adversaries? Why then do we or they employ, through the press and in rhetorical bombast, opprobrious epithets, fit only for the pot-house or the shambles? Shall we men and citizens, each of us a pillar upholding the crowning dome of our nationality, be taught, like vexed and querulous children, the impotence of personal abuse? Why seek to lay upon the head ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... one single series of events, and the time it represented as elapsing be no greater than the time it took in playing. He was always pre-eminently an Englishman of his own day with a scholar's rather than a poet's temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, and only limited because in ruling out these things he ruled out much else that was essential to the spirit of the time. As a craftsman he was uncompromising; he never bowed to the tastes of the public and never veiled ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Where this does not exist, laughter accompanies the appreciation of humour, and in silence there would be little pleasure. The cause of mirth also differs as the persons affected, and the farce which creates a roar in the pit will often not raise a smile in the boxes. Swift writes—"Bombast and buffoonery, by nature lofty and light, soar highest of all in the theatre, and would be lost in the roof, if the prudent architect had not contrived for them a fourth place called the twelvepenny gallery and there planted a suitable colony." That emotionable ebullition affords a lower ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... his first tasks, when he had barely mastered the rudiments of composition, was to write an overture which he intended to be more complicated than Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Heinrich Dorn, who recognized his talent amid all the bombast, conducted this piece at a concert. At the rehearsal the musicians were convulsed with laughter, and at the performance the audience was at first surprised and then disgusted at the persistence of the drum-player, who made himself heard loudly every fourth bar. Finally there was a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... conceptions. The French tragedians may give some weak reflection of Euripides or even of Sophocles, but none have ventured upon the sacred territory of the father of the tragic drama. He defies all imitation. His genius is so near the verge of bombast, that to approach his sublime is to rush into ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Sophocles rather than of that of Euripides, and who lived only a little later than both. This I infer from the familiarity of many of the scenes, for tragedy at this time was fast sinking into the domestic tragedy, whereas, at a still later period, the Alexandrian age, it fell into an opposite error of bombast. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... by those that write about it; and I did not get acquainted with one of the writers. I should like to be intimate with Mr. Anstey, even though he wrote Lord Buckhorse, or with the author of the Heroic Epistle—I have no thirst to know the rest of my contemporaries, from the absurd bombast of Dr. Johnson down to the silly Dr. Goldsmith, though the latter changeling has had bright gleams of parts, and the former had sense, till he changed it for words, and sold it for a pension. Don't think me scornful. Recollect that I have seen Pope, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... defended, but admired too; and that their lay-followers do sincerely, as a shirtless fellow with a cudgel under his arm doth a face-wringing ballad-singer, a water-bearer on the floor of a playhouse, a wide-mouthed poet that speaks nothing but blathers and bombast. Otherwise, for life and profession, nature and art, inward and outward, they agree in all; like canters and gypsies, they are all zeal no knowledge, all purity no humanity, all simplicity no honesty, and if you never trust them ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... always introduced with a flourish of drums and trumpets, in order to rouse a martial spirit in the audience, and to accommodate their ears to bombast and fustian, which Mr Locke's blind man would not have grossly erred in likening to the sound of a trumpet. Again, when lovers are coming forth, soft music often conducts them on the stage, either to soothe the audience with the ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... his soul; there is neither bombast nor didacticism. His poems bring one to the quiet places where the soul speaks to the soul surely but serenely." N. ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... grave difficulties to the translator. The English language will not carry the requisite amount of bombast; the assonances and the puns are generally incapable of reproduction. Even when this allowance has been made, it is in many cases impossible to give anything approximating to a translation in natural English. I can only trust that the English of this translation has not wholly lost the colour ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... method was peculiar to himself, much after the haranguing way; he was no stranger to the rules of art, and knew well how to make his matter subservient to the subject he handled. His diction and language was easy and fluent, void of all affectation and bombast, and has a kind of undesigned negligent elegance which arrests the reader's attention. Considering the time he lived in, it might be said, that he carried the orator's prize from his contemporaries in Scotland, and was not at that time inferior to the best pulpit orator in England. While he lived ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... must be left intact. One should read them again and again, line by line. Ponderous eloquence, fustian bombast, and mouldy pathos combine with the display of pomp, to excite world-wide admiration. This play of well-rehearsed parts is given before an audience of generals, high officials and politicians, and the scene is set at Kiel, that moving pedestal ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... I believe Garrick borrowed some of his improvements from Otway's "Caius Marius.") I don't know, and don't care. It is not Shakespeare. It may "show something of the skill of kindred genius," as the preface to the acting edition says it does. I confess I do not see it. I would have such bombast delivered with the traditional accompaniment of red fire; and the curtain should descend majestically to the sound of slow music. That would be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... to our dramatic writers:... Thomas Kyd was the author of a tragedy entitled Jeronimo, which for the absurd horrors of its plot, and the mingled puerility and bombast of its language, was a source of perpetual ridicule to rival poets, while from a certain wild pathos combined with its imposing grandiloquence it was long a favorite with the people. The same person also translated a play by Garnier on the story of Cornelia the wife of Pompey;—a solitary instance ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat and insipid; his comick wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him: No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... Philippus Theophrastus, Bombast of Hohenheim, known by the name of Paracelsus, and the substance of his teachings concerning Cosmology, Anthropology, Pneumatology, Magic and Sorcery, Medicine, Alchemy, and Astrology, Philosophy, and Theosophy, extracted and translated from his ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... that were taken seriously. Behind the hocus-pocus of such fine-sounding words, the bombast, the theatrical clash and clang of the swords and pasteboard helmets, there was always the incurable futility of a Sardou, the intrepid vaudevillist, playing Punch and Judy with history. When in the world was the like of the ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... sang, the Doctor whistled, the Doctor talked. He spoke of the woods, and the wars, and the deposition of dew; he brightened and babbled of Paris; he soared into cloudy bombast on the glories of the political arena. All was to be changed; as the day departed, it took with it the vestiges of an outworn existence, and to-morrow's sun was to inaugurate the new. "Enough," he cried, "of this life of maceration!" His wife (still beautiful, or he was sadly partial) ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to his rage and to his bombast Elsa had only silence for him—a silence which he knew must hide her real thoughts, he suddenly lost all sense of proportion and of prudence; for the moment he felt as if he could hate this woman whom he had wooed and won despite her resistance, ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... are so instinct with genius and have proved to be so immortal that they may well be considered as ideal witnesses to the triumph of quality over mere quantity or sensational display. To-day, when we suffer from musical bombast, their refined message is ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... by the favour of the Lord Keeper Whitlocke; upon receiving which he wrote him a letter of thanks, which as it serves to illustrate how easily and politely he wrote in prose, we shall here insert. It is far removed either from meanness or bombast, and has as much elegance in it as any ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... which I kept up during my leisure hours in India, which, like those of Don Quixote, were many. I preferred this study infinitely to that of the Asiatic languages, for which I never felt any taste, as I dislike bombast, hyperbole and exaggeration; and though an ardent admirer of the Muses, I never could find pleasure in what Voltaire terms "le bon style oriental, ou l'on fait danser les montagnes et les collines," and I prefer ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... German Press is to me a revelation of bombast, self-righteousness, falsehood, and hypocrisy. What shocks one most is the familiar and perpetual calling upon God to witness that He alone has led the Germans to victory and blessed their cause. I read a poem yesterday, which began "Du Gott der Deutschen," as ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... The touch of bombast was not out of place. It jumped so far with the humour of the convicts that they set up a feeble cheer, at which Sylvia frowned. Frightened as she was, the prison-bred child was as much astonished at hearing convicts cheer as a fashionable lady would ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... Odyssey, and give a preference to the former. The merit of these works may be ascertained in some measure, by the rules we have already established. We need only to add further on this head, that among many beauties we meet with examples of the turgid and bombast in the work of Ariosto; from which that of the Greek Poet is wholly free. The two first lines ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... as mere pleasantry, with all the bombast of lyrical emphasis, the invocation terminated in a cry of ardent conviction, quivering with profound poetical emotion, and Sandoz's eyes grew moist; and, to hide how much he felt moved, he ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... his Groatsworth, "Shakescene" thinks he can bombast out a blank verse with the best; he is an actor, he is also an author, or a furbisher of older plays, and, as a member of the company, is a rival to be dreaded by Greene's three author friends: whoever they were, they were professional University playwrights; the critics ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... creed must fail that cannot recognise any degrees of mental capacity; that cannot understand that man has a soul that cannot be confined within any man-drawn boundaries. This German-creed sweeps the earth with all the bombast of a war-mad Kaiser. It is going to fail, but not till men who think will rise and fight for recognition of their immortality. It will be the War of ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... tendency—especially the romance and the history assuming the form of romance—the very style of these Asiatics was, as may readily be conceived, abrupt and without modulation and finish, minced and effeminate, full of tinsel and bombast, thoroughly vulgar and affected; "any one who knows Hegesias," says Cicero, "knows ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the Temple, his morals do show; But where his deep law is, few mortals yet know: His rhetoric, bombast, silly jests, are by far More like to lampooning, than pleading at bar. ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... Ruffhead, to have told Warburton, that "Young had much of a sublime genius, though without common sense; so that his genius, having no guide, was perpetually liable to degenerate into bombast. This made him pass a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets: but his having a very good heart enabled him to support the clerical character when he assumed it, first with ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... partner for life. Four letters which he wrote to her are preserved, in which he expresses the most pure and honourable feelings in language which, if a little formal, is, for manliness and simplicity, a striking contrast to the bombast of some of his later epistles. Songs, too, he addressed to her—The Lass of Cessnock Banks, Bonnie Peggy Alison, and Mary Morison. The two former are inconsiderable; the latter is one of those pure and beautiful ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... the afternoon the straggling remnant of a sea breeze drifted up the river and tempered the scorching heat. Then the captain of the Honda drained his last glass of red rum in the posada, reiterated to his political affiliates with spiritous bombast his condensed opinion anent the Government, and dramatically signaled the pilot ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... while the venerable Plutarch objects to him that he carried all his thoughts beyond nature; that he wrote not to men of character but to the mob; that his style is at once obscure, licentious, tragical, pompous and mean—sometimes inflated and serious to bombast—sometimes ludicrous, even to puerility; that he makes none of his personages speak in any distinct character, so that in his scenes the son cannot be known from the father—the citizen from the boor—the hero from the shopkeeper, or the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... general good taste in the other points, I was much surprised at this, and could only account for it, by the expence and the difficulty of bringing together such incongruities, for it is a common effect of enormous riches to push every thing they can procure to bombast and extravagance, which are the death of taste. In other countries, however, as well as in China, I have seen some of the most boasted feats, either outgrowing their beauty from a plethora of their owner's wealth, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... um sie und die Bhne verdient zu machen, sahe es freilich mit unserer dramatischen Poesie sehr elend aus. Man kannte keine Regeln, man bekmmerte sich um keine Muster. Unsre Staats- und Heldenaktionen waren voller Unsinn, Bombast, Schmutz und Pbelwitz. Unsre Lustspiele bestanden in Verkleidungen und Zaubereien, und Prgel waren die witzigsten Einflle derselben. Dieses Verderbnis einzusehen, brauchte man eben nicht der feinste und grsste Geist zu sein. ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... little limply; something of the bombast had gone out of his manner. Tavernake's arrival had reminded him of things which he ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the lions, whereof there were great numbers in this veld. The prevalence of these hungry beasts forced us to watch our cattle very closely while they grazed, and at night, wherever it was possible, to protect them and ourselves in "bombast," or fences of thorns, within which we lit fires to scare away wild beasts. Notwithstanding these precautions, we lost several of the oxen, and ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... Vices of Style opposed to the Sublime: Affectation, Bombast, False Sentiment, Frigid Conceits. The cause ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... of the United States authorities in thwarting their plans, to cross the border, as was the case in 1866. So they worked unceasingly and enthusiastically in maturing their plans, while they maintained absolute silence as to their intentions. The boasting bombast which had been so largely indulged in previous to the Raid of 1866 was not manifested on this occasion, consequently little interest was taken by the general public ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... would send every one of the American vessels to the bottom; but they had made similar boasts before, and their bombast did not quiet the fears of the people, among whom a panic quickly spread. Those who were able to do so gathered their valuables and took refuge on the merchant ships in the harbor and thanked heaven when they bore them away. Many others fled from the city, but the majority stayed, grimly determined ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... inspection of some of his romance-compilations. Still one finds it impossible to conceive of our sober and reticent Messer Marco pacing the floor of his Genoese dungeon, and seven times over rolling out this magniloquent bombast, with sufficient deliberation to be overtaken by the pen ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... it."—(Ib). Nor were these volunteer Loyalists intimidated by General Smyth's extended columns of cavalry and infantry with which he lined the American shore, his marching and countermarching of countless battalions, and all the pomp of war and parade of martial bombast with which the fertile mind of General Smyth hoped to terrify the apparently defenceless Canadians; to which he added a flaming proclamation, not excelled in pomposity and brag by that of General Hull ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... whining passions and little starved conceits are gently wafted up by their own extreme levity to the middle region, and there fix and are frozen by the frigid understandings of the inhabitants. Bombast and buffoonery, by nature lofty and light, soar highest of all, and would be lost in the roof if the prudent architect had not, with much foresight, contrived for them a fourth place, called the twelve-penny gallery, and there planted a suitable ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... which fixes the date of the proclamation as 301 A.D. Then follows a long recital of the circumstances which have led the government to adopt this drastic method of controlling prices. This introduction is one of the most extraordinary pieces of bombast, mixed metaphors, loose syntax, and incoherent expressions that Latin literature possesses. One is tempted to infer from its style that it was the product of Diocletian's own pen. He was a man of humble origin, and would not live in Rome for fear of being laughed at on account ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... key the herders on the Keowee talk? They may 'moo' like the cow, or 'mew' like the cat! I should be in danger of losing half that was said. And that is what these varlets here in the station know right well. It must seem but a mere bit of bombast on my part. It could never be seriously countenanced—unless I had an interpreter. Stop me! but if you were a grandson instead of a granddaughter, I would not mind taking you with me to interpret for me, though, Gadzooks, I'd be like a heathen red Injun ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... ever makes allowance for a filthy or sordid expression. Magnificent, noble, and sublime words are to be estimated by their congruity with the subject; for what is magnificent in one place, swells into bombast in another; and what is low in a grand matter, may be proper in a humble situation. As in a splendid style a low word must be very much out of place and, as it were, a blemish to it, so a sublime and pompous expression ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... do so by the spontaneous fervor of your heart and readiness of your imagination, you will feel now little sympathy even with the literary style of that early composition,—you will see extravagance and bombast, where once you saw only eloquence and graphic power. And as for the graver and more important matter of the thought of the discourse, I think you will be aware of a certain undefinable shallowness and crudity. Your growing experience has borne you beyond it. Somehow you feel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... together, constitute a complete and intelligible sentence.[1693] The words I shall utter will be fraught with sense, free from ambiguity (in consequence of each of them not being symbols of many things), logical, free from pleonasm or tautology, smooth, certain, free from bombast, agreeable or sweet, truthful, not inconsistent with the aggregate of three, (viz., Righteousness, Wealth and Pleasure), refined (i.e., free from Prakriti), not elliptical or imperfect, destitute of harshness or difficulty ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... does this decree throw upon unerring wisdom; and all the quibbles in the world cannot clear it of the same. Again: let God speak like thunder, "The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the people that forget God!" yet if the sinner is incapable of taking the warning, what empty bombast does it make of the awful threatening! But let God be true, and every man a liar who can cast such vile reflections upon his ...
— A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism • Thomas Taylor
... cups, of his coming marriage with one of the belles of W——, and, last evening, he openly avowed that to-day, he should 'carry off Miss Sybil Lamotte, in spite of her high and mighty family, and in the face of all the town.' Of course, no one who heard regarded these things, save as the bombast of a half drunken braggart and liar. To-day, young Evarts and his still wilder chum, encountered him just setting forth with his fine turnout and wonderfully gotten up. They jested on his fine appearance, ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... not foreseen that men of science would soon be making discoveries at a rate which left their skill in words outstripped; that having to invent their terms as they went along, yet being careless and contemptuous of a science in which they have no training, they would bombast out our dictionaries with monstrously invented words that not only would have made Quintilian stare and gasp, but would affront the decently literate ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... themselves gradually masters of nearly all the colleges; and after a long and obstinate struggle, even the university of Cracow had to submit. According to Bentkowski, it was principally by their influence, that the tone of panegyric and of bombast was introduced, which for nearly a hundred and fifty years disgraced the Polish literature. The tastelessness of this style reached its highest point under John Sobieski; when the panegyrics with which this victorious captain was hailed by his courtiers, became ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... heere comes bare-bone. How now my sweet Creature of Bombast, how long is't agoe, Iacke, since thou saw'st thine owne Knee? Falst. My owne Knee? When I was about thy yeeres (Hal) I was not an Eagles Talent in the Waste, I could haue crept into any Aldermans Thumbe-Ring: a plague of sighing and ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the North not a single statesman or a single newspaper appeared to have any conception of the serious task before them. The fusillades of rant, passion and bombast which filled the air would have been comic but for the grim tragedy which was ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... plenty of time yet. Liberty, my dear Miss Rossano, will restore your father to health, and he will not lose his share of the glory." We English always excuse a foreigner who shows a tendency to bombast in conversation; and allowing for her partial knowledge of the language, and for the oratorical turn her people have, I saw nothing overstrained in the little woman's raptures. I had even a modified belief in their reality; and even to this day I cannot blame myself for having been deceived by her. ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... exception played in history, and he depicted to Fairhaven the many glories of Fairhaven—past, present and approaching—in superlatives that would hardly have seemed inadequate if applied to Paradise. His oration, in short, was of a piece with the amiable bombast that the college students and Fairhaven at large were accustomed to applaud at every Finals—the sort of linguistic debauch that John Charteris himself remembered to have applauded as an undergraduate more years ago ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... for some little len'th o' time, your honour," said Jones. "Me and my messmates took little heed o't for a time, thinkin' it were only Scrivings' bombast, 'cause ye see, sir, he's only a blessed mouth of a fellow ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... Italian soldiers at Rieka had over and over again been telling the Croats, "then we shall not halt before we come to Zagreb, your capital." Those five will perhaps some day explain to their comrades how quickly Zagreb can be reached.... As yet those whom they left behind them had not lost their bombast: a manifesto was issued by them which declared that five true patriots had sallied forth to Saint Anna, for the purpose of parleying with the Constituent Assembly, and that in a barbarous fashion they had been arrested, maltreated and possibly ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... a time to be drunk with pride. Even Boileau, hurried along by the prevailing enthusiasm, forgot the good sense and good taste to which he owed his reputation. He fancied himself a lyric poet, and gave vent to his feelings in a hundred and sixty lines of frigid bombast about Alcides, Mars, Bacchus, Ceres, the lyre of Orpheus, the Thracian oaks and the Permessian nymphs. He wondered whether Namur, had, like Troy, been built by Apollo and Neptune. He asked what power could subdue a city stronger than that before which the Greeks lay ten years; and he returned answer ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Milt. But at this absurd second intrusion on his decidedly private dinner-party he flipped to the center of the room and said "I beg your pardon!" in such a head-office manner that the pink-locked Mystery halted in his bombast. Claire felt wabbly. She had no theories as to where Milt had acquired a private jester, nor as to what was about to happen to Milt—and possibly ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... awake, he was full of bombast, that major! When he was asleep he snored outrageously. Ugh! For the first time in my life I hate anybody," declared Mother ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... with which the dedicator in the early years of the seventeenth century besought his patron's favour on the first page of his book. But Thorpe was too self-assertive to be a slavish imitator. His addiction to bombast and his elementary appreciation of literature recommended to him the practice of incorporating in his dedicatory salutation some high-sounding embellishments of the accepted formula suggested by his author's writing. {399a} In his dedication of the 'Sonnets' to ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... Smith ("Long Acre") was a bore at the Congress of Vienna, but would have been delightful to us could we have known him.' [Footnote: Sir Sidney Smith must have been prolix over his achievements at the siege of Acre and elsewhere. It is certain that a reputation for bombast injured his career and caused his remarkable ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... stockings, garters, and roses, and with the help of many pillows and other such farcing, so filled the garments which otherwise had hung upon him like a shawl from a peg, and made of himself such a 'sweet creature of bombast' that, with ludicrous unlikeness of countenance, he bore in figure no distant ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... last. They are written in the best modern Lied style, and are quite unhackneyed. It is always the unexpected that happens, though this unexpected thing almost always proves to be a right thing. Without any sense of strain or bombast he reaches superb climaxes; without eccentricity he is individual; and his songs are truly interpreters of the words they express. Of these five, "Wann die Rosen aufgeblueht" is a wonderfully fine and fiery work; "Die Stunde sei gesegnet" has one of the most beautiful endings ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... more appropriately as a commentary on the tragedy of his own life). The tragic note is sounded, with impressive authority and force, in the brief introduction, largo maestoso. The music, from the first, drives to the very heart of the subject: there is neither pose nor bombast in the presentation of the thought; and this attitude is maintained throughout—in the ingratiating loveliness of the second subject, in the fierce striving of the middle section, in the noble and sombre slow movement,—a largo of profound pathos and dignity,—and ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... or lost in clouds! Below a torrent breaking through cliffs, and tumbling through fragments of rocks!. . . Now and then an old foot bridge, with a broken rail, a leaning cross, a cottage or the ruin of an hermitage! This sounds too bombast and too romantic to one that has not seen it, too cold for one that has." Or contrast with Addison's Italian letters passages like these, which foretoken Rogers and Byron. We get nothing so sympathetic till at least a half ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of vanity or bombast in his voice as he said this, and in his eyes that new underglow deepened and shone. Perhaps in this instant he saw more of his future than he would speak of to anyone on earth. Perhaps prevision was given him, and it was as the Big Financier had said ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... before the bonnet maker could determine whether it were better to stand or fly, two active young men, clad in fantastic masking habits, resembling wild men, and holding great clubs, seized upon him, saying, in a tragical tone: "Yield thee, man of bells and bombast—yield thee, rescue or no rescue, or truly thou art but ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... street, the railway guard, the 'bus conductor, the "shover," the humbler clerks, and their womenfolk, who are patrons of the gallery; will they get beyond one visit? Can they recognize profound thoughts at first hearing, or at all? Are they able to distinguish beautiful blank verse from bombast? Are the soliloquies of Hamlet likely to lure them to the severe intellectual task of reading ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... indeed, his very name, Bombast, used to this day as a synonym of loud, violent, and empty talk. To understand it at all, we must go back and think a little over these same occult sciences which were believed in by thousands during the fifteenth and ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... excellent. He was well acquainted with the great Greek writers; and, though unable fully to appreciate their creative genius, admired the majestic simplicity of their manner, and had learned from them to despise bombast and tinsel. It is easy, we think, to discover, in The Spectator and The Guardian, traces of the influence, in part salutary and in part pernicious, which the mind of Boileau had ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... composition, there is no manner of comparison. These meditations resemble, in elegance, purity, neatness, and simplicity, the genius of those performances which we know with certainty to have flowed from the royal pen; but are so unlike the bombast, perplexed, rhetorical, and corrupt style of Dr. Gauden, to whom they are ascribed, that no human testimony seems sufficient to convince us that he was the author. Yet all the evidences which would rob the king of that honor, tend to prove that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... portrayal of the ancient regime, the bombast and credulity of the day overflows in the most extravagant exaggerations (Buchez et Roux, XXXI., 300, Report, by Saint-Just, February 26, 1794.): "In 1788, Louis XVI. Caused eight thousand persons of both sexes and of every age to be sacrificed ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... some bombast speeches of Macbeth, which are not to be understood, he used to say that it was horror; and I am much afraid that ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... compositions are unparalleled in any literature. Nature is systematically outraged in one and all—from beginning to end. Never was such mouthing seen and heard beneath moon and stars. Through the whole range of rant he rages like a man inspired. He is the emperor of bombast. Yet these plays contain many passages of powerful declamation—not a few of high eloquence; some that in their argumentative amplitude, if they do not reach, border on the sublime. Nor are their wanting outbreaks of genuine passion among the utmost extravagances of false sentiment—when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... reared on verbal bombast, had found some difficulty in maintaining her expression of uplifted approbation while Mr. Potts's rhetoric rolled; her willingness that Mr. Potts should serve the cause did not blind her to his inadequacy unless kept under the most careful control; and now, though incensed by Tison's ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... der Apostel," his only work in the nature of an oratorio, is dedicated to "Frau Charlotte Weinlig, the widow of my never-to-be-forgotten teacher." During this time he also composed a sonata and a polonaise, both of which were free from bombast and simple and natural in their musical form. More important than all, Wagner now began to understand Mozart and learned to admire him. He was at last on the path which subsequently was to lead him, even nearer than Beethoven came, to that mighty cantor of Leipzig, who by his art has disclosed ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... spent at a club of his countrymen, where the London papers are taken. Sometimes his daughters entice him to the theaters, but not often. He abuses French tragedy, as all fustian and bombast, Talma as a ranter, and Duchesnois as a mere termagant. It is true his ear is not sufficiently familiar with the language to understand French verse, and he generally goes to sleep during the performance. The wit of the French comedy is flat and pointless to ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... soldiers told me afterward, between chattering teeth. He almost damped our patriotism. We uttered our bombast, sealed our vows and made our sorties, thereafter, every man of us, with our chins over our shoulders! Spare me Seraiah! He has too ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... without strange blunders; yet I cannot find any failure in my intellect. Being unable to write to purpose with my own hand, this forenoon was a sort of holiday to me. The third volume of Count Robert is fairly begun, but I fear I shall want stuff to fill it, for I would not willingly bombast it with things inappropriate. If I could fix my mind to the task to-day, my temper, notwithstanding my oath, sets strong towards politics, where I would be sure of making a figure, and feel I could carry with me a great part of ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... times, These sure no longer are the Muse's crimes! But some complain that, former faults to shun, The reformation to extremes has run. The frantic hero's wild delirium past, Now insipidity succeeds bombast: So slow Melpomene's cold numbers creep, Here dulness seems her drowsy court to keep, And we are scarce awake, whilst you are fast asleep. Thalia, once so ill-behaved and rude, Reform'd, is now become an arrant prude; ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... Those of Moore have reached the drawing rooms; but what do the People know even of his? Buy a ballad in any street in Ireland, from the metropolis to the village, and you will find in it, perhaps, some humour, some tenderness, and some sweetness of sound; but you will certainly find bombast, or slander, or coarseness, united in all cases with false rhythm, false rhyme, conceited imagery, black paper, and blotted printing. A high class of ballads would do immense good—the present race demean and mislead the people ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... eye of a foreigner 'flood' and 'wood' and 'home' and 'come' are perfect rhymes. We must deal gently with the poet while 'trying his 'prentice hand,' hoping better things when he shall 'become an artist true;' and when we remember that to the national taste sublimity is represented by bombast, artifice takes the place of nature, and sense is sacrificed to sound, the love of the ore rotundo demanding mouth-filling words at any price, we cannot fail to discover the genuine Spanish beauties of the piece. I only wonder that in his chronological picture of the races he should ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... perceived to be the essence of the philosophic contes of Voltaire, finished his own intellectual education. Henceforth he does not allow his seriousness to overweigh his liveliness; if he detects a tendency to bombast, he relieves it with a brilliant jest. Count de Moltke and the lampoons offer us a case to our hand; "he was just the old fool who would make a cream cheese," says Contarini, and the startled laugh which greets him is exactly of the same order as those which were wont to reward the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... size, and pigeons. The cacique has several orchards, yielding a great variety of fine fruits, as oranges, lemons, figs, pomegranates, pumpkins, melons, and many others; with a variety of odoriferous plants, as rosemary, thyme, and the like. One of these gardens or orchards was planted with the bombast cotton tree, which grows in pods, in each of which there are ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... and bombast, no man ever gave a more futile account of human things than he has done of the Decline and Fall of the ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... laughing too? You see, Sir, that the gentlemen opposite cannot keep their countenances. And no wonder. Was such a State paper ever seen in our language before? And what is the plea set up for all this bombast? Why, the honourable gentleman the Secretary of the Board of Control brings down to the House some translations of Persian letters from native princes. Such letters, as everybody knows, are written in a most absurd and turgid style. The honourable gentleman forces us ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... name Dorothy would at first tell him nothing. Her captors briefly stated the little they knew concerning her presence in the town. The self-constituted dictator tried bombast, threats and flattery to gain information from her, but they were of no avail. His authority being thus disputed by a woman, and his absurd self-esteem ruffled, he gave way to a torrent of abuse, but Dorothy was as if she heard it not. It was only when Riel was about to give instructions to ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... are affected by them even without the occasions. When words which have been generally so applied are put together without any rational view, or in such a manner that they do not rightly agree with each other, the style is called bombast. And it requires in several cases much good sense and experience to be guarded against the force of such language; for when propriety is neglected, a greater number of these affecting words may be taken into the service, and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... unnatural fatness; and, when it is in such a state that it would be sent away in disgust from any table, he offers it to the judges. The object of the poetical candidate, in like manner, is to produce, not a good poem, but a poem of that exact degree of frigidity or bombast which may appear to his censors to be correct or sublime. Compositions thus constructed will always be worthless. The few excellences which they may contain will have an exotic aspect and flavour. In general, prize sheep are good for nothing but to make tallow candles, and prize poems are good ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to Philip's intelligence to insinuate that the Prince would shrink before danger, or die of fear. Had Orange ever been inclined to bombast, he might have answered the churchman's calumny, as Caesar the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... by the more recent achievements of Correggio, Guido, Guercino, and the Bolognese school. The splendour of the stanze of the Vatican, the dreadful majesty of the Sistine ceiling, revealed to Odo the beauty of that unmatched moment before grandeur broke into bombast. His early association with the expressive homely art of the chapel at Pontesordo and with the half-pagan beauty of Luini's compositions had formed his taste on soberer lines than the fashion of the day affected; ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... quite quietly,—no bombast or boasting about it. Mr. Spugg was standing among a little group of listening members of the club and when he said that he had decided to send his chauffeur, he spoke with a kind of simple earnestness, a determination that marks ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... vault he found the page, Of some long lost, and long lamented Sage, And doubtless he the Letters would have trac'd, Had they not been by age and dust effac'd: This single specimen will serve to shew, The weighty lessons of this reverend Beau, Bombast in vain would want of Genius cloke, For feeble fires evaporate in smoke; A Boy, o'er Boys he holds a trembling reign, More fit than they to seek some ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... a shock to remember that this medley of poetry, bombast, and myth will eventually reach the ears of no other person than the Octavius of Antony and Cleopatra; and the contrast is the more remarkable when one recalls the brilliant scene of negotiation and diplomacy in the latter ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... and is said to have introduced so remarkable a change in our language, I have seen and read. It is an unnatural affected jargon, in which the perpetual use of metaphors, allusions, allegories, and analogies, is to pass for wit, and stiff bombast for language; and with this nonsense the court of Queen Elizabeth (whose times afforded better models for stile and composition, than almost any since) became miserably infected, and greatly help'd to let in all the vile pedantry of language in the two following reigns; so much mischief the most ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... the British lust for paramountcy and suzerainty and possession? Liberal, or Conservative, or Radical, or Unionist, the diplomats and lawyers and financiers who urge on your political machinery by bombast and bribes and catchwords and lying promises, are swayed by one motive—governed by one desire—lands and diamonds and gold. Wealth that is the property of other men, soil that has been fertilised ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... "we must be prepared. I look upon it all as an empty, insolent piece of bombast; but whatever it is, we must not be taken unawares. Help shall be at once asked from England, and meantime we must do all we can to place ourselves ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... Werther period and Napoleon took it with him when he was dreaming of rivalling Alexander's conquests in the East. We may perhaps understand why the gigantesque pictures in Ossian of the northern mountains and scenery—with all its vagueness, incoherence, and bombast, was somehow congenial to minds dissatisfied, for different reasons, with the old ideals. To explain the charm more precisely is a very pretty problem for the acute critic. Ossian, it is clear, fell in with the mood characteristic of the time. But ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... Americans don't embroil us in a war before long it will not be their fault. What with their swagger and bombast, what with their claims for indemnification, what with Ireland and Fenianism, and what with Canada, I have strong apprehensions. With a settled animosity towards the French usurper, I believe him to ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... the same pains and pomp of diction bestowed upon the most trifling as upon the most important parts of a sentence or discourse, we grow tired of distinguishing between pretension and reality, and are disposed to confound the tinsel and bombast of the phraseology with want of weight in the thoughts. Thus, from the imposing and oracular nature of the style, people are tempted at first to imagine that our author's speculations are all wisdom and profundity: ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... V.ii.790 (465,5) [As bombast, and as lining to the time] This line is obscure. Bombast was a kind of loose texture not unlike what is now called wadding, used to give the dresses of that time bulk and protruberance, without much increase of weight; whence the same name is given a tumour ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... elected to the Royal Society at a time when his proposers must have known that his immediate object was to put F.R.S. on the title-page of a work against the tides. To give all I know, I may add that the editor of some very ignorant bombast about the "forehead of the solar sky," who did not know the difference between Bailly[666] and Baily,[667] received hints which induced him to withdraw his proposal for election into the Astronomical Society. But this was an act of kindness; {309} for if he had seen Mr. Baily in the ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... finds the Lord walking in the cool of the evening, showing his hind quarters to Moses, ordering abominable massacres, and punishing chiefs who had not killed enough people. On further perusal, there is revealed, "A great deal of Oriental bombast, incoherence and absurdity, that the marvels recounted are often ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... and exclaimed pompously, "Don't you attempt bombast with me, Mr. Cospatric. I am as safe from your personal violence here as I ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... of that fact was—without phosphorus no thought is possible. We can much more relevantly declare that without thyroid, no thought, no growth, no distinctive humanity or even animality is possible. For the epigram about phosphorus was bombast, since it can be declaimed with equal truth that without oxygen, without carbon, without nitrogen, without any of the food elements that go to make up the chemical composition of brain matter, no thought is possible. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... and starched [let me add] into dry and indelectable affectation, one sort of these scholars assume a style as rough as frequently are their manners; they spangle over their productions with metaphors; they tumble into bombast: the sublime, with them, lying in words, and not in sentiment, they fancy themselves most exalted when least understood; and down they sit, fully satisfied with their own performances, and call them MASCULINE. While a second sort, aiming at wit, that wicked misleader, ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... came to be reissued in a volume, provided a somewhat solemn preface, in which they say: "The principal poems in this volume, under the title of the 'Echo,' owed their origin to the accidental suggestion of a moment of literary sportiveness, at a time when pedantry, affectation, and bombast pervaded most of the pieces published in the gazettes, which were then the principal vehicles of literary information. Willing to lend their aid to check the progress of false taste in American literature, the authors conceived that ridicule would prove a powerful corrective, and ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... Marlowe, and trying to dissuade them from "spending their wits" any longer in "making plays," spitefully declares: "There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in the country." Doubtless this charge of adopting and adapting the productions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... Everett, he was not analyzing the acclamation that greeted everything he said; applause had made him drunk. But under the hilarity of his listeners there was considerable enthusiasm for the man himself. The Duke perceived it, for he realized what times had come upon the State. Spinney's bombast expressed the protest that was abroad. Rebellion, thirsty, does not seek the cold spring of Reason. It fuddles itself with hot speech, it riots—it ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... with difficulty restrained his anger at the fellow's bombast, was upon the point of speaking when Father O'Malley took the words out ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... which cast strong mellow shades on the figures, and gave an effect of reality to the fine white marble of which they are composed; but their merits are very striking, and are quite unalloyed by the graphic bombast of which the most able French artists have been with too much truth accused. The character of the Dauphin, whose exemplary life in the midst of a corrupt court, was a tacit reproof which his haughty father could ill brook, is ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... Men are human still, certainly, yet genuine patriotism appears to be a sine qua non now, where bombast answered in the old day. Corruption is no longer accepted. Public men then were surprisingly simple, surprisingly cheap and limited in their methods. There were two rules for public and private life. It was thought quixotic, I gather from studying the documents of the time, to expect anything ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... Thermometer Charm Rather Tall Stepchild Wedlock Ghostly Haggard Bridal Pioneer Pluck Noon Neighbor Jimson weed Courteous Wanton Rosemary Cynical Street Plausible Grocer Husband Allow Worship Gipsy Insane Encourage Clerk Disease Astonish Clergyman Boulevard Realize Hectoring Canary Bombast Primrose Diamond Benedict Walnut Abominate Piazza Holiday Barbarous Disgust Heavy Kind Virtu Nightmare Devil Gospel Comfort Whist Mermaid Pearl Onion Enthusiasm Domino Book Fanatic Grotesque Cheat Auction Economy Illegible Quell Cheap Illegitimate Sheriff ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... sight like the white froth he was watching on the top of the ever-shifting waves? He had boasted of possessing a witness. Would they believe that boast and send a detective in search of him, or would they take his words for the bombast they really were and proceed with their investigations in happy relief at the ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... unknown during his lifetime, but a small collection of his poems, published after his death, gained him a posthumous recognition as the greatest Danish poet of the 18th century. Stub's style is extremely noble and expressive, devoid of the excessive bombast and sentimentality that many writers then mistook for poetry. He was of a cheerful disposition with a hopeful outlook upon life that only occasionally is darkened by the hardships and disappointments of his own existence. Even the poems of his darker moods are colored by his inborn ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... Tennyson's "Light Brigade" seems bombast and gallery play after July 1st. In that case some men on horses who had received an order rode out and rode back, and verse made ever memorable this wild gallop of exhilaration with horses bearing the men. The battalions of July 1st went on their ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Carleton persisted in holding out, and a prophecy attributed to Montgomery that he would eat his Christmas dinner either in Quebec or in Hell—these were some of the blood-curdling items that came in by petticoat or arrow post. One of the most active purveyors of all this bombast was Jerry Duggan, a Canadian 'patriot' barber ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... knocked M. Lantenac into a cocked hat and stormed la Tourgue if it had been garrisoned by 19 x 19 French spouters of platitude in half the time that Gauvain and Cimourdain took about it. In fact, Balfour seems to me to be flesh and blood and Gauvain & Co. to be too often mere personified bombast: and therefore I fancy that Old Mortality will outlast '93, though Notre Dame is far better than Quentin Durward, and Les Miserables, perhaps, better than any. This is, of course, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in this field of occult knowledge and of nature mysticism was the far-travelled man and medical genius, Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast, of Hohenheim, generally known as Paracelsus. He was born in 1493 in the neighbourhood of Einsiedeln, not far from Zurich, the son of a physician of repute. He studied in the University of Basle, and later was instructed by Trithemius, Abbot ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... he mustered force to put the sin at a distance. And at last his eyes seemed to open to some new ways. He found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... little noticed their altered language or their graver brow. In a little while, finding they had ceased to be amusing, he effaced their works, not as dangerous, but as dull; and recognized only thenceforward, as art, the innocuous bombast of Michael Angelo, and fluent efflorescence of Bernini. But when you become more intimately and impartially acquainted with the history of the Reformation, you will find that, as surely and earnestly ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... of sham jewellery; and I have heard him offer a situation to one of his fellow-passengers with the air of a lord. Nothing could overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was written on his brow. He was then in his ill days; but I can imagine him in Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder. As we moved in the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society. I do not think I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or interesting; but there was entertainment in the man's demeanour. You might call him a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... their dish on all the table. They, who would combat general authority with particular opinion, must first establish themselves a reputation of understanding better than other men. Are all the flights of heroic poetry to be concluded bombast, unnatural, and mere madness, because they are not affected with their excellencies? It is just as reasonable as to conclude there is no day, because a blind man cannot distinguish of light and colours. Ought ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... more important than knowing how to pitch it. Take the average American military audience: what can be said fairly of its main characteristics? Perhaps this—that it is moderately reflective; that it is ready to give the untried speaker a break; that it does not like windiness, bombast or prolonged moralizing; that it refuses to be bullied; and that it can usually be won by the light touch and a little appeal to its sporting instinct. It is the little leavening in the bread which makes all the difference ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... are beginning to awake to the fact that their countries have been living on the glories of their revolutions and traditions, rather than the substance of freedom. Behind the boast of old-age pensions, material benefits and wage regulations, behind the bombast concerning liberty in this country and tyranny in that, behind all the slogans and shibboleths coined out of the ideals of the peoples for the uses of imperialism, woman must and will see the iron hand of that same imperialism, condemning women ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... Shadwell dwells on the great success of the piece, the plot of which he had cleverly "adapted" from the Adelphi of Terence. In the prologue, which was spoken by Mountfort, the actor, whom the infamous Lord Mohun stabbed in Norfolk Street, the dramatist ridicules his tormenter Dryden, for his noise and bombast, and with some ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... any other. A page of Boccaccio or Bembo, for instance, done into literal English, would have an air of intolerable artifice and verbiage. The choicest morsels of Massillon, Bossuet, or the rhetorical Thomas, would savor marvellously of bombast; and how could we in any degree keep pace with the magnificent march of the Castilian! Yet surely we are not to impugn the taste of all these nations, who attach much more importance, and have paid ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... instant the thing was done! At the man's words about Benita, Meyer, who had been listening to his threats and bombast unconcerned, suddenly seemed to awake. His dark eyes flashed, his pale face turned cruel. Snatching the revolver from his belt he seemed to point and fire it with one movement, and down—dead or ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... and resumed my walk. "The key to an empire!" I said my own words over, and could have blushed for their tone of bombast. They were true, but they sounded false, I looked at my surroundings, and marveled that a situation that was of real dignity could wear so mean a garb. The sandy cove where I stood was on the mainland, and sheltered four settlements. Behind lay the forest; in front stretched Lake Huron, a ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... honour of his country, between his quiet, calm demeanour, and the absurd airs, and noisy brawls, and the dapper uniforms of the young fellows one meets with in the fashionable quarters. It is the difference between reality and sham, bravery and bombast. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... not about to be put down, though the huge globe crack about his ears. After this, he calmly worded on, seeming to regard the judge's stinging observation with the same sort of indifference as the lion would a dew-drop on his mane; and having poured out all manner of voluminous bombast, he gradually ran down, and came to a conclusion; then, jumping up refreshed, like the bounding of a tennis-ball, he proceeded to call witnesses; and, judging from what happened at the inquest, as well as because he wished to overwhelm a ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the widest vogue among the good wishes with which the dedicator in the early years of the seventeenth century besought his patron's favour on the first page of his book. But Thorpe was too self-assertive to be a slavish imitator. His addiction to bombast and his elementary appreciation of literature recommended to him the practice of incorporating in his dedicatory salutation some high-sounding embellishments of the accepted formula suggested by his author's writing. {399a} In his ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... that we had done with the nauseous talk about campaigns, and standard-bearers, and glorious victories (imperial triumphs) and all the bloated army-bumming bombast which is so rife for the six months preceding an election? To read almost any one of our political papers during a canvass is enough to make one sick and sorry.... An election has no manner of likeness to a campaign, or a battle. It is not even a ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... Deutschland auf." Reden Friedrich Wilhelms, p. 9. In conversation with Bassermann Frederick William at a later time described his ride through Berlin as "a comedy which he had been made to play." The bombast at any ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... theatre. Shaw does not know that it is unpardonable sin to have his characters make long speeches at one another, apparently thinking that this embargo applies only to long speeches which consist mainly of bombast and rhetoric. There never was an author who showed less predilection for a specific medium by which to accomplish his results. He recognized, early in his days, many things awry in the world and ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... received, and the many complimentary expressions with which he is greeted at its close, one would at once conclude that the remarks were new and original. Boasting is an Indian's weak point; given a listener, and the amount of bombast and mock heroics which he will inflict ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... the language well in all you write, and swerve not from it in your loftiest flight. The smoothest verse and the exactest sense displease us, if ill English give offence: a barbarous phrase no reader can approve; nor bombast, noise, or affectation love. In short, without pure language, what you write can never yield us profit or delight. Take time for thinking, never work in haste; and value not yourself for writing fast." See Dryden's Art of Poetry:—British ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of the international situation as those that had germinated within half a mile of Downing Street. Quite in keeping, too, with the older and better traditions of British journalism was the manner of the home-coming; no bombast, no personal advertisement, no flamboyant interviews. Even a complimentary luncheon at the Voyagers' Club was courteously declined. Indeed, it began to be felt that the self-effacement of the returned pressmen was being carried to a ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... had him, but the Dissenters protested against his being given to an Anglican refuge. The scene at the mass-meeting to celebrate young Ginx's rescue from the incubus of a delusive superstition is described with rare appreciation of the foibles of character. The bombast, the cant, the flapdoodle and flubdub, the silly unction of different kinds of preachers are "done to a hair." Five hours the meeting raged, and at last a resolution that the Metropolitan pulpit should take up the subject, and the churches take up a collection for the ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the theatre is living; you see something really good, and good throughout. Not one touch of that stage-strut and vulgar bombast of tone, which the English actor fancies indispensable to scenic illusion, is tolerated here. For the first time in my life, I saw something represented in a style uniformly good, and should have found sufficient proof, if I had needed any, that all ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of my kind of art as 'the noble pursuit of Truth,' and so on. I don't care for such phrases; they may mean something, but as a rule come of the very spirit so opposed to my own—that which feels it necessary to justify art by bombast. The one object I have in life is to paint a bit of the world just as I see it. I exhaust myself in vain toil; I shall never succeed; but I am right to persevere, I am right ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... raising pruriences and protuberances is observed to run much upon a line, and ever in a circle. The whining passions and little starved conceits are gently wafted up by their own extreme levity to the middle region, and there fix and are frozen by the frigid understandings of the inhabitants. Bombast and buffoonery, by nature lofty and light, soar highest of all, and would be lost in the roof if the prudent architect had not, with much foresight, contrived for them a fourth place, called the twelve-penny gallery, and there planted a suitable ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... such a snow-storm in his imagination, when telling the shepherds to be kind to their helpless charge, addressed them in language which, in an ordinary mood, would have been bombast. "Shepherds," says he, "baffle the raging year!" How? Why merely by filling their pens with food. But ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... only enfeebled the beautiful if austere picture of patriarchal domestic life delineated in the Bible. He therefore adhered to tradition and created a series of scenes full of beauty, dignity, and pathos, simple and strong in spite of the bombast prevalent in the literary style of the period. Mehul's music is marked by grandeur, simplicity, lofty sentiment, and consistent severity of manner. The composer's predilection for ecclesiastical music, created, no doubt, by the blind organist who taught him in his childhood ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... and for some years in the Council. Lieut. Kerigan[665] was elected to the Royal Society at a time when his proposers must have known that his immediate object was to put F.R.S. on the title-page of a work against the tides. To give all I know, I may add that the editor of some very ignorant bombast about the "forehead of the solar sky," who did not know the difference between Bailly[666] and Baily,[667] received hints which induced him to withdraw his proposal for election into the Astronomical Society. But this ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Holy Roman Empire still dragging from his shoulders, is no more than a puzzled, broken old man, crowded in this bad business beside the Grand Turk, against whom his fathers defended Europe. The preposterous Ferdinand, shorn of his bombast, is only a chicken-hearted assassin. The leader of the band, the All Highest himself, when stripped of his white cloak and silver helmet, shows the slouch and the furtive ferocity of the street-corner bravo. And the cry "God with us," which once rallied Crusades, ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... power; though the melancholy is too dreamy to deserve the name of passion, and the terror of the infinite is not explicitly connected with any religious emotion. It is a proof of the fineness of his taste, that he scarcely ever falls into bombast; we tremble at his audacity in accumulating gorgeous phrases; but we confess that he is justified by the result. The only exception that I can remember is the passage in 'The English Mailcoach,' where his exaggerated patriotism ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... which has attended them, are reduced to aim their censures at the alleged magniloquence of the governor-general's proclamations; which, it should always be remembered in England, are addressed to a population accustomed to consider the bombast of a Persian secretary as the ne plus ultra of human composition, and which are not, therefore, to be judged by the European standard of taste. Much of the hostility directed against Lord Ellenborough, is, moreover, owing to his resolute emancipation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... if we do not act at once, to draw us to a sudden halt. Now to this meddling Englishman: we have offered him a million—five millions for four. He laughs. He is a millionaire. With characteristic bombast he declares that money has no charms. For six months, since his father's death, we have hounded him, in vain. It is something I can not understand. What is Leopold to these Englishmen that they risk a princely fortune to secure him his throne? ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... by questions of metaphysics; 'puts down' men at a dinner-table with her superior information; and seizes the opportunity of a soiree to catechise us on the vital question of the relation between mind and matter. And then, look at her writings! She mistakes vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality; she struts on one page, rolls her eyes on another, grimaces in a third, and is hysterical in a fourth. She may have read many writings of great men, and a few writings of great women; ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... varied poems have finally been collected in a remarkable one-volume Inclusive Edition (1885-1918), an indispensable part of any student's library. This gifted and prolific creator, whose work was affected by the war, has frequently lapsed into bombast and a journalistic imperialism. At his best he is unforgettable, standing mountain-high above his host of imitators. His home is at ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... tragedy of his own life). The tragic note is sounded, with impressive authority and force, in the brief introduction, largo maestoso. The music, from the first, drives to the very heart of the subject: there is neither pose nor bombast in the presentation of the thought; and this attitude is maintained throughout—in the ingratiating loveliness of the second subject, in the fierce striving of the middle section, in the noble and sombre slow movement,—a largo of profound pathos and dignity,—and in the dramatic ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... objective point was the grave of Douglas, which became by the time he arrived the grave also of his own reputation and the hopes of his partisans. His speeches on the route were a volcanic outbreak of vulgarity, conceit, bombast, scurrility, ignorance, insolence, brutality, and balderdash. Screams of laughter, cries of disgust, flushings of shame, were the various responses of the nation he disgraced to the harangues of this leader of American ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... (l. liii. p. 698) gives us a prolix and bombast speech on this great occasion. I have borrowed from Suetonius and Tacitus ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... nature. He had raised the issue of Shakespeare's learning, thus helping to emphasize the idea of Shakespeare as a natural genius; and in the Discoveries he had blamed his friend for too great facility and for bombast. ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... shall be expected? Where judges sob like children, and jurors swoon away with emotionalism; where floods of bombast—go to the courts, and listen!—take the place of cross-examination and duly-sworn affidavits; where perjury is a humanly venial and almost praiseworthy failing—how shall the code, defective as it is, be administered? Rhetoric, and rhetoric alone, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... England, have more sincerity, and are in every way better expressions of Byron's mature genius. Scattered through all his works one finds magnificent descriptions of natural scenery, and exquisite lyrics of love and despair; but they are mixed with such a deal of bombast and rhetoric, together with much that is unwholesome, that the beginner will do well to confine himself to a ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... While that Bombast Poet Alpinus, murders Memnon in his Poem, and bemires himself in his description of the Rhine, I divert my self in these Satires. 'Tis plain from hence, that Alpinus liv'd in the time when Horace writ these Satires: and suppose Alpinus was an imaginary Name, cou'd the Author of the ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... Vienna, but would have been delightful to us could we have known him.' [Footnote: Sir Sidney Smith must have been prolix over his achievements at the siege of Acre and elsewhere. It is certain that a reputation for bombast injured his career and caused his remarkable achievements to ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... established as significant, the cry for the emphasis of that fact was—without phosphorus no thought is possible. We can much more relevantly declare that without thyroid, no thought, no growth, no distinctive humanity or even animality is possible. For the epigram about phosphorus was bombast, since it can be declaimed with equal truth that without oxygen, without carbon, without nitrogen, without any of the food elements that go to make up the chemical composition of brain matter, no thought is possible. Indeed, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... book of nature, written with God's own finger." We shall see, however, that this "book of nature" taught Paracelsus some very strange lessons. Modesty was not one of these. "Now at this time," he declares, "I, Theophrastus Paracelsus, Bombast, Monarch of the Arcana, was endowed by God with special gifts for this end, that every searcher after this supreme philosopher's work may be forced to imitate and to follow me, be he Italian, Pole, Gaul, German, or whatsoever or whosoever he be. Come hither after me, all ye philosophers, astronomers, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... soon be making discoveries at a rate which left their skill in words outstripped; that having to invent their terms as they went along, yet being careless and contemptuous of a science in which they have no training, they would bombast out our dictionaries with monstrously invented words that not only would have made Quintilian stare and gasp, but would affront the ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... venture it, when the crowd was hanging on his words with breathless attention, he appealed no longer directly to the people, but drew, in graphic language, the picture of the desolations brought by war. The simplicity of his phrases, his entire absence of showiness or bombast, made his influence indescribably deep and powerful. A mere ranter, a frothy mob orator, would have ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... without bombast upon any subject she ventured on. His vocabulary was good and his speaking voice one of the most pleasing she had ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... universe. Its power is not that of the storm that harries and devastates, but rather that of the sunshine that fructifies, purifies, chastens, and ripens. It does not rush or crash into a situation but steals in as quietly as the dawn, without noise or bombast, and, by its gentle influence, softens asperities and wins a smile from the face of sorrow, or discouragement, or anger. Its presence transforms discord into harmony, irradiates gloom, and evokes rare flowers from the murky soil ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... thoughts. As a statesman he had serious defects; he was haughty, vain, and overbearing, his opinions were unsettled, his far-reaching views often nebulous; his passion was stronger than his judgment, and he was immoderately given to bombast. In spite of his true greatness he lacked simplicity, and he imported the arts of a charlatan into political life. Yet Englishmen must ever reverence his memory, for he loved England with all the ardour ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... of bombast was not out of place. It jumped so far with the humour of the convicts that they set up a feeble cheer, at which Sylvia frowned. Frightened as she was, the prison-bred child was as much astonished at hearing convicts cheer as a fashionable lady would be to hear her ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... Antonio Porcellio dei Pandoni, commissioned by Alfonso of Naples to write a report of the campaign. It is written, not in the purest, but in a fluent Latin, a little too much in the style of the humanistic bombast of the day, is modelled on Caesar's Commentaries, and interspersed with speeches, prodigies, and the like. Since for the past hundred years it had been seriously disputed whether Scipio Africanus or Hannibal was ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... lions, whereof there were great numbers in this veld. The prevalence of these hungry beasts forced us to watch our cattle very closely while they grazed, and at night, wherever it was possible, to protect them and ourselves in "bombast," or fences of thorns, within which we lit fires to scare away wild beasts. Notwithstanding these precautions, we lost several of the oxen, and ourselves had ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity,{353} are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... ran so high over the Reform Bill, as almost to threaten civil war. One minister talked of settling the question with 'broken heads and flaming houses.' Another boasted at a public meeting that he had 'got his hand upon the throat of capital'—all bombast, of course, but dangerous bombast at a time of great public excitement. Happily a vent was found for these angry passions in the ridiculous incident of Mr. Berry's 'embassy' to the Colonial Office, which set both parties laughing, and after three years of turmoil which had led to ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... proclaimed that they would send every one of the American vessels to the bottom; but they had made similar boasts before, and their bombast did not quiet the fears of the people, among whom a panic quickly spread. Those who were able to do so gathered their valuables and took refuge on the merchant ships in the harbor and thanked heaven when they bore them away. Many others ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... commanded at Cape Haytien, and when Leclerc summoned him to surrender, replied, "Go tell your general that the French shall march here only over ashes, and that the ground shall burn beneath their feet." This was not bombast, for when he found further defence impossible, he set fire to the city and retreated to the mountains, taking with him two thousand white prisoners. Grief and despair filled the soul of Toussaint when, marching to the relief of Cristophe, he saw the roads ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... with all the bombast of lyrical emphasis, the invocation terminated in a cry of ardent conviction, quivering with profound poetical emotion, and Sandoz's eyes grew moist; and, to hide how much he felt moved, he added, roughly, with a sweeping gesture that took in the ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... being retaken, that, without further communication, he retreated to his own room, in order to resume his own dress, which he hoped would alter his appearance in such a manner as to baffle all search and examination; while the physician remained ashamed and abashed, to find himself convinced of bombast by a person of such contemptible talents. He was offended at this proof of his memory, and so much enraged at his presumption in exhibiting it, that he could never forgive his want of reverence, and took every opportunity of exposing his ignorance and ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... poignant truth" which he rightly perceived to be the essence of the philosophic contes of Voltaire, finished his own intellectual education. Henceforth he does not allow his seriousness to overweigh his liveliness; if he detects a tendency to bombast, he relieves it with a brilliant jest. Count de Moltke and the lampoons offer us a case to our hand; "he was just the old fool who would make a cream cheese," says Contarini, and the startled laugh which greets him is exactly of the same order as those which were wont to reward ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... few days longer. His anxiety, however, to bring his enemy to battle was even greater than usual. Pope had already gained an unenviable notoriety. On taking over command he had issued an extraordinary address. His bombast was only equalled by his want of tact. Not content with extolling the prowess of the Western troops, with whom he had hitherto served, he was bitterly satirical at the expense of McClellan and of McClellan's army. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... during his lifetime, but a small collection of his poems, published after his death, gained him a posthumous recognition as the greatest Danish poet of the 18th century. Stub's style is extremely noble and expressive, devoid of the excessive bombast and sentimentality that many writers then mistook for poetry. He was of a cheerful disposition with a hopeful outlook upon life that only occasionally is darkened by the hardships and disappointments of his own existence. Even the poems of his darker moods ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... different all this acting to what I find in France! Here the theatre is living; you see something really good, and good throughout. Not one touch of that stage strut and vulgar bombast of tone, which the English actor fancies indispensable to scenic illusion, is tolerated here. For the first time in my life I saw something represented in a style uniformly good, and should have found sufficient proof, if I ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... soliciting the attestations of the patients, and decoying the simple, the ignorant, well-intentioned, but deceived neighbours, to add their signatures to cases of which they know nothing, and of which the details are a series of bombast, falsehood, ignorance, and humbug. There are many of the cases which I have related to which I could have obtained the signatures of clergymen, Members of Parliament, magistrates, and other persons high in rank and station in life, without saying a word ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... committee is like flourishing a sword in a drawing-room: it will lose the case. Where the weakest are to be convinced speech must stoop: a full consideration of the velleities and uncertainties, a little bombast to elevate the feelings without committing the judgment, some vague effusion of sentiment, an inapposite blandness, a meaningless rodomontade—these are the by-ways to be travelled by the style that is a willing slave to ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... as early as the fourteenth century their political faith, like their mode of life, was simple and averse to display. In a few ordinary words the deputies of Appenzell said all that has since been said with infinite bombast: "We are convinced that mankind are born for order, but not for servitude—that they must have magistrates whom they themselves elect, but not masters to grovel under." The essentials of true freedom having thus early become an every-day enjoyment, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Bhne verdient zu machen, sahe es freilich mit unserer dramatischen Poesie sehr elend aus. Man kannte keine Regeln, man bekmmerte sich um keine Muster. Unsre Staats- und Heldenaktionen waren voller Unsinn, Bombast, Schmutz und Pbelwitz. Unsre Lustspiele bestanden in Verkleidungen und Zaubereien, und Prgel waren die witzigsten Einflle derselben. Dieses Verderbnis einzusehen, brauchte man eben nicht der feinste und grsste Geist zu sein. Auch war Herr Gottsched nicht der erste, der sich Krfte ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... torrent breaking through cliffs, and tumbling through fragments of rocks!. . . Now and then an old foot bridge, with a broken rail, a leaning cross, a cottage or the ruin of an hermitage! This sounds too bombast and too romantic to one that has not seen it, too cold for one that has." Or contrast with Addison's Italian letters passages like these, which foretoken Rogers and Byron. We get nothing so sympathetic till at least a half century later. "It is the most beautiful ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the intervention of the United States authorities in thwarting their plans, to cross the border, as was the case in 1866. So they worked unceasingly and enthusiastically in maturing their plans, while they maintained absolute silence as to their intentions. The boasting bombast which had been so largely indulged in previous to the Raid of 1866 was not manifested on this occasion, consequently little interest was taken by the general public in ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... heroes and of highly ornamented lays, and we are not surprised to find truth covered up beneath a mass of fulsome bombast. It is related that Tarquinius now obtained the help of Prince or Lars Porsena of Clusium in Etruria, and with a large army proceeded undisturbed quite up to the Janiculum Hill on his march to Rome. There he found himself separated from the object of his long struggle only ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... Bumbast cloth, according, to the estate of the person with long hats on their heads, called Colae, made of Veluet, Satten, Damaske, or Scarlet, girding themselues in stead of girdles with some fine white bombast doth: they haue breeches after the order of the Turks: they weare on their feet plaine high things called of them Aspergh, and at their eares they haue hanging great plenty ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... effect of anger and fear on animals was observed centuries before America was discovered. Statius, a writer who fully equals Mr Slick both in his affectation and bombast, thus ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... his silk stockings, garters, and roses, and with the help of many pillows and other such farcing, so filled the garments which otherwise had hung upon him like a shawl from a peg, and made of himself such a 'sweet creature of bombast' that, with ludicrous unlikeness of countenance, he bore in figure no distant resemblance to ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... could be worse! Nothing could be more shameful and disastrous. The Americans had evidently been expecting this useless bombast, and ere the words were well uttered, they answered them with a yell of defiance. I do not think more than one proclamation was necessary, but Morello went from point to point in the city and the Americans ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... chap's foolish bombast, as I thought it; but I have often wondered since whether the gift of that cheap pipe did not, after all, alter the whole of ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... Champlain, and the "vast inferiority of British sailors and soldiers to the true-blooded Yankees." The events of the war were commemorated in songs which this Briton declared—and no doubt truthfully—to be "frothy, senseless bombast." But whatever limitations of culture were disclosed by this outburst of national conceit, no one could doubt for an instant that an exuberant vitality was coursing through ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish spell of number; do not talk to me—to me who am to die outright—of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast, show, delusion! They call me a master because of some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in the presence ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... hurried along by the prevailing enthusiasm, forgot the good sense and good taste to which he owed his reputation. He fancied himself a lyric poet, and gave vent to his feelings in a hundred and sixty lines of frigid bombast about Alcides, Mars, Bacchus, Ceres, the lyre of Orpheus, the Thracian oaks and the Permessian nymphs. He wondered whether Namur, had, like Troy, been built by Apollo and Neptune. He asked what power ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... position, convinced that the features of their faces perpetuated upon the canvas would go down to posterity, they exaggerated somewhat the qualities which are so characteristic of their high and responsible office in our prison. A certain bombast of pose, an exaggerated expression of stern authority, an obvious consciousness of their own importance, and a noticeable contempt for those on whom their eyes were directed—all this disfigured their kind and affable ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... heedless persons, stirred by the bombast of self-exploiting orators eager for notoriety or display—loose mobs of local nondescripts led by pension sharks so aptly described by the gallant General Bragg, of Wisconsin, as coffee coolers and camp followers—should tear their ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... Triplet rolled off the couch like Richard the Third. He sat a moment on the floor, with a finger in each eye; and then, finding he was neither daubing, ranting, nor deluging earth with "acts," he accused himself of indolence, and sat down to write a small tale of blood and bombast; he took his seat at the deal table with some alacrity, for he had recently ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... a preference to the former. The merit of these works may be ascertained in some measure, by the rules we have already established. We need only to add further on this head, that among many beauties we meet with examples of the turgid and bombast in the work of Ariosto; from which that of the Greek Poet is wholly free. The two first ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... said Fontenoy, resuming, "concerns the lad himself. His mother, you will understand, cannot run any risk of being brought in contact with that woman. Nor is she physically fit for the voyage; but someone must go, if only to content her. There has been some wild talk of suicide, apparently—mere bombast, of course, like so much of it, but she has ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Yet, once decorated with the ennobling badge of his order, our friend became from that moment something superior, something exclusive, something supercilious, arrogant, exacting,—Asirvadam, the high Brahmin,—a creature of wide strides without awkwardness, towering airs without bombast, Sanscrit quotations without pedantry, florid phraseology without hyperbole, allegorical illustrations and proverbial points without sententiousness, fanciful flights without affectation, and formal strains of compliment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... of Philippus Theophrastus, Bombast of Hohenheim, known by the name of Paracelsus, and the substance of his teachings concerning Cosmology, Anthropology, Pneumatology, Magic and Sorcery, Medicine, Alchemy, and Astrology, Philosophy, and Theosophy, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... just as they always have, and no lack of all the panoply of old-time chivalry and war can make a friendship slipping into love less than a beautiful and wondrous thing. It is perhaps in some ways to be regretted that the inspiring bombast of the elder days is no longer in vogue—the grandiloquent arrogance that led a man to tie a lady's ribband to his arm and proclaim on fear of sudden death her puissance of beauty throughout the world. ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... and the history assuming the form of romance—the very style of these Asiatics was, as may readily be conceived, abrupt and without modulation and finish, minced and effeminate, full of tinsel and bombast, thoroughly vulgar and affected; "any one who knows Hegesias," says Cicero, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... that such ghost-stories as these would appear to his readers duller than Holland cheese and more tiresome than homespun. To 1594, too, belongs the tragedy of "Dido," probably left incomplete by Marlowe, and finished by Nash, who shows himself here an adept in that swelling bombast of bragging blank verse of which he affected to disapprove. A new edition of "Christ's Tears" also belongs to this busy year 1594, which however is mainly interesting to us as having seen the publication of the work which we are ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... the torch to the wooden images set up by his political predecessors. He made a speech that is unintelligible, all wind, sound and bombast, but was cheered to ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... operated to bring it about but British greed, and the British lust for paramountcy and suzerainty and possession? Liberal, or Conservative, or Radical, or Unionist, the diplomats and lawyers and financiers who urge on your political machinery by bombast and bribes and catchwords and lying promises, are swayed by one motive—governed by one desire—lands and diamonds and gold. Wealth that is the property of other men, soil that has been fertilised by the sweat of a nation of agriculturists, whom Great Britain despised until she learned that ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... correct translation of a real original. If we had that alone, it would be a revelation of the power of Ossian, and of the aptitudes of a people who could enjoy it. It is not within our scope to quote from the veritable Ossian, or to expose the bombast and fustian, tumid diction and swelling sound of Macpherson, of which the ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Brigade" seems bombast and gallery play after July 1st. In that case some men on horses who had received an order rode out and rode back, and verse made ever memorable this wild gallop of exhilaration with horses bearing the men. The battalions of July ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Vern, whose silly vanity would by no means allow him to put up with his not having been elected Commander-in-Chief, all on a sudden cried out in his sort of bombast, "Here they are coming, boys: now I will lead you to death or victory!"—actually a band of men was tramping full speed towards ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... was awake, he was full of bombast, that major! When he was asleep he snored outrageously. Ugh! For the first time in my life I hate anybody," declared ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... that is mere bombast! Why, man, the Bartons, father and sons, have been the family solicitors of the Mainwarings for the past fifty years. The old firm of Barton & Sons had charge of the settlement of the estate when it passed into Hugh ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... ever be preferred to those that must offend a chaste ear, and no polite discourse ever makes allowance for a filthy or sordid expression. Magnificent, noble, and sublime words are to be estimated by their congruity with the subject; for what is magnificent in one place, swells into bombast in another; and what is low in a grand matter, may be proper in a humble situation. As in a splendid style a low word must be very much out of place and, as it were, a blemish to it, so a sublime and pompous expression ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... are Nature's sel'; Nae bombast spates o' nonsense swell; Nae snap conceits, but that sweet spell O' witchin love, That charm that can the ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... and the rector of the University had pled for mercy. Luther replied that Leipzig deserved to be placed in the pillory[31], that he had no desire to make sport of the city and its university, but was pressed into it by the bombast of the Romanist, who boasted that he was a "public teacher of the Holy Scripture at Leipzig"; and by the fact that Alveld had dedicated his work to the city and its Council. Alveld answered Lonicer and Luther bitterly, but ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... years, damaged in reputation and broken in fortune; but only to carry on the war with indomitable energy, although with a recklessness and extravagance which alienated his allies and lowered his character. He tried to cover his errors by brags and bombast, which became ridiculous, and which are yet not ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... himself the credit of having advised the despatch of a letter to Strongbow. He also gives us the letter, which probably was his own composition, as it is written in the same strain of bombast as his praises of his family.—Hib. Expug. lib. i. c. 12. It commences thus: "We have watched the storks and swallows; the summer birds are come and gone," &c. We imagine that Dermod's style, if he had taken to epistolary correspondence, would ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... — The mischief a secret any of them know, above the consuming of coals and drawing of usquebaugh! Howsoever they may pretend, under the specious names of Geber, Arnold, Lulli, or bombast of Hohenheim, to commit miracles in art, and treason against nature! As if the title of philosopher, that creature of glory, were to be fetched out of a furnace! I am their crude, and their sublimate, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... everyone who saw the letter would know that it was pretence and bombast. Of course you will do nothing ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... response to his rage and to his bombast Elsa had only silence for him—a silence which he knew must hide her real thoughts, he suddenly lost all sense of proportion and of prudence; for the moment he felt as if he could hate this woman whom he had wooed and won despite her resistance, and in the ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... and in the second place, Theodor Koerner's soul was most ardently engrossed with the supposed and the real sufferings of his time, with the dignity and the misfortune of his people, and with the necessity and sacredness of the war. Let no one scent any bombast in all this, but, on the contrary, let him admire my cleverness in condensing into three lines, everything that Theodor Koerner expressed in a whole volume, in Lyre and Sword! If, therefore, his war-songs are bad, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... different name; and Marcellinus observes, that the tyrant of Europe was slain in the night by the hand, and the knife, of a woman Corneille, who has adapted the genuine account to his tragedy, describes the irruption of blood in forty bombast lines, and Attila exclaims, with ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... modern poet, of the stern sublimity of his conceptions. The French tragedians may give some weak reflection of Euripides or even of Sophocles, but none have ventured upon the sacred territory of the father of the tragic drama. He defies all imitation. His genius is so near the verge of bombast, that to approach his sublime is to rush into ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and lean, (No bungler e'er was half so mean) Went to a foreign place, and there Began his med'cines to prepare: But one of more especial note He call'd his sovereign antidote; And by his technical bombast Contrived to raise a name at last. It happen'd that the king was sick, Who, willing to detect the trick, Call'd for some water in an ewer, Poison in which he feign'd to pour The antidote was likewise mix'd; He then upon ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... ended, the King arose, and sat down again in his chair, and the dean of Westminster wiped and dried all the places anointed, with fine linen, or fine bombast wool, delivered to him by the lord ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Philip's intelligence to insinuate that the Prince would shrink before danger, or die of fear. Had Orange ever been inclined to bombast, he might have answered the churchman's calumny, as ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... satanic, yet horribly human, iniquity of Ferdinand and Bosolo. And, at least in one scene, Shirley sinks—it is true, in the person of a subordinate character—to a foul-mouthed vulgarity which recalls the shameless bombast of the heroes and heroines ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... vanity or bombast in his voice as he said this, and in his eyes that new underglow deepened and shone. Perhaps in this instant he saw more of his future than he would speak of to anyone on earth. Perhaps prevision was given him, and it was as the Big Financier had said to Maitre Fille, that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Cavaliere Dursi, at your service," answered Freccia, indifferently. "Good swearers both and hard drinkers—filled with stock phrases, such as 'our distinguished dear friend, Ferrari, 'wrongs which can only be wiped out by blood'—all bombast and braggadocio! These fellows would as soon be on one side ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... your trial, and it won't hurt you to go into court a first-class man: will it? And then you won't quarrel by letter, you two; I know. Come, will you do what I tell you: or is friendship but a name? eh, Mr. Bombast?" He ended with great though quiet force: "Come, you two, which is better, to part like the scissors, or part like ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... said the prince, with bitter sneer. "Man, know thy station and thy profession. When I want homilies, I seek my confessor; when I have resolved on a vice, I come to thee. A truce with this bombast. For Fonseca, he shall be consoled; and when he shall learn who is his rival, he is a traitor if he remain discontented with his lot. Thou ...
— Calderon The Courtier - A Tale • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... In reading some bombast speeches of Macbeth, which are not to be understood, he used to say that it was horror; and I am much ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... lost.] Vices of Style opposed to the Sublime: Affectation, Bombast, False Sentiment, Frigid Conceits. ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... the text. 1. Bombast and mock-heroics. 2. Horse-play and slap-sticks. 3. Burlesque, farce and extravagance of situation and dialogue. a. True burlesque. b. True farce. c. Extravagances obviously unnatural and merely ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... of sight like the white froth he was watching on the top of the ever-shifting waves? He had boasted of possessing a witness. Would they believe that boast and send a detective in search of him, or would they take his words for the bombast they really were and proceed with their investigations in happy relief at the loss ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... introduced with a flourish of drums and trumpets, in order to rouse a martial spirit in the audience, and to accommodate their ears to bombast and fustian, which Mr Locke's blind man would not have grossly erred in likening to the sound of a trumpet. Again, when lovers are coming forth, soft music often conducts them on the stage, either to soothe the audience with the softness of the tender passion, or to ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... undertaken that merchant vessels would not be torpedoed without first being warned, and that pledge the United States looked to her to respect, whether the vessels were armed for defense or not. What, then, would now happen, with Germany's latest decree sent ringing round the world with resounding bombast, by way of telling neutral noncombatants, including Americans, to stay at home, as though cataclysmic destruction awaited all vessels which dared to show a gun at the stern? The United States waited. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... human still, certainly, yet genuine patriotism appears to be a sine qua non now, where bombast answered in the old day. Corruption is no longer accepted. Public men then were surprisingly simple, surprisingly cheap and limited in their methods. There were two rules for public and private life. It was thought quixotic, I gather from studying the documents of the time, ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... would be sent away in disgust from any table, he offers it to the judges. The object of the poetical candidate, in like manner, is to produce, not a good poem, but a poem of that exact degree of frigidity or bombast which may appear to his censors to be correct or sublime. Compositions thus constructed will always be worthless. The few excellences which they may contain will have an exotic aspect and flavour. In general, prize sheep are good ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of time yet. Liberty, my dear Miss Rossano, will restore your father to health, and he will not lose his share of the glory." We English always excuse a foreigner who shows a tendency to bombast in conversation; and allowing for her partial knowledge of the language, and for the oratorical turn her people have, I saw nothing overstrained in the little woman's raptures. I had even a modified belief in their reality; and even to this day I cannot blame myself for having ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... Tyrtaeus; and in the second place, Theodor Koerner's soul was most ardently engrossed with the supposed and the real sufferings of his time, with the dignity and the misfortune of his people, and with the necessity and sacredness of the war. Let no one scent any bombast in all this, but, on the contrary, let him admire my cleverness in condensing into three lines, everything that Theodor Koerner expressed in a whole volume, in Lyre and Sword! If, therefore, his war-songs are bad, we shall be justified in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... flattering silence with which his speech is received, and the many complimentary expressions with which he is greeted at its close, one would at once conclude that the remarks were new and original. Boasting is an Indian's weak point; given a listener, and the amount of bombast and mock heroics which he will inflict ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... or good without being great." The story of "Jonathan Wild" is really a bitter, satirical attack on what Fielding called "the greatness which is totally devoid of goodness." He avowed it his intention "to expose the character of this bombast greatness," and no one can deny the success of his achievement. Surely no story was ever written under more desperate circumstances. The evils of poverty, which at this period were at their height, were aggravated by the serious illness of his wife, and his ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... further communication, he retreated to his own room, in order to resume his own dress, which he hoped would alter his appearance in such a manner as to baffle all search and examination; while the physician remained ashamed and abashed, to find himself convinced of bombast by a person of such contemptible talents. He was offended at this proof of his memory, and so much enraged at his presumption in exhibiting it, that he could never forgive his want of reverence, and took every opportunity of exposing his ignorance and folly in the sequel. Indeed, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Nothing could be more shameful and disastrous. The Americans had evidently been expecting this useless bombast, and ere the words were well uttered, they answered them with a yell of defiance. I do not think more than one proclamation was necessary, but Morello went from point to point in the city and the Americans followed him. I can tell you this, Maria: ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... systematically outraged in one and all—from beginning to end. Never was such mouthing seen and heard beneath moon and stars. Through the whole range of rant he rages like a man inspired. He is the emperor of bombast. Yet these plays contain many passages of powerful declamation—not a few of high eloquence; some that in their argumentative amplitude, if they do not reach, border on the sublime. Nor are their wanting outbreaks of genuine passion among the utmost extravagances ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... judicious and learned. Mr. Binning's method was peculiar to himself, much after the haranguing way; he was no stranger to the rules of art, and knew well how to make his matter subservient to the subject he handled. His diction and language was easy and fluent, void of all affectation and bombast, and has a kind of undesigned negligent elegance which arrests the reader's attention. Considering the time he lived in, it might be said, that he carried the orator's prize from his contemporaries in Scotland, and was not at that time ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... clear it of the same. Again: let God speak like thunder, "The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the people that forget God!" yet if the sinner is incapable of taking the warning, what empty bombast does it make of the awful threatening! But let God be true, and every man a liar who can cast such vile reflections upon ...
— A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism • Thomas Taylor
... for the interest of his customers to raise plants of the best quality; and we have no reason to suppose that we are infinitely superior to our neighbors. While the first is a downright swindle, the latter is the height of arrogance. If we had a good deal less of bombast and self laudation, and more of honesty and fair dealing in the profession, the public would have more confidence in professional men, and would be more likely to practice what we preach. Therefore, if you look around for plants, do not go to those who advertise, "layers ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... is to me a revelation of bombast, self-righteousness, falsehood, and hypocrisy. What shocks one most is the familiar and perpetual calling upon God to witness that He alone has led the Germans to victory and blessed their cause. I read a poem yesterday, which began "Du Gott der Deutschen," as if indeed the ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... my people than myself. Can it be possible that he believes that proclamation will be acceptable to them—that mixture of cajolery and bombast. He has heard that we are ignorant, and he concludes that we are without understanding. What think you of his promise of abundance by the hands of Leclerc? As if it were not their cupidity, excited by our abundance, which has brought these thousands of soldiers ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... Dryden, Warburton and Doctor Johnson used collectively or individually the following expressions in describing the work of the author of "Hamlet": conceit, overreach, word-play, extravagance, overdone, absurdity, obscurity, puerility, bombast, idiocy, untruth, improbability, drivel. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... garb, his taste was excellent. He was well acquainted with the great Greek writers; and, though unable fully to appreciate their creative genius, admired the majestic simplicity of their manner, and had learned from them to despise bombast and tinsel. It is easy, we think, to discover, in The Spectator and The Guardian, traces of the influence, in part salutary and in part pernicious, which the mind of Boileau had on ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... not fill out my characters; and they were right. The characters had all been prepared for a different sort of man. Our tragedy hero was a round, robustious fellow, with an amazing voice; who stamped and slapped his breast until his wig shook again; and who roared and bellowed out his bombast, until every phrase swelled upon the ear like the sound of a kettle-drum. I might as well have attempted to fill out his clothes as his characters. When we had a dialogue together, I was nothing before him, with my slender voice and ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... disdain to cull my phrases or polish my style—I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, nor in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart. I shall be employed about things, not words! and, anxious to render my sex more respectable members of society, I shall try to avoid that flowery diction which has slided from essays ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... the watch for a few days longer. His anxiety, however, to bring his enemy to battle was even greater than usual. Pope had already gained an unenviable notoriety. On taking over command he had issued an extraordinary address. His bombast was only equalled by his want of tact. Not content with extolling the prowess of the Western troops, with whom he had hitherto served, he was bitterly satirical at the expense of McClellan and of McClellan's army. "I have come to ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... two days the sea burst on the black rocks of the islet in the bay in clouds of foam. It was all bombast, froth and bubble, or rather a gentle back-hander, for the cyclone was playing all sorts of naughty pranks elsewhere. But why were we apprehensive? In disobedience to the scriptural injunction, we had observed the clouds ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... may be adopted with great advantage to clearness and force; if it is not parallel, any attempt to treat it as such is detected as a shallow trick. To search for thoughts to trail along in a series results in thinnest bombast. As everywhere else in composition, so here a writer must rely on his good taste and ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... and now. Do not talk to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish spell of number; do not talk to me—to me who am to die outright—of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast, show, delusion! They call me a master because of some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in the presence ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... time to be drunk with pride. Even Boileau, hurried along by the prevailing enthusiasm, forgot the good sense and good taste to which he owed his reputation. He fancied himself a lyric poet, and gave vent to his feelings in a hundred and sixty lines of frigid bombast about Alcides, Mars, Bacchus, Ceres, the lyre of Orpheus, the Thracian oaks and the Permessian nymphs. He wondered whether Namur, had, like Troy, been built by Apollo and Neptune. He asked what power could subdue a city stronger than that before which the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a free unconstrained way of speaking, is the beauty and excellence of speech, so an easy free concise way of writing is the best style for a tradesman. He that affects a rumbling and bombast style, and fills his letters with long harangues, compliments, and flourishes, should turn poet instead of tradesman, and set up for a wit, not a shopkeeper. Hark how such a young tradesman writes, out of the country, to his wholesale-man ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat and insipid; his comick wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him: No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... Emmet before him as a model. He addressed the judges as if he were about to expiate his error upon the scaffold, whereas he knew, as all Ireland knew, that it was not the intention of government to put the sentence of the law in force. This circumstance gave an air of display and bombast to a speech that, if the realities of the speaker's position had corresponded with it, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... ridiculousness &c adj.; comicality, oddity &c adj.; extravagance, drollery. farce, comedy; burlesque &c (ridicule) 856; buffoonery &c (fun) 840; frippery; doggerel verses; absurdity &c 497; bombast &c (unmeaning) 517; anticlimax, bathos; eccentricity, monstrosity &c (unconformity) 83; laughingstock &c 857. V. be ridiculous &c adj.; pass from the sublime to the ridiculous; make one laugh; play the fool, make a fool of oneself, commit an absurdity. Adj. ridiculous, ludicrous; comical; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... pipe. Athelny smoked cigarettes of Havana tobacco, which he rolled himself. Sally cleared away. Philip was reserved, and it embarrassed him to be the recipient of so many confidences. Athelny, with his powerful voice in the diminutive body, with his bombast, with his foreign look, with his emphasis, was an astonishing creature. He reminded Philip a good deal of Cronshaw. He appeared to have the same independence of thought, the same bohemianism, but he had an infinitely more vivacious temperament; his mind was coarser, and he had ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... a single statesman or a single newspaper appeared to have any conception of the serious task before them. The fusillades of rant, passion and bombast which filled the air would have been comic but for the grim tragedy which was stalking ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... their altered language or their graver brow. In a little while, finding they had ceased to be amusing, he effaced their works, not as dangerous, but as dull; and recognized only thenceforward, as art, the innocuous bombast of Michael Angelo, and fluent efflorescence of Bernini. But when you become more intimately and impartially acquainted with the history of the Reformation, you will find that, as surely and earnestly as Memling ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... their opinion and modes of expressing it, providing it be done with decorum and with a proper respect for the opinions of their adversaries? Why then do we or they employ, through the press and in rhetorical bombast, opprobrious epithets, fit only for the pot-house or the shambles? Shall we men and citizens, each of us a pillar upholding the crowning dome of our nationality, be taught, like vexed and querulous children, the impotence of personal abuse? Why seek ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... arranging his own destiny according to his private goodwill and pleasure.[9] The greatest of Richardson's successors in the history of English fiction adds to this explanation. "Those," says Sir Walter Scott, "who with patience had studied rant and bombast in the folios of Scuderi, could not readily tire of nature, sense, and genius in the octavos of Richardson." The old French romances in which Europe had found a dreary amusement, were stories of princes and princesses. It was to be expected ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... art, leisure, and study." The "taste" and the "art" are principally those of the pseudo-classic style, an imitation of "ancient Greece and imperial Rome," which the French of the XVIII century carried to such unpleasant excess. The general characteristics of the imitation, size and bombast, are well epitomised in the principal statue of Montpellier's fine Champ de Mars, which represents the high-heeled and luxurious Louis XIV in the unfitting armour of a Roman Imperator, mounted on a huge and restive charger. Such affectation in architectural ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... numbers. The character of Cato is, in my opinion, vastly superior to that of Cornelia in the "Pompey" of Corneille, for Cato is great without anything like fustian, and Cornelia, who besides is not a necessary character, tends sometimes to bombast. Mr. Addison's Cato appears to me the greatest character that was ever brought upon any stage, but then the rest of them do not correspond to the dignity of it, and this dramatic piece, so excellently well writ, is disfigured by a dull ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... which he rightly perceived to be the essence of the philosophic contes of Voltaire, finished his own intellectual education. Henceforth he does not allow his seriousness to overweigh his liveliness; if he detects a tendency to bombast, he relieves it with a brilliant jest. Count de Moltke and the lampoons offer us a case to our hand; "he was just the old fool who would make a cream cheese," says Contarini, and the startled laugh which greets him is exactly of the same order as those which were wont to reward the statesman's ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... about but British greed, and the British lust for paramountcy and suzerainty and possession? Liberal, or Conservative, or Radical, or Unionist, the diplomats and lawyers and financiers who urge on your political machinery by bombast and bribes and catchwords and lying promises, are swayed by one motive—governed by one desire—lands and diamonds and gold. Wealth that is the property of other men, soil that has been fertilised by the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... and was designed for a priest. It was useless to undeceive men who would not be convinced, so I accordingly gave them, as they say, "the length of their tether;" nay, to such, purpose did I ply them with proofs of it, that my conversation soon became as fine a specimen of pedantic bombast as ever was uttered. Not a word under six feet could come out of my lips, even of English; but as the best English, after all, is but commonplace, I peppered them with vile Latin, and an occasional verse in Greek, from St. John's Gospel, which ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... images too great for the subject. This is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts, so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... afterward, between chattering teeth. He almost damped our patriotism. We uttered our bombast, sealed our vows and made our sorties, thereafter, every man of us, with our chins over our shoulders! Spare me Seraiah! He has too ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... taken seriously. Behind the hocus-pocus of such fine-sounding words, the bombast, the theatrical clash and clang of the swords and pasteboard helmets, there was always the incurable futility of a Sardou, the intrepid vaudevillist, playing Punch and Judy with history. When in the world was the like of the heroism of Cyrano ever to be found? These writers moved ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... jury on the subject of dishonored womanhood and the merciless bestiality of certain male types had been more than a legal oration. He had expressed himself in it and had spent two full days lost in admiration of the echoes of his bombast.... "Men who follow the vile dictates of their lower natures, who sow the whirlwind and expect to reap the roses thereby; cynical, soulless men who take a woman as one takes a glove, to wear, admire, and discard; depraved men who prowl like demons at the heels of ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... Some such bombast would any monk of those days have talked in like case. And yet, so strange a thing is man, he might have been withal, like Herluin, a shrewd ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... generally bad; the verse is generally very bad; and one turns with relief to the author's connecting links, wishing only at times that he would not worry about proving his point quite so thoroughly. The bombast and the bullying, the self-pity and the cruelty, and, most of all, the instinctive claim, typical of Germany to-day, to prescribe one law for themselves but something quite different for the rest of the world, run through ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... the rector of the University had pled for mercy. Luther replied that Leipzig deserved to be placed in the pillory[31], that he had no desire to make sport of the city and its university, but was pressed into it by the bombast of the Romanist, who boasted that he was a "public teacher of the Holy Scripture at Leipzig"; and by the fact that Alveld had dedicated his work to the city and its Council. Alveld answered Lonicer and Luther bitterly, but ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... hope that she may, and we shall run much less risk of injury than we should have done had she attacked the Ouzel Galley with her heavy guns. I believe that the pirate's threat of blowing up the ship was all bombast. These fellows, hardened villains as they are, are seldom in a hurry to go out of the world, if they can by any means prolong their miserable existence. Each man fancies that he may have a chance of escaping by ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... themselves sweet. Mr. C. was asked what he thought of Klopstock. He answered, that his fame was rapidly declining in Germany; that an Englishman might form a correct notion of him by uniting the moral epigram of Young, the bombast of Hervey, and the minute description of Richardson. As to sublimity, he had, with all Germans, one rule for producing it;—it was, to take something very great, and make it very small in comparison with that which you wish to ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... Theophrastus, Bombast of Hohenheim, known by the name of Paracelsus, and the substance of his teachings concerning Cosmology, Anthropology, Pneumatology, Magic and Sorcery, Medicine, Alchemy, and Astrology, Philosophy, and Theosophy, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... offend a chaste ear, and no polite discourse ever makes allowance for a filthy or sordid expression. Magnificent, noble, and sublime words are to be estimated by their congruity with the subject; for what is magnificent in one place, swells into bombast in another; and what is low in a grand matter, may be proper in a humble situation. As in a splendid style a low word must be very much out of place and, as it were, a blemish to it, so a sublime and pompous expression is unsuited to a subject that is plain ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... against the wall, by way of clencher to the argument. Yet this impetuosity, this turn for declamation, did not hinder his talk from being directly instructive. Younger men of the most various type, from Morellet down to Joubert, men quite competent to detect mere bombast or ardent vagueness, were held captive by the cogency of his understanding. His writings have none of this compulsion. We see the flame, but through a veil of interfused smoke. The expression is not obscure, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... surprised by the sound of hoofs upon the stony soil, and, turning round, he was almost immediately confronted with the threatening figure of Big Bill. The dialogue which ensued has not been historically described; there was none of the bombast that generally preceded the combats of Grecian heroes; but it appears that the horse-stealer's right hand instinctively grasped the handle of his revolver, not unseen by the vigilant eyes of Big Bill, who with praiseworthy decision sent a bullet through ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... The more I was ridiculed, the more I persisted. I talked my self into notice; I became acquainted with several of the literary men at Cambridge; I wrote in defence of my opinion, or, as some called it, my heresy. I maintained that what all the world had mistaken for sublimity was bombast; that the Night Thoughts were fuller of witty conceits than of poetical images: I drew a parallel between Young and Cowley; and I finished by pronouncing Young to be the Cowley of the eighteenth century. To do myself justice, there was much ingenuity ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... was watching on the top of the ever-shifting waves? He had boasted of possessing a witness. Would they believe that boast and send a detective in search of him, or would they take his words for the bombast they really were and proceed with their investigations in happy relief at the ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... all this acting to what I find in France! Here the theatre is living; you see something really good, and good throughout. Not one touch of that stage strut and vulgar bombast of tone, which the English actor fancies indispensable to scenic illusion, is tolerated here. For the first time in my life I saw something represented in a style uniformly good, and should have found sufficient proof, if I had needed any, that all men will prefer ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... in support of this view the distribution of death, wounds and decorations in this war. This theory of history has in it larger elements of wholesomeness and truth than has, for instance, the pernicious bombast of Carlyle. I told my Sardinian friend that I had once heard it said by a most learned man that, if Rousseau had never lived, the world would not look very different to-day, except that probably there would be no negro republic in the island of Haiti. This saying ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... many good men, wise, men, learned men to attend upon him with all submission, as an appendix to his riches, for that respect alone, because he hath more wealth and money," [336]"to honour him with divine titles, and bombast epithets," to smother him with fumes and eulogies, whom they know to be a dizzard, a fool, a covetous wretch, a beast, &c. "because he is rich?" To see sub exuviis leonis onagrum, a filthy loathsome carcass, a Gorgon's head puffed up by parasites, assume ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... unkindly criticism has not unsuccessfully sought for the gravest faults of language and manner to be found in Shakespeare. For certainly it cannot be cleared from the charge of a style stiffened and swollen with clumsy braid and crabbed bombast. But against the weird sisters, and her who sits above them and apart, more awful than Hecate's very self, no mangling hand has been stretched forth; no blight of mistranslation by perversion has fallen upon the ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... gathering of heedless persons, stirred by the bombast of self-exploiting orators eager for notoriety or display—loose mobs of local nondescripts led by pension sharks so aptly described by the gallant General Bragg, of Wisconsin, as coffee coolers and camp followers—should tear their passion to tatters with the ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... Bard, with such a snow-storm in his imagination, when telling the shepherds to be kind to their helpless charge, addressed them in language which, in an ordinary mood, would have been bombast. "Shepherds," says he, "baffle the raging year!" How? Why merely by filling their pens with food. But the whirlwind ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... should be in one place, its whole action deal with one single series of events, and the time it represented as elapsing be no greater than the time it took in playing. He was always pre-eminently an Englishman of his own day with a scholar's rather than a poet's temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, and only limited because in ruling out these things he ruled out much else that was essential to the spirit of the time. As a craftsman he was uncompromising; he never bowed to the tastes of the public and never veiled his scorn of those—Shakespeare among them—whom he conceived ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... None of these are over two pages long, except the last. They are written in the best modern Lied style, and are quite unhackneyed. It is always the unexpected that happens, though this unexpected thing almost always proves to be a right thing. Without any sense of strain or bombast he reaches superb climaxes; without eccentricity he is individual; and his songs are truly interpreters of the words they express. Of these five, "Wann die Rosen aufgeblueht" is a wonderfully fine and fiery work; "Die Stunde sei gesegnet" has one of the most beautiful endings ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... very poet of nature. He had raised the issue of Shakespeare's learning, thus helping to emphasize the idea of Shakespeare as a natural genius; and in the Discoveries he had blamed his friend for too great facility and for bombast. ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... merchant vessels would not be torpedoed without first being warned, and that pledge the United States looked to her to respect, whether the vessels were armed for defense or not. What, then, would now happen, with Germany's latest decree sent ringing round the world with resounding bombast, by way of telling neutral noncombatants, including Americans, to stay at home, as though cataclysmic destruction awaited all vessels which dared to show a gun at the stern? The United States waited. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... from that moment something superior, something exclusive, something supercilious, arrogant, exacting,—Asirvadam, the high Brahmin,—a creature of wide strides without awkwardness, towering airs without bombast, Sanscrit quotations without pedantry, florid phraseology without hyperbole, allegorical illustrations and proverbial points without sententiousness, fanciful flights without affectation, and formal strains of compliment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... highest dramatic sense, but the need of imaginativeness pressed on him while it was ceasing to press on his brother playwrights. He could not reach the sublime, but neither could he content himself as they did with the prosaic; he rants, fumes, and talks wild bombast in the vain effort ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... Oxford?—some small buzzing thing, Some starveling songster on a tiny wing,— (N.B. They call the insect Bob, I know, I heard a printer's devil call it so)— So fondly tells his admiration vast No one can call the chastened strains bombast, Though epitheted substantives immense Claim for each lofty sound the caret sense," ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... from the lions, whereof there were great numbers in this veld. The prevalence of these hungry beasts forced us to watch our cattle very closely while they grazed, and at night, wherever it was possible, to protect them and ourselves in "bombast," or fences of thorns, within which we lit fires to scare away wild beasts. Notwithstanding these precautions, we lost several of the oxen, and ourselves had some ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... impatient I am to see my brother, and tell him of his plight! The good man has been victimized, with all his bombast! ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... death before them—to have told all this in words would have necessitated a long speech, most unnatural and undramatic at such a moment of tension, and could scarcely have avoided degenerating into bombast. By a few simple transitions, a few devices of instrumentation, the orchestra relates all this and much more, while Isolde's flute-motive, so exquisitely graceful and tender in the preceding scene, has now become a shriek of resolution bewildered but undaunted ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... other time should I advise you to go any further," said Madeline laughingly, for it was hard to take the bombast of Mr. Early very seriously. He made her think now of a sort of pouter pigeon. And Sebastian remained only partly satisfied as to the effect which he wished to produce. He wanted to give her something to think about, and so make way for ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... strong mellow shades on the figures, and gave an effect of reality to the fine white marble of which they are composed; but their merits are very striking, and are quite unalloyed by the graphic bombast of which the most able French artists have been with too much truth accused. The character of the Dauphin, whose exemplary life in the midst of a corrupt court, was a tacit reproof which his haughty father could ill brook, is ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... And then the pitfalls which lie about the feet of the Frenchman who has to speak of 1793,—the terrible year of the modern epoch! The delirium of the Terror haunts most of the revolutionary historians, and the choicest examples in all literature of bombast, folly, emptiness, political immorality, inhumanity, formal repudiation of common sense and judgment, are to be found in the rhapsodies which men of letters, some of them men of eminence, call ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... indued a corresponding suit of his clothes as well, even to his silk stockings, garters, and roses, and with the help of many pillows and other such farcing, so filled the garments which otherwise had hung upon him like a shawl from a peg, and made of himself such a 'sweet creature of bombast' that, with ludicrous unlikeness of countenance, he bore in figure no distant resemblance to ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... no thought is possible. We can much more relevantly declare that without thyroid, no thought, no growth, no distinctive humanity or even animality is possible. For the epigram about phosphorus was bombast, since it can be declaimed with equal truth that without oxygen, without carbon, without nitrogen, without any of the food elements that go to make up the chemical composition of brain matter, no thought is possible. Indeed, if one were set upon the indictment ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... interest in this melancholy, middle-aged man than she would have done if she had not been on the outlook for her Western type,—the man who was to combine all the qualities of chivalry, daring, bombast, and generosity, seasoned with piquant grammar, which she firmly believed to be the real thing. But notwithstanding this kindly and somewhat curious interest, she might never have made his acquaintance if it had not been for a rather ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... Robertson, Voltaire, and Gibbon. Yet it is not the thing. I have a conception of history more just, I am confident, than theirs."[68] "Gibbon," said Carlyle in a public lecture, is "a greater historian than Robertson but not so great as Hume. With all his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave a more futile account of human things than he has done of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; assigning no profound cause for these phenomena, nothing but diseased nerves, and all sorts of ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... will, while he listened, the unscrupulous valor of the man stirred Tabs to admiration. Only the after-event could prove whether this verbal display of fireworks was only bombast. "And so that's your ultimatum?" he ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... tragic note is sounded, with impressive authority and force, in the brief introduction, largo maestoso. The music, from the first, drives to the very heart of the subject: there is neither pose nor bombast in the presentation of the thought; and this attitude is maintained throughout—in the ingratiating loveliness of the second subject, in the fierce striving of the middle section, in the noble and sombre slow movement,—a largo of profound pathos and dignity,—and ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... long in Spain, which, with its innate propensity to bombast, was more fertile soil for it than other nations. Innumerable poetasters of the early eighteenth century enjoyed fame in their day and some possessed talent; but the obscure and trivial style of the age from which they could not free themselves deprived them of any chance of enduring fame. ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... quarter if Carleton persisted in holding out, and a prophecy attributed to Montgomery that he would eat his Christmas dinner either in Quebec or in Hell—these were some of the blood-curdling items that came in by petticoat or arrow post. One of the most active purveyors of all this bombast was Jerry Duggan, a Canadian 'patriot' barber now ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... afternoon the straggling remnant of a sea breeze drifted up the river and tempered the scorching heat. Then the captain of the Honda drained his last glass of red rum in the posada, reiterated to his political affiliates with spiritous bombast his condensed opinion anent the Government, and dramatically signaled the pilot to get ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... if I did not. The great ones of the City, In personal suit to make me his Lieutenant, Off-capped to him:—and, by the faith of man, I know my price—I am worth no worse a place; But he, as loving his own pride and purposes, Evades them with a bombast circumstance, Horribly stuffed with epithets of war; And, in conclusion, Nonsuits my meditators; for, "Certes," says he, "I have already chose my officer." And who was he? Forsooth, a great Arithmetician. * * * * * That never set a squadron in the field, Nor the division ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... taste of the actors and the cruder taste of the public—"is all traceable to their idiot art-masters that intrude themselves as the alchemists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse, indeed it may be the ingrafted overflow of some killcow conceit, etc. Among this kind of men that repose eternity in the mouth of a player I can but engross some deep read school men or grammarians, ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... tennis-court. These walls but t'other day were filled with noise Of roaring gamesters and your dam'me boys; Then bounding balls and rackets they encompast, And now they're filled with jests, and flights, and bombast! I vow, I don't much like this transmigration, Strolling from place to place by circulation; Grant heaven, we don't return to our first station! I know not what these think, but for my part I can't reflect without an aching heart, How we should ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... exclaimed pompously, "Don't you attempt bombast with me, Mr. Cospatric. I am as safe from your personal violence here as ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... fellow-passengers with the air of a lord. Nothing could overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was written on his brow. He was then in his ill days; but I can imagine him in Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder. As we moved in the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society. I do not think I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or interesting; but there was entertainment in the man's demeanour. You might call him ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it was not unmerited. Ellenborough's theatrical bombast, like that of Napoleon at the Pyramids, recoiled upon him, bringing a hornets' nest about his own ears and leading to his recall. As a matter of fact, too, the gates which he held in such reverence were found to be replicas of the pair that the Sultan Mahmood had pilfered from Somnauth; and ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... Pope Joan," is a bombast, silly performance of Elkanah Settle; the catastrophe of which consists in the accouchement of the Pope in the streets of Rome. The aid necessary in the conclusion of an English tragedy, (usually ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... mere pleasantry, with all the bombast of lyrical emphasis, the invocation terminated in a cry of ardent conviction, quivering with profound poetical emotion, and Sandoz's eyes grew moist; and, to hide how much he felt moved, he added, roughly, with a sweeping gesture that took in the ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... the Holy Roman Empire still dragging from his shoulders, is no more than a puzzled, broken old man, crowded in this bad business beside the Grand Turk, against whom his fathers defended Europe. The preposterous Ferdinand, shorn of his bombast, is only a chicken-hearted assassin. The leader of the band, the All Highest himself, when stripped of his white cloak and silver helmet, shows the slouch and the furtive ferocity of the street-corner bravo. And the cry "God with us," which once rallied Crusades, has become on such lips the signal ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... his very name, Bombast, used to this day as a synonym of loud, violent, and empty talk. To understand it at all, we must go back and think a little over these same occult sciences which were believed in by thousands during the fifteenth ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... they would send every one of the American vessels to the bottom; but they had made similar boasts before, and their bombast did not quiet the fears of the people, among whom a panic quickly spread. Those who were able to do so gathered their valuables and took refuge on the merchant ships in the harbor and thanked heaven when they ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... always have, and no lack of all the panoply of old-time chivalry and war can make a friendship slipping into love less than a beautiful and wondrous thing. It is perhaps in some ways to be regretted that the inspiring bombast of the elder days is no longer in vogue—the grandiloquent arrogance that led a man to tie a lady's ribband to his arm and proclaim on fear of sudden death her puissance of beauty throughout the world. This is perhaps unfortunate; ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... insult. I've spared you hitherto out of consideration for the feelings of your excellent father, who is so anxious that you should become an object of pride and credit to him; but if you dare to treat me to any more of this bombast about 'explaining your rights,' you will force me to exercise one of mine—the right to inflict corporal punishment, sir—which you have just seen in ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... and Tintoretto; Perugino was succeeded by Raphael. It is everywhere the same story; a reverend but child-like worship of the letter, followed by a manful apprehension of the spirit, and, alas! in due time by an almost total disregard of the letter; then rant and cant and bombast, till the value of the letter is reasserted. In theology the early men are represented by the Evangelicals, the times of utter decadence by infidelity—the middle race of giants is yet to come, and will be found in those ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... mountains and the ocean, stirs him to feeling which often results in superb stanzas, like the well-known ones at the end of 'Childe Harold' beginning 'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll'! Too often, however, Byron's passion and facility of expression issue in bombast and crude rhetoric. Moreover, his poetry is for the most part lacking in delicacy and fine shading; scarcely a score of his lyrics are of the highest order. He gives us often the blaring music of a military band or the loud, swelling volume of an organ, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... other interpretation but of Christ, as the Jehovah incarnate. In any other sense it would be a specimen of more than Persian or Moghul hyperbole, and bombast, of which there is no other instance in Scripture, and which no Christian would dare to attribute to an inspired writer. We know, too, that the elder Jewish Church ranked it among the Messianic Psalms.—N.B. The word in St. John and the Name of the Most High in the Psalms ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... great." The story of "Jonathan Wild" is really a bitter, satirical attack on what Fielding called "the greatness which is totally devoid of goodness." He avowed it his intention "to expose the character of this bombast greatness," and no one can deny the success of his achievement. Surely no story was ever written under more desperate circumstances. The evils of poverty, which at this period were at their height, were aggravated by the serious illness of his wife, and his own sufferings from attacks ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... compare the Orlando Furioso with the Odyssey, and give a preference to the former. The merit of these works may be ascertained in some measure, by the rules we have already established. We need only to add further on this head, that among many beauties we meet with examples of the turgid and bombast in the work of Ariosto; from which that of the Greek Poet is wholly free. The two ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... subsequent history of the island, commanded at Cape Haytien, and when Leclerc summoned him to surrender, replied, "Go tell your general that the French shall march here only over ashes, and that the ground shall burn beneath their feet." This was not bombast, for when he found further defence impossible, he set fire to the city and retreated to the mountains, taking with him two thousand white prisoners. Grief and despair filled the soul of Toussaint when, marching to the relief ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... levelled with exquisite tact just on the verge of bombast. This is not done to make the hearer care for the thing described, which is never heard of after, but to give a hint of Timon and what is to befall him, and to create a melodic effect upon the hearer's sense which shall put ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... whether it may have the same operation upon other men that it has upon me, but when I hear our architects thunder out their bombast words of pilasters, architraves, and cornices, of the Corinthian and Doric orders, and suchlike jargon, my imagination is presently possessed with the palace of Apollidon; when, after all, I find them but the paltry pieces of ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... which terminated in the downfall of Athens, was succeeded by a period of exhaustion and repose. The fine arts were checked in their progress, and poetry degenerated into empty bombast. Yet at this very time prose literature began a new career, which led to ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... address doubtless savors of bombast to many Americans, but in the history of political and military oratory in their own land they can find an endless number of speeches that, in that particular quality, rival if they do not surpass it. The Cuban situation was desperate, and the Cuban attitude was one ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... [The beginning lost.] Vices of Style opposed to the Sublime: Affectation, Bombast, False Sentiment, Frigid Conceits. The cause ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... any means a fool. I have occasionally been tempted to think he is, especially when he talks about having his throat cut at night; but he has always shown me in the end that he has in him a vein of strong common sense. He recognized that I was talking bombast when I spoke about the supreme crisis; but, curiously enough, he is quite convinced of Babberly's sincerity when he ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... Napoleon took it with him when he was dreaming of rivalling Alexander's conquests in the East. We may perhaps understand why the gigantesque pictures in Ossian of the northern mountains and scenery—with all its vagueness, incoherence, and bombast, was somehow congenial to minds dissatisfied, for different reasons, with the old ideals. To explain the charm more precisely is a very pretty problem for the acute critic. Ossian, it is clear, fell in with the mood characteristic of the time. But when we ask what effect it produced in English ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... free unconstrained way of speaking, is the beauty and excellence of speech, so an easy free concise way of writing is the best style for a tradesman. He that affects a rumbling and bombast style, and fills his letters with long harangues, compliments, and flourishes, should turn poet instead of tradesman, and set up for a wit, not a shopkeeper. Hark how such a young tradesman writes, out of the country, to his wholesale-man ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... be left intact. One should read them again and again, line by line. Ponderous eloquence, fustian bombast, and mouldy pathos combine with the display of pomp, to excite world-wide admiration. This play of well-rehearsed parts is given before an audience of generals, high officials and politicians, and the scene is set at Kiel, ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... drawing rooms; but what do the People know even of his? Buy a ballad in any street in Ireland, from the metropolis to the village, and you will find in it, perhaps, some humour, some tenderness, and some sweetness of sound; but you will certainly find bombast, or slander, or coarseness, united in all cases with false rhythm, false rhyme, conceited imagery, black paper, and blotted printing. A high class of ballads would do immense good—the present race demean and mislead the people as much as they stimulate ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... peculiar to himself, much after the haranguing way; he was no stranger to the rules of art, and knew well how to make his matter subservient to the subject he handled. His diction and language was easy and fluent, void of all affectation and bombast, and has a kind of undesigned negligent elegance which arrests the reader's attention. Considering the time he lived in, it might be said, that he carried the orator's prize from his contemporaries in Scotland, and was not at that time inferior to the best pulpit ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... you will remark how most of the so-called Roman names are Greek. You will remark, too, as a sign of the decadence of taste and art, that though full of wisdom and practical morality, the letters are couched in the most wonderful bombast to be met with, even in that age of infimae Latinitatis. One can only explain their style by supposing that King Dietrich, having supplied the sense, left it for Cassiodorus to shape it as he thought best; and when the letter ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... harmony of the numbers. The character of Cato is, in my opinion, vastly superior to that of Cornelia in the "Pompey" of Corneille, for Cato is great without anything like fustian, and Cornelia, who besides is not a necessary character, tends sometimes to bombast. Mr. Addison's Cato appears to me the greatest character that was ever brought upon any stage, but then the rest of them do not correspond to the dignity of it, and this dramatic piece, so excellently well writ, is disfigured ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... conveying, indeed, or being significant of, sweet images or thoughts, were themselves sweet. Mr. C. was asked what he thought of Klopstock. He answered, that his fame was rapidly declining in Germany; that an Englishman might form a correct notion of him by uniting the moral epigram of Young, the bombast of Hervey, and the minute description of Richardson. As to sublimity, he had, with all Germans, one rule for producing it;—it was, to take something very great, and make it very small in comparison with that which you wish to elevate. Thus, for example, Klopstock says,—'As the gardener goes ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... unworthy of what such a being should be represented. He finds the Lord walking in the cool of the evening, showing his hind quarters to Moses, ordering abominable massacres, and punishing chiefs who had not killed enough people. On further perusal, there is revealed, "A great deal of Oriental bombast, incoherence and absurdity, that the marvels recounted are often ludicrous ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... the huge globe crack about his ears. After this, he calmly worded on, seeming to regard the judge's stinging observation with the same sort of indifference as the lion would a dew-drop on his mane; and having poured out all manner of voluminous bombast, he gradually ran down, and came to a conclusion; then, jumping up refreshed, like the bounding of a tennis-ball, he proceeded to call witnesses; and, judging from what happened at the inquest, as well as because he wished to overwhelm a suspected and ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... said, endeavouring in his own mind to excuse the indiscretion of that Kappa-kappa. This lecture also she turned to wholesome food and digested, obtaining from it some strength and throwing off the bombast by which a weaker mind might have been inflated. She understood, at any rate, that St. James' Square must be her doom; but while acknowledging this to herself, she made a little resolution that a good ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... grand words and to dress their very ordinary thoughts in the most extraordinary expressions and the most outlandish, artificial, and rarest phrases. Their sentences perpetually stalk about on stilts. With regard to their delight in bombast, and to their writing generally in a grand, puffed-up, unreal, hyperbolical, and acrobatic style, their prototype is Pistol, who was once impatiently requested by Falstaff, his friend, to "say what you have to say, like a man ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... encounter," said I; "but they are not absolutely insuperable; and where is firmness of mind shown but in exertion? mere declamation is bombast rant." Besides, wherever I am, or in whatever situation I ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... to defend it."—(Ib). Nor were these volunteer Loyalists intimidated by General Smyth's extended columns of cavalry and infantry with which he lined the American shore, his marching and countermarching of countless battalions, and all the pomp of war and parade of martial bombast with which the fertile mind of General Smyth hoped to terrify the apparently defenceless Canadians; to which he added a flaming proclamation, not excelled in pomposity and brag by that of General Hull issued ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... knowledge, a purse, friends of his own. He will let the world see that he can get along with his own resources. Barnabas Know-nothing may talk as he please, Job Do-nothing may do all he can, and Richard Bombast may swagger because he thinks matters are done as he planned; but Mr. Grumbler is independent of them all, and will, by-and-by, ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... have heard him offer a situation to one of his fellow-passengers with the air of a lord. Nothing could overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was written on his brow. He was then in his ill days; but I can imagine him in Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder. As we moved in the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society. I do not think I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or interesting; but there was entertainment in the man's demeanour. You might call ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not a single statesman or a single newspaper appeared to have any conception of the serious task before them. The fusillades of rant, passion and bombast which filled the air would have been comic but for the grim tragedy which was stalking ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... his order, our friend became from that moment something superior, something exclusive, something supercilious, arrogant, exacting,—Asirvadam, the high Brahmin,—a creature of wide strides without awkwardness, towering airs without bombast, Sanscrit quotations without pedantry, florid phraseology without hyperbole, allegorical illustrations and proverbial points without sententiousness, fanciful flights without affectation, and formal strains of compliment without ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... into a cocked hat and stormed la Tourgue if it had been garrisoned by 19 x 19 French spouters of platitude in half the time that Gauvain and Cimourdain took about it. In fact, Balfour seems to me to be flesh and blood and Gauvain & Co. to be too often mere personified bombast: and therefore I fancy that Old Mortality will outlast '93, though Notre Dame is far better than Quentin Durward, and Les Miserables, perhaps, better than any. This is, of course, fair ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... outward, arriue, and as they retume homeward also from Russia, and the said Northerne regions, into Turkie. The foresaid merchants transport thither ermines and gray furres, with other rich and costly skinnes. Others carrie cloathes made of cotton or bombast, and silke, and diuers kindes of spices. [Sidenote: The citie of Matriga.] But vpon the East part of the said prouince standeth a Citie called Matriga [Footnote: Azou.], where the riuer Tanais [Footnote: The Don.] dischargeth his streames ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... protuberances is observed to run much upon a line, and ever in a circle. The whining passions and little starved conceits are gently wafted up by their own extreme levity to the middle region, and there fix and are frozen by the frigid understandings of the inhabitants. Bombast and buffoonery, by nature lofty and light, soar highest of all, and would be lost in the roof if the prudent architect had not, with much foresight, contrived for them a fourth place, called the twelve-penny gallery, and there planted a ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... acclamation that greeted everything he said; applause had made him drunk. But under the hilarity of his listeners there was considerable enthusiasm for the man himself. The Duke perceived it, for he realized what times had come upon the State. Spinney's bombast expressed the protest that was abroad. Rebellion, thirsty, does not seek the cold spring of Reason. It fuddles itself with hot speech, it riots—it ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... much grasp of the international situation as those that had germinated within half a mile of Downing Street. Quite in keeping, too, with the older and better traditions of British journalism was the manner of the home-coming; no bombast, no personal advertisement, no flamboyant interviews. Even a complimentary luncheon at the Voyagers' Club was courteously declined. Indeed, it began to be felt that the self-effacement of the returned pressmen was being carried to a pedantic length. Foreman compositors, ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... Iacke, heere comes bare-bone. How now my sweet Creature of Bombast, how long is't agoe, Iacke, since thou saw'st thine owne Knee? Falst. My owne Knee? When I was about thy yeeres (Hal) I was not an Eagles Talent in the Waste, I could haue crept into any Aldermans Thumbe-Ring: a plague of sighing and griefe, it blowes a man vp like a Bladder. There's villanous ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... definitely to give him the money; she asked him to come and talk to her. But he entrenched himself behind the Ole Fred gang and speedily helped to make it the nuisance of the ship. The germ of self-confidence and courage that was entirely missing in his make-up was replaced by bombast under the combined influence of whisky and boredom. Some day, perhaps, the iniquity of fastening up a small world of people in a ship for six weeks with nothing compulsory to do will dawn upon shipping companies, and the passengers will be forced to work, for their ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... 1909, for two days the sea burst on the black rocks of the islet in the bay in clouds of foam. It was all bombast, froth and bubble, or rather a gentle back-hander, for the cyclone was playing all sorts of naughty pranks elsewhere. But why were we apprehensive? In disobedience to the scriptural injunction, we had observed the clouds and the birds. Twice a flock of lesser frigate-birds, those ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... still, certainly, yet genuine patriotism appears to be a sine qua non now, where bombast answered in the old day. Corruption is no longer accepted. Public men then were surprisingly simple, surprisingly cheap and limited in their methods. There were two rules for public and private life. It was ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as the smoke vanisheth so shalt thou drive them away!' Even to common minds this familiarity with grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse, gave a loftiness and ardor of expression that with all its tendency to exaggeration and bombast we may prefer to the slip-shod vulgarisms ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... parallel, a parallel treatment may be adopted with great advantage to clearness and force; if it is not parallel, any attempt to treat it as such is detected as a shallow trick. To search for thoughts to trail along in a series results in thinnest bombast. As everywhere else in composition, so here a writer must rely on his good taste and ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... naive, conscious of the importance of their position, convinced that the features of their faces perpetuated upon the canvas would go down to posterity, they exaggerated somewhat the qualities which are so characteristic of their high and responsible office in our prison. A certain bombast of pose, an exaggerated expression of stern authority, an obvious consciousness of their own importance, and a noticeable contempt for those on whom their eyes were directed—all this disfigured their kind and affable faces. ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... and images too great for the subject. This is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by the bye, is a fault of which none but ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... reckless in the field; and required them to declare if so venial a fault had not, by that fact, already been sufficiently expiated. He then recapitulated the events of his career as a military leader; but he did so temperately and modestly, without a trace of the arrogant bombast for which he had throughout his life been celebrated. So great was the effect of this unexpected and manly dignity, that many members of the court were seen to shed tears; and had his fate been decided upon the instant, it is probable that ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... ignore. The consistent, systematic lying of the German press, or the grotesque blasphemies of the Kaiser, can be met by us with contemptuous tolerance. After all, what is is, and neither falsehood nor bombast will alter it. But this policy of murder deeply affects not only ourselves but the whole framework of civilization, so slowly and painfully built upward by ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... strength. Lord Frederick Campbell was the most impetuous of all, so little he foresaw how much wiser it would be to follow your brother. Pitt made a short speech, excellently argumentative, and not bombast, nor tedious, nor deviating from the question. He was supported by your brother, and Charles Townshend, and Lord George; the two last of whom are strangely firm, now they are got under the cannon of your brother:—Charles, who, as he must be extraordinary, is now so in romantic nicety of honour. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... collection of contemporary comment thereon, in prose and verse. The prose is generally bad; the verse is generally very bad; and one turns with relief to the author's connecting links, wishing only at times that he would not worry about proving his point quite so thoroughly. The bombast and the bullying, the self-pity and the cruelty, and, most of all, the instinctive claim, typical of Germany to-day, to prescribe one law for themselves but something quite different for the rest of the world, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... critic thinks were intended for Shakspeare: 'Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.' Again: with this view, the disputed passages—those in which ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... thing. I have a conception of history more just, I am confident, than theirs."[68] "Gibbon," said Carlyle in a public lecture, is "a greater historian than Robertson but not so great as Hume. With all his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave a more futile account of human things than he has done of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; assigning no profound cause for these phenomena, nothing but diseased nerves, and all sorts of miserable motives, to the actors in them."[69] Carlyle's ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... The very bombast of them gives joy. Who can stand before the Barberini set, The Mysteries of the Life and Death of Jesus Christ, bequeathed to the Cathedral of St. John, the Divine, in New York, by Mrs. Clarke, without being more than ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... concealing his troops, remained on the watch for a few days longer. His anxiety, however, to bring his enemy to battle was even greater than usual. Pope had already gained an unenviable notoriety. On taking over command he had issued an extraordinary address. His bombast was only equalled by his want of tact. Not content with extolling the prowess of the Western troops, with whom he had hitherto served, he was bitterly satirical at the expense of McClellan and of McClellan's army. "I have come to ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... drunk with pride. Even Boileau, hurried along by the prevailing enthusiasm, forgot the good sense and good taste to which he owed his reputation. He fancied himself a lyric poet, and gave vent to his feelings in a hundred and sixty lines of frigid bombast about Alcides, Mars, Bacchus, Ceres, the lyre of Orpheus, the Thracian oaks and the Permessian nymphs. He wondered whether Namur, had, like Troy, been built by Apollo and Neptune. He asked what power could subdue a city stronger than that before which the Greeks lay ten years; ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... poetical expression sparingly; must use them more freely as the emotion rises; and must carry them to their greatest extent, only where the emotion reaches a climax. The entire contravention of these principles results in bombast or doggerel. The insufficient respect for them is seen in didactic poetry. And it is because they are rarely fully obeyed, that ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... the King arose, and sat down again in his chair, and the dean of Westminster wiped and dried all the places anointed, with fine linen, or fine bombast wool, delivered to him by the lord ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... lawlessness had been expelled. Royalty was reconstituted. Men had recovered from the follies of politics. They mocked at revolution, they jeered at the republic, and as to those times when such strange words as Right, Liberty, Progress, had been in the mouth—why, they laughed at such bombast! Admirable was the return to common sense. England had been in a dream. What joy to be quit of such errors! Was ever anything so mad? Where should we be if every one had his rights? Fancy every one's having a hand in the government? Can you imagine a city ruled by its citizens? Why, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... resumed my walk. "The key to an empire!" I said my own words over, and could have blushed for their tone of bombast. They were true, but they sounded false, I looked at my surroundings, and marveled that a situation that was of real dignity could wear so mean a garb. The sandy cove where I stood was on the mainland, and sheltered four settlements. Behind lay the forest; in front stretched Lake ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... into life-power, and be poured forth, not as oracular wisdom in silly novels, but as sympathy and enlarged comprehension of the daily duties of life. When educated women "mistake vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality," she is not surprised that men regard rhodomontade as the native accent of woman's intellect, or that they come to the conclusion that "the average nature of women is too shallow and feeble a soil ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... lands are beginning to awake to the fact that their countries have been living on the glories of their revolutions and traditions, rather than the substance of freedom. Behind the boast of old-age pensions, material benefits and wage regulations, behind the bombast concerning liberty in this country and tyranny in that, behind all the slogans and shibboleths coined out of the ideals of the peoples for the uses of imperialism, woman must and will see the iron hand of that same imperialism, condemning ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... State letters, one is struck with the diplomatically(?) cunning composition of them. There does not seem to be a manly phrase from beginning to end. Trickery, suspicion, cruelty, veiled or apparent, and an occasional dash of pious consideration and bombast sums up these perfidious documents. A few extracts will convey precisely the character of the men who were carrying on negotiations which should have been ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... Rueckert. None of these are over two pages long, except the last. They are written in the best modern Lied style, and are quite unhackneyed. It is always the unexpected that happens, though this unexpected thing almost always proves to be a right thing. Without any sense of strain or bombast he reaches superb climaxes; without eccentricity he is individual; and his songs are truly interpreters of the words they express. Of these five, "Wann die Rosen aufgeblueht" is a wonderfully fine and fiery ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... prevailed; and in parts of Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope," we find the last modified specimen of the evil. Hence, in Falconer the obsolete mythological allusions—the names with classical terminations—the perpetual apostrophes—the set and stilted speeches he puts into the mouths of heroes—the bombast, verbiage, and sounding sameness of much of his verse. Nor do we greatly admire the story which he introduces with the poem, nor the discrimination of his characters, nor, what may be called strictly, the pathos of ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... brilliant chapters in his opening volume, as more fully later on through Mr. Lane Poole's admirable biography, the Great Eltchi is known to English readers. He moves across the stage with a majesty sometimes bordering on what Iago calls bombast circumstance; drums and trumpets herald his every entrance; now pacing the shady gardens of the Bosphorus, now foiling, "in his grand quiet way," the Czar's ferocious Christianity, or torturing his baffled ambassador by scornful concession of the points which he formally demanded but ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... silly vanity would by no means allow him to put up with his not having been elected Commander-in-Chief, all on a sudden cried out in his sort of bombast, "Here they are coming, boys: now I will lead you to death or victory!"—actually a band of men was tramping ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... insulting even to Philip's intelligence to insinuate that the Prince would shrink before danger, or die of fear. Had Orange ever been inclined to bombast, he might have answered the churchman's calumny, as ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... (it might stand even more appropriately as a commentary on the tragedy of his own life). The tragic note is sounded, with impressive authority and force, in the brief introduction, largo maestoso. The music, from the first, drives to the very heart of the subject: there is neither pose nor bombast in the presentation of the thought; and this attitude is maintained throughout—in the ingratiating loveliness of the second subject, in the fierce striving of the middle section, in the noble and sombre slow movement,—a largo of profound pathos and dignity,—and ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... displeases me more than to see people assenting to everything that they hear said; I at once come to the conclusion that they are either hypocrites, or there is nothing in them. But, with respect to Shakespeare, whom I have not read for thirty years, is he not rather given to bombast, 'crackling bombast,' as I think I have said in one ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... must fail that cannot recognise any degrees of mental capacity; that cannot understand that man has a soul that cannot be confined within any man-drawn boundaries. This German-creed sweeps the earth with all the bombast of a war-mad Kaiser. It is going to fail, but not till men who think will rise and fight for recognition of their immortality. It will be ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... is most unlike the rooster is the most spiritual part of love. All will agree on that, schisms only arise when one tries to decide what does go farthest from the bird's automatic mechanism. Certainly not a Dante-Beatrice affair which is only the negation of the rooster in terms of the swooning bombast of adolescence, the first onslaught of a force which the sufferer cannot control or inhabit with all the potentialities of his body and soul. But the rooster is troubled by no dreams of a divine orgy, no carnival-loves ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... men of science would soon be making discoveries at a rate which left their skill in words outstripped; that having to invent their terms as they went along, yet being careless and contemptuous of a science in which they have no training, they would bombast out our dictionaries with monstrously invented words that not only would have made Quintilian stare and gasp, but would affront the ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Horses in the kingdom would match them. Homer, after having been very lavish in their praise, has given us their names, and the pedigree of two of them, which it seems were full brothers. He tells us, they were as swift as the wind, and in his bombast** way of writing, says they were immortal; which expression is exactly of the same style and meaning with our modern phrase high-bred, and could mean nothing else, because in the recital of the pedigree, he tells us, they were got by this same North-country Horse before mentioned, ...
— A Dissertation on Horses • William Osmer
... this does not exist, laughter accompanies the appreciation of humour, and in silence there would be little pleasure. The cause of mirth also differs as the persons affected, and the farce which creates a roar in the pit will often not raise a smile in the boxes. Swift writes—"Bombast and buffoonery, by nature lofty and light, soar highest of all in the theatre, and would be lost in the roof, if the prudent architect had not contrived for them a fourth place called the twelvepenny ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... came from the Temple, his morals do show; But where his deep law is, few mortals yet know: His rhetoric, bombast, silly jests, are by far More like to lampooning, than pleading at bar. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... note of bombast, this last paragraph echoed pretty accurately the feeling of the Garsiders at the loss of their flag. Their pride had been more sorely wounded even than it had been by the affair at the sand-pit. ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... the Indies, where the herb grows, and where he himself and a dozen other gentlemen had for the space of one-and-twenty weeks known no other nutriment than the fume of tobacco. This again was tolerably "steep" even for this Falstaff-like braggart. He continues with more bombast in praise of the medicinal virtues of the herb—virtues which were then very firmly and widely believed in—and is replied to by Cob, the anti-tobacconist, who, with equal exaggeration on the other side, denounces tobacco, and declares that four people had died in one house from the use of it in ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... in this eminent man towards those from whom he disagreed, he will not even allow that he had any 'patrons'[516] who have adorned the doctrine of Christ. 'His language is barbarous, unscriptural, and unintelligible.' 'It is most sublime nonsense, inimitable bombast, fustian not to be paralleled.' Bishop Warburton also refers to him in the most unqualified[517] terms of contempt. William Blake, most mystical of poets and painters, delighted, as might well be expected, in Behmen's writings.[518] A far weightier ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... Otway's "Caius Marius.") I don't know, and don't care. It is not Shakespeare. It may "show something of the skill of kindred genius," as the preface to the acting edition says it does. I confess I do not see it. I would have such bombast delivered with the traditional accompaniment of red fire; and the curtain should descend majestically to the sound of slow music. That would be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... acquainted with one of the writers. I should like to be intimate with Mr. Anstey, even though he wrote Lord Buckhorse, or with the author of the Heroic Epistle—I have no thirst to know the rest of my contemporaries, from the absurd bombast of Dr. Johnson down to the silly Dr. Goldsmith, though the latter changeling has had bright gleams of parts, and the former had sense, till he changed it for words, and sold it for a pension. Don't ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... considerable truth in the above, we are sorry to state. Reporters are too apt to smooth over and give a fair face to the stupidity and bombast of political and other public humbugs. For this they are not only seldom thanked, but frequently are kicked. Of course this sort of thing is wrong. A Reporter should be independent enough to meet the approaches of gentlemen of the Nincompoop persuasion with a flat rebuff. He ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... Bombast Paracelsus, Read what Flood the Seeker tells us Of the Dominant that runs Through the cycles of the Suns— Read my story last and see ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... with something of a shock to remember that this medley of poetry, bombast, and myth will eventually reach the ears of no other person than the Octavius of Antony and Cleopatra; and the contrast is the more remarkable when one recalls the brilliant scene of negotiation and diplomacy ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... his Excellency the Prime Minister, a renegade American from New Hampshire, all jaw, vanity, bombast and ignorance, a lawyer of "shyster" calibre, a fraud by nature, a humble worshipper of the sceptre above him, a reptile never tired of sneering at the land of his birth or glorifying the ten-acre kingdom that has adopted ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... above the tone of conversation, the majority of preachers withdraw too far from it. They swell their delivery, and declaim instead of speaking. Now, when bombast comes in, nature ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... 'flood' and 'wood' and 'home' and 'come' are perfect rhymes. We must deal gently with the poet while 'trying his 'prentice hand,' hoping better things when he shall 'become an artist true;' and when we remember that to the national taste sublimity is represented by bombast, artifice takes the place of nature, and sense is sacrificed to sound, the love of the ore rotundo demanding mouth-filling words at any price, we cannot fail to discover the genuine Spanish beauties of the piece. I only wonder that in his chronological picture of the races he should omit to display ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... need not neglect his regular college work, but in them can train himself to think consecutively, and gain facility of expression and an acquaintance with parliamentary law. If he makes faithful preparation, he will escape bombast and loose thinking and expression, and will become familiar with public movements, political questions, and social tendencies. For these and other reasons the literary societies should be encouraged, ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... him a little limply; something of the bombast had gone out of his manner. Tavernake's arrival had reminded him of things which he had only ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... life, disappointments, and excuses of any shrub or beast that he happened to be addressing, his genius has a curious resemblance to that of Burns. But if he avoided the weakness of Burns' verses to animals, the occasional morbidity, bombast, and moralisation on himself, the credit is surely due to a cleaner ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... ridikilous,' sais he, 'in that are expression, of Hope pitchin' her tent on a hill. It's figurativ' and poetic, but it's within the line that divides taste from bombast. Hope pitchin' her tent on a hill! What is ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... had indued a corresponding suit of his clothes as well, even to his silk stockings, garters, and roses, and with the help of many pillows and other such farcing, so filled the garments which otherwise had hung upon him like a shawl from a peg, and made of himself such a 'sweet creature of bombast' that, with ludicrous unlikeness of countenance, he bore in figure no distant resemblance to ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... call grand victories. As I have Bonaparte's dispatches before me, which I took yesterday, I speak positively. He says—"I am now going to send off, to take Suez and Damietta." He does not speak very favourable of either the country or people; but there is so much bombast in his letters, that it is difficult to get near the truth. He does not mention India, in these dispatches. He is what he calls organizing the country: but, you may be assured, is master only of what ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... monarch of Felix Austria, with the mantle of the Holy Roman Empire still dragging from his shoulders, is no more than a puzzled, broken old man, crowded in this bad business beside the Grand Turk, against whom his fathers defended Europe. The preposterous Ferdinand, shorn of his bombast, is only a chicken-hearted assassin. The leader of the band, the All Highest himself, when stripped of his white cloak and silver helmet, shows the slouch and the furtive ferocity of the street-corner bravo. And the cry "God with us," which once rallied Crusades, has become on such lips ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... time yet. Liberty, my dear Miss Rossano, will restore your father to health, and he will not lose his share of the glory." We English always excuse a foreigner who shows a tendency to bombast in conversation; and allowing for her partial knowledge of the language, and for the oratorical turn her people have, I saw nothing overstrained in the little woman's raptures. I had even a modified belief in their reality; and ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... her adamantine soul unscathed, to the moment when she attains her destiny, namely, to spend a night of love with the dying Agathon Geyer and to bear him the first child of a better time, Beatus, the fortunate. Sultry sensuality and outrageous bombast characterize the work, the action of which is not clearly set forth, but floats in a sea of nebulous somnambulistic vagueness. Visionary representation and mythical creation are indeed the program which Wassermann lays out for himself in a theoretical treatise, The Art ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... better than the open book of nature, written with God's own finger." We shall see, however, that this "book of nature" taught Paracelsus some very strange lessons. Modesty was not one of these. "Now at this time," he declares, "I, Theophrastus Paracelsus, Bombast, Monarch of the Arcana, was endowed by God with special gifts for this end, that every searcher after this supreme philosopher's work may be forced to imitate and to follow me, be he Italian, Pole, Gaul, German, or whatsoever or whosoever he be. Come hither ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... will stir up a few of the respectable otiose souls there if he has an opportunity. There is a good deal of swagger about him; he believes in carry a stick and turning it; in admiring himself and letting other people know that he is of a cypher; there is much conceit and ever so much bombast about him; he likes giving historical lectures; thinks he is an authority on everything appertaining to Elizabeth, Mary, the Prince of Orange, &c.; is fond of attacking Bishop Goss, and getting into ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... continued the reviewer, 'whose style is for the most part easy and dignified, with a praiseworthy absence of all inflation or bombast, seems at times to have been smitten by a fatal desire to "split the ears of the groundlings" and produce an impression by showy parades of a not overwhelmingly profound scholarship; and the effect of these contrasts ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... associates. Belvidera instigates him to this treachery, because she cannot bear the thought of having her father murdered, and is absurd enough to imagine that she and her husband shall be tender and happy lovers ever after. Their love in the latter acts of the play is a continued tirade of bombast and sounding nonsense, without one real sentiment, one just reflection, or one strong emotion working from the heart, and analysing the nature of man. The folly of this love can only be exceeded, by the abject and despicable crouching ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... Warburton and Doctor Johnson used collectively or individually the following expressions in describing the work of the author of "Hamlet": conceit, overreach, word-play, extravagance, overdone, absurdity, obscurity, puerility, bombast, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity,{353} are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... room, in order to resume his own dress, which he hoped would alter his appearance in such a manner as to baffle all search and examination; while the physician remained ashamed and abashed, to find himself convinced of bombast by a person of such contemptible talents. He was offended at this proof of his memory, and so much enraged at his presumption in exhibiting it, that he could never forgive his want of reverence, and took every opportunity of exposing his ignorance and folly in the sequel. Indeed, the ties ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... idolatry he seems to be the god: while the venerable Plutarch objects to him that he carried all his thoughts beyond nature; that he wrote not to men of character but to the mob; that his style is at once obscure, licentious, tragical, pompous and mean—sometimes inflated and serious to bombast—sometimes ludicrous, even to puerility; that he makes none of his personages speak in any distinct character, so that in his scenes the son cannot be known from the father—the citizen from the boor—the hero from the shopkeeper, or ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can. We can afford to dally and play tricks with the one, but the others we have enough to do with, without any of the wantonness and bombast of passion—without the swaggering of Pistol or the insolence of King Cambyses' vein. To great evils we submit; we resent little provocations. I have before now been disappointed of a hundred pound job and lost ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... my kind of art as 'the noble pursuit of Truth,' and so on. I don't care for such phrases; they may mean something, but as a rule come of the very spirit so opposed to my own—that which feels it necessary to justify art by bombast. The one object I have in life is to paint a bit of the world just as I see it. I exhaust myself in vain toil; I shall never succeed; but I am right to persevere, I am right to ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... shall not halt before we come to Zagreb, your capital." Those five will perhaps some day explain to their comrades how quickly Zagreb can be reached.... As yet those whom they left behind them had not lost their bombast: a manifesto was issued by them which declared that five true patriots had sallied forth to Saint Anna, for the purpose of parleying with the Constituent Assembly, and that in a barbarous fashion they had been arrested, maltreated and possibly killed. Let the people avenge the shedding ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... embodies power, and power governs the universe. Its power is not that of the storm that harries and devastates, but rather that of the sunshine that fructifies, purifies, chastens, and ripens. It does not rush or crash into a situation but steals in as quietly as the dawn, without noise or bombast, and, by its gentle influence, softens asperities and wins a smile from the face of sorrow, or discouragement, or anger. Its presence transforms discord into harmony, irradiates gloom, and evokes rare flowers from the murky soil of discontent. Whatever storms ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... the other hand, such as that on The Daffodil, may not all be endorsed by us to-day. But in the mass they have the insight of genius, as when he condemns "the approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal." His quotations of great passages, again, are the ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... enthusiasm rose to fever pitch, amid these stupid exhibitions of mob violence. Then to end up, after tramping the streets with other gaping idlers till late at night, he would make his way back, with weary limbs and aching ribs, his head whirling confusedly with bombast and loud talk, through the sleeping city to the Faubourg Saint-Germain. There, as he strode past some aristocratic mansion and saw the scutcheon blazoned on its facade and the two lions lying white in the moonlight on guard before its closed ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... two-thirds. From such activity, much that is worth while is bound to spring. Art knows no sex, and even what the women write in man-tone is often surprisingly strong, though it is wrongly aimed. But this effort is like the bombast of a young people or a juvenile literature; the directness and repose of fidelity to nature come later. The American woman is in the habit of getting what she sets her heart on. She has determined to ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... events, and the time it represented as elapsing be no greater than the time it took in playing. He was always pre-eminently an Englishman of his own day with a scholar's rather than a poet's temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, and only limited because in ruling out these things he ruled out much else that was essential to the spirit of the time. As a craftsman he was uncompromising; he never bowed to the tastes of the public ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... headquarters of the latter were attended by the scholar Gian Antonio Porcellio dei Pandoni, commissioned by Alfonso of Naples to write a report of the campaign. It is written, not in the purest, but in a fluent Latin, a little too much in the style of the humanistic bombast of the day, is modelled on Caesar's Commentaries, and interspersed with speeches, prodigies, and the like. Since for the past hundred years it had been seriously disputed whether Scipio Africanus or Hannibal ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... likewise; and so on till the tobacco is finished, and the seed of wisdom has sprouted in every soul into the tree of meditation, bearing the flowers of eloquence, and in due time the fruit of valiant action." With which quaint fact (for fact it is, in spite of the bombast) I end ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... spontaneously to his lips, and were not less lofty than his thoughts. As a statesman he had serious defects; he was haughty, vain, and overbearing, his opinions were unsettled, his far-reaching views often nebulous; his passion was stronger than his judgment, and he was immoderately given to bombast. In spite of his true greatness he lacked simplicity, and he imported the arts of a charlatan into political life. Yet Englishmen must ever reverence his memory, for he loved England with all the ardour of his soul, and, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... are they not entitled to their opinion and modes of expressing it, providing it be done with decorum and with a proper respect for the opinions of their adversaries? Why then do we or they employ, through the press and in rhetorical bombast, opprobrious epithets, fit only for the pot-house or the shambles? Shall we men and citizens, each of us a pillar upholding the crowning dome of our nationality, be taught, like vexed and querulous ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... or an equivalent paraphrase, that had the widest vogue among the good wishes with which the dedicator in the early years of the seventeenth century besought his patron's favour on the first page of his book. But Thorpe was too self-assertive to be a slavish imitator. His addiction to bombast and his elementary appreciation of literature recommended to him the practice of incorporating in his dedicatory salutation some high-sounding embellishments of the accepted formula suggested by his author's writing. {399a} In his dedication of the 'Sonnets' to 'Mr. W. H.' he grafted on the common ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... with such a snow-storm in his imagination, when telling the shepherds to be kind to their helpless charge, addressed them in language which, in an ordinary mood, would have been bombast. "Shepherds," says he, "baffle the raging year!" How? Why merely by filling their pens with food. But the whirlwind ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... figure in this field of occult knowledge and of nature mysticism was the far-travelled man and medical genius, Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast, of Hohenheim, generally known as Paracelsus. He was born in 1493 in the neighbourhood of Einsiedeln, not far from Zurich, the son of a physician of repute. He studied in the University of Basle, and later was instructed by ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... Macedonia, the Frolic, Lake Erie, Lake Champlain, and the "vast inferiority of British sailors and soldiers to the true-blooded Yankees." The events of the war were commemorated in songs which this Briton declared—and no doubt truthfully—to be "frothy, senseless bombast." But whatever limitations of culture were disclosed by this outburst of national conceit, no one could doubt for an instant that an exuberant vitality was coursing through the veins ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... by their influence till after my uncle had procured me several opportunities of proving my proficiency in my calling. I may say without vanity that my speeches won approval; but I was revolted by the pompous, flowery bombast, without which I should have been hissed down, and though my parents rejoiced when I went home from Niku, Arsmoe, or some other little provincial town, with laurel-wreaths and gold pieces, to myself I always seemed an impostor. Still, for my father's sake, I dared not give up my profession, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... convey a worse than inadequate idea of this wonderful oration, for they give merely a few fragments, in which they have contrived either to select their examples with the most curious infelicity, or to blunder them into bombast. But nothing can be more childish than to suppose, that Pitt would have given his praise to tawdry metaphor, that Burke would have done honour to feeble truisms, that Fox should have been unable to distinguish between logic and looseness of reasoning, or that the whole assembly, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... opinion that the diversion only enfeebled the beautiful if austere picture of patriarchal domestic life delineated in the Bible. He therefore adhered to tradition and created a series of scenes full of beauty, dignity, and pathos, simple and strong in spite of the bombast prevalent in the literary style of the period. Mehul's music is marked by grandeur, simplicity, lofty sentiment, and consistent severity of manner. The composer's predilection for ecclesiastical music, created, no doubt, by the blind organist who taught him in his childhood and nourished by his ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... cannon and 500 newly raised recruits to Sandusky. I telegraphed the Hon. Joshua R. Giddings, our consul-general at Montreal, asking what he could learn in Canada as to the threatened expedition. He thought it was the mere "bombast" of Confederate emissaries and refugees in the Canadian provinces, and made light of it. On the 12th, however, the Secretary of War telegraphed me that Lord Lyons, the British ambassador, confirmed the report, and directed me to take energetic action to ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... eulogize what the government has sanctioned, or to infuse something of literary immortality into popular enthusiasm, were in requisition on this extraordinary occasion, and, as usual, vied with each other in bombast and the fervour of exaggeration. If one might credit the legends, Sir Francis accomplished much more than a visit to the antipodes, much more indeed, than ever man did before or since. Witness an epigram on him preserved in the Censura ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... me? And does he still aspire To marry Theban strains to Latium's lyre, Thanks to the favouring muse? Or haply rage And mouth in bombast for the tragic stage?" ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... the Third. He sat a moment on the floor, with a finger in each eye; and then, finding he was neither daubing, ranting, nor deluging earth with "acts," he accused himself of indolence, and sat down to write a small tale of blood and bombast; he took his seat at the deal table with some alacrity, for he had recently ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... a curse to the nation, an outrage upon the poor Negro and suffering humanity. This bill gave the poor Negro no protection in the land of his birth, a country boasting of being the land of the brave and the home of the free. These terms, however, were nothing but bombast; they would just come and take a freeman and carry him into absolute slavery without judge ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... admitted it to himself with his mouth pulled down at the corners, the worst of it was that under the bombast, under the vituperative utterances, the catch phrases of radicalism, there remained the grains of truth. Starr knew that the masses of Mexico were suffering, broken under the tramplings of revolution and counter-revolution that swept back and ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... high over the Reform Bill, as almost to threaten civil war. One minister talked of settling the question with 'broken heads and flaming houses.' Another boasted at a public meeting that he had 'got his hand upon the throat of capital'—all bombast, of course, but dangerous bombast at a time of great public excitement. Happily a vent was found for these angry passions in the ridiculous incident of Mr. Berry's 'embassy' to the Colonial Office, which set both parties laughing, and ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... cruel order for the killing of the children. But when the foul deed is done there await the murderer two kings whom he cannot slay, Death and the Devil. A banquet is in full swing, Herod's officers are about him, the customary rant and bombast is on his lips when those two steal in. 'While the trumpets are sounding, Death slays Herod and his two soldiers suddenly, and the Devil receives them'—so ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... language of Paul III. went far to justify the rough measures by which his menaces were parried. If any misgiving had remained in the king's mind on the legitimacy of the course which he had pursued, the last trace of it must have been obliterated by the perusal of this preposterous bombast. ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... Demosthenes was given to this kind of exercise. A dignified and, if I may say it, a chaste, style, is neither elaborate nor loaded with ornament; it rises supreme by its own natural purity. This windy and high-sounding bombast, a recent immigrant to Athens, from Asia, touched with its breath the aspiring minds of youth, with the effect of some pestilential planet, and as soon as the tradition of the past was broken, eloquence halted and was stricken dumb. Since ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... return to our dramatic writers:... Thomas Kyd was the author of a tragedy entitled Jeronimo, which for the absurd horrors of its plot, and the mingled puerility and bombast of its language, was a source of perpetual ridicule to rival poets, while from a certain wild pathos combined with its imposing grandiloquence it was long a favorite with the people. The same person also translated a play by ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... and, when it is in such a state that it would be sent away in disgust from any table, he offers it to the judges. The object of the poetical candidate, in like manner, is to produce, not a good poem, but a poem of that exact degree of frigidity or bombast which may appear to his censors to be correct or sublime. Compositions thus constructed will always be worthless. The few excellences which they may contain will have an exotic aspect and flavour. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... say: "The principal poems in this volume, under the title of the 'Echo,' owed their origin to the accidental suggestion of a moment of literary sportiveness, at a time when pedantry, affectation, and bombast pervaded most of the pieces published in the gazettes, which were then the principal vehicles of literary information. Willing to lend their aid to check the progress of false taste in American literature, the authors conceived that ridicule would prove a powerful corrective, ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
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