"Bathos" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... moments when inspiration is running low, and a gap has to be filled up, the shorter line needs less padding, and can be more rapidly run over when it is weak. Whereas a feeble heroic couplet becomes ponderous and sinks more quickly into bathos—as in the following sample ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... debate, dropped into poetry, and remarked that a certain catastrophe came "like a bolt from the blue"; a daily journal of vast circulation described the event as coming "like a bolt from the flue"—which was a very sad instance of bathos. The amazing thing is that such blunders should be so ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... we have added another tragic possibility to the list: the Strike situation. As yet no one tackles this situation. It is a sort of Medusa head, which turns—no, not to stone, but to sloppy treacle. Mr. Galsworthy had a peep, and sank down towards bathos. ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... and say that you don't mind your own business. We hadn't yet got rid of Hsiang Ling with all her rubbish, and here we have a chatterbox like you thrown on us! But what is it that that mouth of yours keeps on jabbering? What about the bathos of Tu Kung-pu; and the unadorned refinement of Wei Su-chou? What also about Wen Pa-ch'a's elegant diction; and Li I-shan's abstruseness? A pack of silly fools that you are! Do you in any way ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... would have lingered for a few years more of weary life on foreign soil, and dropped into an unhonoured grave. To him English history is indebted for a heroic scene, and Ralegh for a glorious close to his splendid but checkered career. The mind shudders at the thought of the bathos into which a little remorse in that contemptible villain would ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... nothing of my mother, and not knowing what to do with me, he at last (for he was a kind man) installed me as under usher of the school; for, you see, my education had been good, and I was well qualified for the situation, as far as capability went: it was rather a bathos, though, to sink from a gentleman's son to an under usher; but I was not a philosopher at that time. I handed the toast to the master and mistress, the head ushers and parlour boarders, but was not allowed ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... immediately from the soul-and partook intensely of that soul's nature. Nor is it difficult to perceive the tendency of this abandon-to elevate immeasurably all the energies of mind-but, again, so to mingle the greatest possible fire, force, delicacy, and all good things, with the lowest possible bathos, baldness, and imbecility, as to render it not a matter of doubt that the average results of mind in such a school will be found inferior to those results in ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... hall, containing a brief chronicle of the progress of painting from Cimabue to—Carlo Dolce! There may be a still deeper descent; but that is bathos sufficient for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... in defense of coffee was the first to be illustrated; and for all its air of pretentious grandeur and occasional bathos, it was not a bad rhyming advertisement for the persecuted drink. It was printed for Paul Greenwood and sold "at the sign of the coffee mill and tobacco-roll in Cloath-fair near West-Smithfield, who selleth the best Arabian coffee powder and ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Capital—more than twenty pounds; quite a substantial little sum in excess of twenty pounds, even without the interest shortly to be added thereto. Finally, that very evening, had I not been addressed as 'Mister Freydon,' I, the erstwhile bare-footed 'inmate' of St. Peter's? There was nothing of bathos, nothing in the least ludicrous, to me ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... penetrated beneath the surface of clerical society—meaning thereby the sphere of divinities (mostly female) that doth hedge a curate of a parish—without being sensible of the eligibility of Penny Readings for a place in Mystic London? When the Silly Season is at its very bathos; when the monster gooseberries have gone to seed and the showers of frogs ceased to fall; after the matrimonial efforts of Margate or Scarborough, and before the more decided business of the Christmas Decorations, then there is deep mystery ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... bathos of a poor speech from Colonel Nolan, and then the division. Everybody has the numbers now—34 majority—34 in spite of Saunders and Bolton, of absent Wallace, and unpaired Mr. Wilson. We cheer, counter ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... afterwards told, on complaining of certain gales that were not altogether ambrosial, it was a melting day with him. "And what, Sir," he said, after a short pause, "might the cost be?" "Only four-pence,"—(O! how I felt the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of that four-pence!)—"only four-pence, Sir, each number, to be published on every eighth day."—"That comes to a deal of money at the end of a year. And how much, did you say, there was to be for ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... words; and those to which the doctrine leads are absolutely innumerable. That up and down, with verbs of motion, imply ascent and descent, as wisely and foolishly imply wisdom and folly, is not to be denied; but the grammatical bathos of coming "down [the ascent] from the hill" of science, should startle those whose faces are directed upward! Downward ascent is a movement worthy only of Kirkham, and his Irish rival, Joseph W. Wright. The brackets here ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... note, too, here, the substance of this future intervention which, to the Psalmist's quiet faith, is present:—'My soul from death,' and after that he says, 'My feet from falling,' which looks very like an anticlimax and bathos. But yet, just because to deliver the feet from falling is so much smaller a thing than delivering a life from death, it comes here to be a climax and something greater. The storm passes over the man. What then? After the storm ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that it was monstrous that the modern man, who was pre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictory beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic, and the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat. He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. It is indeed difficult to account for the clinging curse of ugliness ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... he thus keeps within the rules of credibility, the more he can surprize the reader the more he will engage his attention, and the more he will charm him. As a genius of the highest rank observes in his fifth chapter of the Bathos, "The great art of all poetry is to mix truth with fiction, in order to join the ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... right to sit among the elect, if you will; talk of his tendency to farce and caricature; call his humour low comedy, and his pathos bathos—although you shall say none of these things in my presence unchallenged; the fact remains that every child, in America at least, knows more of England—its almshouses, debtors' prisons, and law-courts, its villages and villagers, its beadles ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... we too clearly foresee the hopeless bathos of the end. Poor child, her real, deep sorrows, expressed in such worn-out ill-fitting phrases, are as little touching as the beauty of a London shopgirl under the ready-made cast-off adornments of ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... The bathos of the word made me laugh louder. Carlotta, aware that a joke was in the air, joined in my mirth, and her ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke |
