"Bathos" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... acknowledge, something grotesque in this endeavor to supply the warmth of the emotional imagination by the use of cold reason, and had Franklin possessed less wit and more humor he would never have fallen into such bathos. The little book still exists in which Franklin wrote out his creed and private liturgy. The creed expresses a belief in "one Supreme, most perfect Being, Author and Father of the gods themselves." Finding this God to be infinitely above man's comprehension, ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... carbine feelin' like a yard o' bad ice—an' then find the bloomin' winder above 'is bed been opened by some kind bloke an' 'is bed a blasted swamp... Yus—you 'ave four o' rum 'ot and you'll feel like the bloomin' 'Ouse o' Lords. Then 'ave a Livin'stone Rouser." "Oh, shut up," said Dam, cursing the Bathos of Things and returning to the beginning ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... groans from two poor fellows who had been hit were heard from the bottom of the launch. The cutter was by this time close to us, on the larboard side, commanded by Mr Julius Caesar Tip, the senior midshipman, vulgarly called in the ship Bathos, from his rather unromantic name. Here also a low moaning evinced the precision ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... and swallowed. Fortunately her sense of humour was limited; but, even so, she could not but be aware of a dangerous decline. Not only of bathos, but of vulgar bathos, from which gentility revolted, must she be the exponent, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... combination of both methods. Four of the five adventures are of the mystically gruesome kind, removed however from being commonplace ghost-stories by a certain dignity of conception. It is to be admitted that but for this dignity two at least would fall into some peril of bathos. Take the first, The Regeneration of Lord Ernie, in which a young tutor, bear-leading a spiritless scion of nobility through Europe, brings his bored charge to a strange mountain village where the inhabitants worship the forces of fire and wind. If you know Mr. BLACKWOOD'S ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... was deeper; and, somehow, in spite of prophecy, the affair had taken place without even a touch of bathos or grotesqueness. It had been said that England was too solid and too humorous. Yet there had been extraordinary scenes the day before. A great murmur of enthusiasm had rolled round the Abbey from end to end as the ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... of bathos brought about good-humor again, and soon our whole attention was absorbed in that magical music which to this hour electrifies me more than that of any other opera excepting "Norma." "Bad taste this," connoisseurs will say; but the perfection ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... all right," she assured him hastily, stung by a keen sense that her catastrophe had fallen headlong from impending tragedy to bathos. "Please bestow all your sympathy on Mr ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... a lyre; other figures were in white, with their mouths open like young birds preparing to be fed by older birds. They represented Harmony in all its forms. There were other attempts at the classical in the decoration of the room; but Lady Everard herself had reduced this idea to bathos by huge quantities of signed photographs in silver frames, by large waste-paper baskets, lined with blue satin and trimmed with pink rosettes, by fans which were pockets, stuffed cats which were paperweights, oranges which were pincushions, and other debris from those charitable ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... the unheavenly nature of invective, of something of a lurking conceit in the making an eclipse out of a blush, and in the positive bathos, and I fear almost indecent irrelevancy of the introduction of Beatrice at all on such an occasion, much more under the feeble aspect of one young lady blushing for another,—this scene altogether is a very grand one; and the violence itself of the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... her we drank a bottle of wine and had an age-long conversation, which would have been highly delightful if Fanny and I had not been faint with hunger. The ladies each narrated the story of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the prettiest combination of sentiment and financial bathos. Abramina, specially, endeared herself with every word. She was as simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that should have been brought up to the business of a money-changer. One touch was so resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over. When her "old man" wrote home for her from ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... time when a really well-informed revelation, uttered with charm and power, might not have revolutionized the world. "A well-informed revelation!" the reader may cry: "What terrible bathos!" Mr. Wells, moreover, speaks slightingly of revelation (pp. 19, 163) in a tone that seems to imply that "modern religion" would have nothing to do with it even if it could. But the demand for a revelation is eminently ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... appropriate terms of various arts and sciences, introduced, which habit alone can render intelligible. There is scarcely a report read in the Convention that does not exhibit every possible example of the Bathos, together with more conceits than are to be found in a writer of the sixteenth century; and I doubt whether any of their projects of legislation or finance would be understood by Montesquieu ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... scream. He returned with the news that Mrs. Murphy's little boy, Mike, was lost. Following the messenger, out bounced Mrs. Murphy—two hundred pounds in tears and hysterics, clutching the air and howling to the sky for the loss of thirty pounds of freckles and mischief. Bathos, truly; but Mr. Toomey sat down at the side of Miss Purdy, millinery, and their hands came together in sympathy. The two old maids, Misses Walsh, who complained every day about the noise in the halls, inquired immediately if anybody ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... Wilson, and yet fully three-fourths of the newly-enfranchised women voters voted against him. He is, despite his talents for deception, a poor popular psychologist, and so he made an inept effort to fetch the girls by tear-squeezing: every connoisseur will remember his bathos about breaking the heart of the world. Well, very few women believe in broken hearts, and the cause is not far to seek: practically every woman above the age of twenty-five has a broken heart. That is ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... the small hours. One excited orator, in closing a 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 rare as ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... fairy tales, and miscalled the Arabian Nights, is unique as a study of anthropology. It is a marvellous picture of Oriental life; its shiftings are those of the kaleidoscope. Its alternation of pathos and bathos—of the boldest poetry (the diction of Job) with the baldest prose (the Egyptian of to-day) and finally, its contrast of the highest and purest morality with the orgies of Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter, take away the reader's breath. I determined ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... chiefs, then these pleasant fancies may be compared with that ancient theory mentioned by Plutarch, that hell is in the air and elysium in the moon, and again with the mediaeval conception of the moon as the seat of hell, a thought elaborated in profoundest bathos by ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... away. When they were after larks a revolving mirror, flashing in the sun, was considered very attractive; I suppose the birds approached from motives of curiosity.[3] Many thousands were caught for the London and Brighton markets for lark pies and puddings, a wicked bathos, ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... at which both words and music aimed, it is amazing that they did not fall into utter wreck and nauseating bathos. That they have proved so effective shows the sure-footedness of genius. It is all good, especially the ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... they grew so affected by the wine they had drank, that they were ready to follow a leader into any absurdity. Chapelle was, when tipsy, always melancholy, and on this occasion he addressed his companions in a strain of bathos which, had they been free from the effects of wine, would only have excited their laughter. But now they were in the same condition as himself. Chapelle finally wound up by proposing that they all proceed to a neighboring river, and end life together by plunging into it. He expiated upon the ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... a large 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 any ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... plenum erat,) renovaret: ut hinc tandem cognoscerent Judi, pactum Abrahamiticum etiam post latam legem ritualem adhuc viguisse, adeoque pro foedere habendum fuisse, cui unice salus ipsorum inniteretur. (Conf. Gal. iii. 17.) ... Quis hic cum Apostolo non exclamet, bathos ploutou kai sophias kai gnses Theou! (Rom. xi. 33.) Sed hc obiter, etsi haudquaquam frustra. Pergo."—From Bp. Bull's Harmonia Apostolica, cap. xi., sect. 3.—Works, vol. iii. ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... collected to witness the feat; the day was unusually cold, and Sam was intoxicated. The river was low, and the falls near him on either side were bare. Sam threw himself off, and the waters (to quote the bathos of a New York newspaper) "received him in their cold embrace. The tide bubbled as the life left the body, and then the stillness of death, indeed, sat upon the bosom of the waters." His body was found past the spring at the mouth of the river, seven miles below ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... The bathos of the word made me laugh louder. Carlotta, aware that a joke was in the air, joined in my mirth, and her laughter ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... the comradeship of boys, he retains his sense of fun, fights on in good humor, detects and saves himself on the verge of pious caricature and solemn bathos; knows how to meet important committees on microscopic reforms as well as self-appointed theological inquisitors and all the insistent cranks that waylay a busy pastor. Life cannot grow stale; and by letting the boys ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... When his brilliant conceits are exhausted, he supplies their place with metaphysical quibbles, forced antitheses, bad puns, and execrable charades. In his fifth sonnet he may, I think, be said to have sounded the lowest chasm of the Bathos. Upon the whole, that piece may be safely pronounced to be the worst attempt at poetry, and the worst attempt ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... but to be arrested, or rather picked up, scraped up, gathered up, in such condition, was really too silly. And Lupin, who had so often scoffed at others, felt all the ridicule that was falling to his share in this ending of the Dugrival business, all the bathos of allowing himself to be caught in the widow's infernal trap and finally of being "served up" to the police like a dish of game, roasted to ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... "of all measures," dear Tom,—so here goes! Here goes, for a swim on the stream of old Time, On those buoyant supporters, the bladders of rhyme. If our weight breaks them down, and we sink in the flood, We are smothered, at least, in respectable mud, Where the divers of Bathos lie drowned in a heap, And Southey's last Pan has pillowed his sleep; That Felo de se who, half drunk with his Malmsey, Walked out of his depth and was lost in a calm sea, 10 Singing "Glory to God" in a spick and span stanza, The like (since Tom Sternhold ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... the old Augustan Days Of formal Courtesies and formal Phrase; That like along the finish'd Line to feel The Ruffle's Flutter and the Flash of Steel; That like my Couplet as compact as clear; That like my Satire sparkling tho' severe, Unmix'd with Bathos and unmarr'd by Trope, I fling my Cap for ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... his face black with fury. "If every word you say were true, yet with all the more reason would I drag you in my marriage procession, and force you to avow yourself my wife. Never have I been balked of woman; and you, too, with all your tragic bathos, shall learn that, if you won't have me for a slave, I'll bow your ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... It was the sentimental act of a virtuoso in the art of pleasing women—who are so easily pleased. At the moment he had achieved forgetfulness of boudoir trickery and so retained almost all his usual assumption of dignity. Even Joan, with her quick eye for the ridiculous, failed to detect the bathos of his attitude, and merely thought that he was trying to be funny and ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... professional anti-Prohibition spouter, and have been jumped up here without preparation; but it occurs to me that it requires no careful rehearsal of set orations before an amorous looking glass, no studied intermingling of pathos, bathos and blue fire to demolish the Prohibition fallacy. Liberty is ever won by volunteers; the shackles of political and religious slavery are forged by the hands of hirelings. Prohibition cannot withstand the light of logic, the lessons of experience, ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... their Abyssinian wars, and are fond of "Jihading" with the Gallas, over whom they boast many a victory. I have seen a letter addressed by the late Amir to the Hajj Sharmarkay, in which he boasts of having slain a thousand infidels, and, by way of bathos, begs for a few pounds of English gunpowder. The Harari hold foreigners in especial hate and contempt, and divide them into two orders, Arabs and Somal. [26] The latter, though nearly one third of the population, or 2500 souls, are, to use their ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... formal Phrase; That like along the finish'd Line to feel The Ruffle's Flutter and the Flash of Steel; That like my Couplet as Compact as Clear; That like my Satire sparkling tho' severe, Unmix'd with Bathos and unmarr'd by trope, I fling my Cap ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 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 any myself; I taught Latin and Greek, ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... man full in the face, there was a bathos in her zeal, and she stopped, open-mouthed, and ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... chance, he was safe to slide in some of his vulgar bathos after any heroic sentiment or personal opinion I may have uttered. This, naturally, would rouse my temper, never very pacific; and made me so cross, that I was often on the verge of quarrelling with ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... drunk and enjoyed the society of his beloved" (Jowett). See "Symp." the finale; or if, after Weiske and Cobet, {euthumias}, transl. "to the general hilarity of myself and the whole company" (cf. "Cyrop." I. iii. 12, IV. v. 7), but this is surely a bathos rhetorically. ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... heavy head; and one feather is not sufficient to enable my genius to take wing. If the public knew what dull work it is to write a novel, they would not be surprised at finding them dull reading. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Barnstaple, I am at the very bathos ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... "Oh, bathos!" said Lady Bath, while the 'prentices shouted applause. "Is this hedge-bantling to be fathered on you, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... source. Some pretend, indeed, to find in humanity what they deny to exist as Deity, but I should be incapable of the illogical exchange. It is to deny that the seed sprang from a root; it is to replace a grand and illimitable theism by a finite and vainglorious bathos. Of all the creeds that have debased mankind, the new creed that would centre itself in man seems to me the poorest and the most baseless of all. If humanity be but a vibrion, a conglomeration of gases, a mere mould ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... almost brutally, pathetic in the ugly squalor of a man's tears. Sandy Graff crying, and now and then wiping his eyes with the damp and dirty sheet, was almost a more ugly sight than he had been in the maudlin bathos of his former drunkenness. ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... the coarsest of terms for what the French nuns prettily termed un sonnet; I find ung sonnet also in Nov. ii. of the Cent nouvelles Nouvelles. Captain Lockett (p. 32) quotes Strepsiades in The Clouds {Greek} "because he cannot express the bathos of the original (in the Tale of Ja'afar and the old Badawi) without descending to the oracular language of Giacoma Rodogina, the engastrymythian prophetess." But Sterne was by no means so squeamish. The literature of this subject is extensive, beginning ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... they will strive for the best and help it to prevail. If the latter, they will be brought back to the state as the means of making right reason effective, and of extending to all not simply the leave to be what they want to be, of following what Arnold calls their "natural taste of the bathos," but the opportunity ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... for rhythm Lewis may have had, his verse is for the most part execrable; and his jaunty, jiggling anapaests and pragmatic manner are ludicrously out of keeping with the horrors of his tale, increasing the air of bathos which ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Philosopher It was as if she had been eyeing a golden door shut fast My engagement to Mr. Pericles is that I am not to write Man who beats his wife my first question is, 'Do he take his tea?' Oh! beastly bathos On a wild April morning Once my love? said he. Not now?—does it mean, not now? So it is when you play at Life! When you will not go straight To know that you are in England, breathing the same air with me We are, in short, a civilized people We have now looked ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... with those ridiculous Englishwomen! Those foolish, flippant girls! One had quoted poetry to him at dinner, the very scrap his lady had spoken a line of—this new poet's, who was taking the world of London by storm that year: "Loved with a love beyond all words or sense!" And it had sounded like bathos or sacrilege. What did these dolls know of love, or life? Chattering parrots to weary a man's brain! Yes, the Greeks were right, it would be better to keep them spinning flax, ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... for the world. It is the sense-of-humor that makes the master of comedy, that helps him to see things in due proportion and perspective, that keeps him from exaggeration and emphasis, from sentimentality and melodrama and bathos. It is the sense-of-humor that prevents our making fools of ourselves; it is humor itself that softens our laughter at those who make themselves ridiculous. In his serious stories Daudet employs this negative humor chiefly, as though he had in ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... an interruption so unexpected and yet so natural that the whole scene seemed at once to dissolve into bathos. The door was thrown open, and ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to preach about 'faith.' I daresay some of you have never tried to apprehend what it means. And I daresay there are a great many of you to whom the utterance of the word suggests that I am plunging into the bathos and commonplaces of the pulpit. Perhaps, if you would try to understand it, you would find it was a bigger thing than you fancied. What is faith? I will give you another expression that has not so many theological accretions sticking to it, and which means precisely the same thing—trust. And ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... been watching your career with interest," wrote the great man, "and we are now casting about for some one to take charge of a humorous department to be called 'Bathos and Pathos,' which we shall, in the near future, add to the magazine. May we see more of your work, as well as some of Mrs. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... comparison of St. Augustine's where he detects a resemblance between yon spectra of purple and green and the plumage of a dove. What has a dove to do with such magnificence and grandeur? It was an anti-climax, a bathos, of which St. Augustine is seldom guilty. 'And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... moving, while two red lines slowly defined themselves across his face. The theatrical quality of the scene and the turgid rhetorical bathos of the boy's speeches attested his youth and the unformed violence of his emotions. Did they also indicate a rehearsal, or had the boy merely been goaded to vague action by implicit belief in a woman's vagaries? Orde did not know, but the incident brought ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... thing to do is to get away as quickly as possible. It would be pure bathos to suggest any of your wife's labour-saving devices, or introduce the subject of that circular bath-room with a circular bath hanging by chains from the ceiling and a spirit-stove under it—your pet invention. Recall a pressing engagement, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... 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 chocolate in cake or roll, after the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... and he says there are too many virgins! Did you ever hear the like? Then, after Napoleon's campaigns, the lines are full of sonorous brass and flaming cannon-balls, rolling along from page to page. Modeste tells me that all that bathos is put in by the translator, and that I ought to read the book in English. But I certainly sha'n't learn English to read Lord Byron when I didn't learn it to teach Exupere. I much prefer the novels of Ducray-Dumenil to all these English romances. I'm too good ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... expense, 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 ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the very sense of worship is a mere coward instinct—a relic of barbarism which is being gradually eradicated from our natures by the progress of civilization. The world knows by this time that creation is an empty jest; we are all beginning to understand its bathos! And if we must grant that there is some mischievous supreme Farceur who, safely shrouded in invisibility, continues to perpetrate so poor and purposeless a joke for his own amusement and our torture, we need not, for that matter, admire his wit or flatter his ingenuity! ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Polyxene, a sort of half-way house between these shorter novels and the ever-enlarged "Heroics," is a very fat duodecimo of 1100 pages. The heroine has two lovers—one with the singular name of Cloryman,—but love does not run smooth with either, and she ends by taking the (pagan) veil. The bathos of the thought and style may be judged from the heroine's affecting mention of an entertainment as "the last ballet ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the difference between those stars which one sees in consequence of a blow on the forehead and those he sees by turning his gaze to the nightly sky. To every competent thinker, the bare appreciation of such a passage as that which closes Chateaubriand's chapter on the Last Judgment, with the huge bathos of its incongruous mixture of sublime and absurd, is its sufficient refutation: "The globe trembles on its axis; the moon is covered with a bloody veil; the threatening stars hang half detached from the vault of heaven, and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... "Ere Garrick died," etc. "By the by, one of my corrections in the fair copy sent yesterday has dived into the bathos some sixty fathom— ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... of George Strangwidge' many times lapses into bathos, but as in a way it answers the other ballad, I will quote a ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... ground; or the books which I carry with me may be seized and sequestrated, in spite of all the plans which I have devised for their safety. The great failing of Protestants, in general, is a tendency to spring suddenly to the pinnacle of exultation, and as suddenly to fall to the lowest bathos of dejection, forgetting that the brightest day as well as the most gloomy night must necessarily have a termination. How far more wise are the members of that object of my undying detestation, the Church of Rome; from ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... 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
... bathos that unfortunately goes too far. Still, I am sure, English readers love a ghost ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... act, such as Mark was contemplating, is when successful, an interruption brings with it an inevitable bathos; when he first felt that grasp on his arm, he thought himself in the power of a German policeman, and, prepared as he was a moment before to face a sudden death, he quailed before the prospect of some degrading ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... him in admiration—real admiration—because the gross bathos he had just uttered betrayed a weakness—vanity. Now I began to understand him; vanity must also lead him to undervalue men. True, with the faintest approach to eloquence he could no doubt hold the "Clubs" of Belleville spellbound; with self-effacing ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... little hours, but by two o'clock there was a great sameness about it, and I grew desperately sleepy. I was not going to give it up, however, so I shocked myself into a torpid animation with a cold bath, it being mid-winter, and betwixt bath and bathos, managed to keep agoing till daylight. Once since then I was very happy, and could not keep my eyes shut. Those are the only two times I ever sat up all night, and, on the whole, I think I will go to bed; wherefore, O people on the earth, marking eagerly the moon's eclipse, and ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... of her speech a bathos? Perhaps not; for as she spoke the last word, she drew from her bosom, where it hung round her neck by a chain, a broken talisman, exactly similar to the one which she coveted so fiercely, and looked at it long and lovingly—kissed it—wept over it—spoke to it—fondled ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... 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
... "traded abroad, and was took into Turkey as a slave," and there gained the affections of his master's daughter, after the most approved old-ballad fashion; though, alas! it was not to her love that he owed his liberty, but (dreadful bathos!) to his skill in "cooking fowls, &c. &c. in the English taste;" which, on a certain occasion, when some English merchants came to dine with his master, "so pleased the company, that they offered to redeem him, which was accepted; and when freed ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... the theatre to behold the other. The dialogue, usually a weak point with this writer, is here for better managed than usual, having her customary piquancy, with less of disfigurement from flippancy and bad puns. The plot shows none of those alarming pieces of incongruity and bathos which have marred some of her stories. And one may fancy that it is not far to seek for the originals of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the Circe up to date, and I am to be beguiled. How ought I to answer you? I do remember the Ambassador's, and I do remember driving down the Bois in your victoria, and holding—I believe I am right—your hand. You have no right to disturb those charming memories by attempting to turn them into bathos." ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Swift and Mr. Pope thought it proper, for reasons specified in the preface to their 'Miscellanies,' to publish such little pieces of theirs as had occasionally got abroad, there was added to them the 'Treatise of the Bathos, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry.' It happened that in one chapter of this piece the several species of bad poets were ranged in classes, to which were prefixed almost all the letters of the alphabet (the greatest part ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... of what some of us have too much of- -criticism. His work met with too little resistance to call forth his powers. Too often his pathos sinks to bathos, and this not from want of skill, but from want of care. It is difficult to believe that the popular writer who allowed his sentimentality—or rather the public's sentimentality—to run away with him in ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... has Cervantes of "such weak witness of his name;" or what could a monument do in his case except testify to the self-glorification of those who had put it up? Si monumentum quoeris, circumspice. The nearest bookseller's shop will show what bathos there would be in a monument to the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... After this it is bathos to speak of the Stationers' Company; but we must do so. For, at the end of the Areopagitica there is a distinct insinuation by Milton that the Ordinance he was asking the Parliament to repeal was less the invention of Parliament ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... still, the blood hot in her cheeks; no one heard her, the tinker's wife, who alone was near, having just wished Heaven to send a judgment on her husband, was busy putting out his smoking smallclothes. It is a way that women and wives have, and they never see the bathos of it. ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... next week over the ridiculous bathos of those twenty loud-sounding ballads, little guessed the misery and disgust they had ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... surviver. He himself does not perish, for he himself has never excited our sympathies [362]. He is punished through his son and wife—they dead, our interest ceases in him, and to add his death to theirs and to that of Antigone would be bathos. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... say, the essentials of Christianity are a new creature, faith, obedience—and circumcision? That is, indeed, sewing old cloth on a new garment, and huddling together in grotesque chaos things which are utterly diverse. It is as absurd bathos as to say the essentials of a judge are integrity, learning, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... took to her heels, and left poor Hypocon. Her martial gallant swore that truth was a libel, That marriage was thraldom, elopement no sin; Quoth she, I remember the words of my Bible - My spouse is a Stranger, and I'll take him in. With my sentimentalibus lachrymae roar 'em, And pathos and bathos delightful to see; And chop and change ribs, a-la-mode Germanorum, And high diddle ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... fields and sweet-scenting pastures, where the fences are fair and clean and the ditches broad and deep, where there is room to gallop and room to jump, and where, as he sails along on a well-bred horse or reclines perchance in a muddy ditch (Professor Raleigh! what a watery bathos!), he may often say to himself, "It is good for me to be here!" For when the hounds cross this country there are always "wigs on the green" in abundance; and in spite of barbed wire we may still ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... don't get QUITE the full sensation of gambling. You do lose just a little something of the proper tremors before a coup, the proper throes during a coup, the proper thrill of joy or anguish after a coup. You're bound to, you know," he added, purposely making this bathos when he saw me smiling at the heights to which ...
— James Pethel • Max Beerbohm
... praiseworthy patience, though, as I was 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 the money?"—"Thirty-two ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... his love of nature any transcendental strain; no mawkish sentimentality, and consequently in its expression no bathos. Everywhere in his poetry nature comes in, at times in artistically selected detail, at times again with a deft suggestive touch that is telling and effective, yet always in harmony with the feeling of the poem, and always subordinate ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... commercialism in which the New England conscience was encysted. Robert H. Newell, mirth-maker and mystic, satirized military ignorance and pinchbeck bluster to an immortality of contempt. Bret Harte in verse and story touched the parallels of tragedy and of comedy, of pathos, of bathos, and of humor, which love of life and lust of gold opened up amid the unapprehended grandeurs and the coveted treasures of primeval nature. Charles F. Browne made "Artemus Ward" as well known as Abraham Lincoln in the time the two divided the attention ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... and 'Boats,' and 'Waggons!' Oh! ye shades Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this? That trash of such sort not alone evades Contempt, but from the bathos' vast abyss Floats scumlike uppermost, and these Jack Cades Of sense and song above your graves may hiss— The 'little boatman' and his 'Peter Bell' Can sneer at him ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... "I never dance to a finish. It's too much like the clown's turn after the transformation scene. It is bathos on the top of the superb. At least it would be in this case. Who in wonder taught you to dance ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... Nangle's Index shows, was less favorable. "There is great variety in the numbers of this ode; but, in our opinion, they are not combined in such a manner as to produce a natural or agreeable harmony. There is sometimes, too, a falling off, not far removed from the Bathos. Thus, when the Author says his ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... family, thereby becoming entitled to certain privileges,—and thereby also becoming subject to certain domestic drawbacks. In Mrs Dale's little household there had been no rising to grandeur; but then, also, there had never been any bathos of dirt. Of this also Crosbie thought as he sat with his tea in ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... competitors, instead of waiting for the 'pistol' (A. E. G. Bennett with home-made 'blanks') started at the report of our 6-inch gun in the next orchard, which occurred a fraction of a second earlier. The evening was saved from bathos by the news that the Division was to be relieved. Life operates by contrast, and though the war was going on a few miles to the eastward I believe as much pleasure was experienced that day in the small orchard behind Headquarters at La Pierriere as in any elaborate peace ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... higher, till at length the chief, Pagadi, swathed in war-garments of splendid furs, preceded by runners and accompanied by picked warriors, creeps slowly up. He is old and tottering, and of an unwieldy bulk. Two attendants support him, whilst a third bears his shield, and a fourth (oh bathos!) a cane-bottomed chair. One moment the old man stands and surveys his warriors and listens to the familiar war-cry. As he stands, his face is lit with the light of battle, the light of remembered days. The tottering ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... sounds almost like a bathos; we should have called these, not fundamental principles, but obvious considerations, which hardly required ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... but let him not presume To jumble fun and opera, grave and comic, In one vile mess—then call the mixture Shakspeare. No more of him: my hopes are all evanish'd, For "Hexham's battle," slew him: "The Iron Chest" Sunk him to Shadwell's bathos; and "John Bull" Drove off in wild affright the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... 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
... welter of words there stood forth one sentence to tempt the imagination: "She met death as a tryst." For that brief flash the reporter had been lifted out of his bathos and tawdriness into a clearer element. One could well believe that she had "met death as a tryst." For if ever I have beheld unfaltering hope and unflagging courage glorified and spiritualized into unearthly beauty, it was there in that ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Pamphilus, two of the name Pan, the god "Pankration" (the) Pantacles, unknown "Parsley and the rue" Pathos and bathos Patrocles, a rich miser Pauson, ruined —poverty of Peace, mother of Plutus Peacock and hoopoe Pebble, the, how held Pelargicon, the Pellen, a town Peplus, the Perfumes, on dead bodies Perseus, legend of Persian (the), cloak Phanae, land ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... 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 ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... the speech approached dangerously near to bathos. Douglas pictured himself standing beside the deathbed of Clay and pledging his life to the advocacy of the great principle expressed in the compromise measures of 1850, and later in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Strangely enough he had given the same ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... breakfast was to include only a few of our more intimate acquaintances, the proceedings were by no means to terminate tamely. The romance of these remarkable espousals was not to find its conclusion in bathos. No; the bloom and aroma of the interesting event were to be enjoyed in the evening, when a grand supper and ball, given by me, the happy and much-to-be-envied bridegroom, was to take place in the hotel which I had made my residence for so long. No expense was spared for this, ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... to utter a single delightfully modulated strain. He often brings his tiresome extravaganzas to a magnificent climax of melody, and just as often concludes an inimitable chant with a most contemptible bathos. But the notes of the Robin are all melodious, all delightful,—loud without vociferation, mellow without monotony, fervent without ecstasy, and combining more of mellowness of tone, plaintiveness, cheerfulness, and propriety of execution, than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... mechanical pedantries, as we think now, to whom grammar is no longer, as of old, "a new invented game." Moreover, he has to give examples of the faults opposed to sublimity, he has to dive into and search the bathos, to dally over examples of the bombastic, the over-wrought, the puerile. These faults are not the sins of "minds generous and aspiring," and we have them with us always. The additions to Boileau's preface (Paris, ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... the pipe into his plates. In the tail-piece to his works, which he prepared a few months before his death, and which he called The Bathos, or Manner of Sinking in Sublime Paintings, the end of everything is represented. Time himself, supported against a broken column, is expiring, his scythe falling from his grasp and a long clay pipe ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... phenomena disappear in strife and opposition. The result is a conflict, a growth and decay, a seeming existence. The original cause of this lies in the fact that a substratum, viz., matter, lies at the basis of bodies. Matter is the foundation of each ([Greek: to bathos hekastou he hule]); it is the obscure, the indefinite, that which is without qualities, the [Greek: me on]. As devoid of form and idea it is the evil, as capable ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... in fair, square prose, with sentences solidly built, and no help from bastard rhythms. Moreover, there is a progression—I cannot call it a progress—in his work towards a more and more strictly prosaic level, until at last he sinks into the bathos of the prosy. Emerson mentions having once remarked to Thoreau: "Who would not like to write something which all can read, like 'Robinson Crusoe'? and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... enthusiasm to the modern painters; too much is certainly not the vice of the present age. The Italians seem to have been continually declining, in this respect, from the time of Michael Angelo to that of Carlo Maratti, and from thence to the very bathos of insipidity to which they are now sunk; so that there is no need of remarking, that, where I mentioned the Italian painters in opposition to the Dutch, I mean not the moderns, but the heads of the old Roman and Bolognian schools; nor did I mean to include in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... are passages in "Ernani," "Rigoletto," "Traviata," "Trovatore," and "Aida," so strong and dignified, that it provokes a wonder that one with such capacity for greatness should often descend into such bathos. ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... Laura, like Gale's Pyramus and Thisbe, falls into bathos near the end when Amos, in an extended comparison, likens Laura's refusal to cure his love wound to an avaricious doctor's refusal to set a poor man's leg. Page's failure as a poet is not a result of temporary lapses, as here, but of his inability to invent significant conflict. ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... 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 History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... the bathos. 'It is no laughing matter, she said; 'it is so uncivil, when he is so kind. I can't imagine ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... published entire, and is usually included in complete editions of Coleridge's poetical works. It is an extremely immature production, abounding in such coquettings (if nothing more serious) with bathos as ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... to end such a story without bathos? I think it is not possible, yet I must end it. An old French priest said one day at Lourdes, to one of those with whom I travelled, that he feared that in these times the pilgrims did not pray so much as they once did, and that this was a ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... chivalry and arrived at metaphysics; every knight he held must be a logician, and ultimate bravery is courage of the mind. One thinks of his coming to this conclusion with knit brows and balancing intentness above whole gulfs of bathos—very much as he had once walked the ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... at best but a mixture of a little good with much evil and a little pleasure with much pain; the beautiful is linked with the revolting, the trivial with the solemn, bathos with pathos, the commonplace with ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... be that Lorison, in spite of the unconvincing bathos of this appeal, showed a sympathetic face, for one of the officers left the woman's side, and went over ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... bathos—whether for the cause, or against it—caught its quick rebuke, at the hands of some glib funmaker. Once an enthusiastic admirer of the hero of Charleston indited a glowing ode, of ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... comparison with what the War has revealed. Anyone might easily hazard the conjecture that the murderers of Belgium had never entertained too fastidious a respect for womanhood; and after the destruction of Louvain and Ypres it is mere bathos to insist that the perpetrators of these outrages against art had previously cherished a Philistine affection for antimacassars and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... the kaleidoscopic shiftings of the marvellous picture with many a "rich truth in a tale's presence", pointed by a rough dry humour which compares well with "wut; "the alternations of strength and weakness, of pathos and bathos, of the boldest poetry (the diction of Job) and the baldest prose (the Egyptian of today); the contact of religion and morality with the orgies of African Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter—at times taking away ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... is plausible; but I do not find it adequate. The first objection is that the same smell of bathos haunts the soul in the case of all deliberate and elaborate visits to "beauty spots," even by persons of the most elegant position or the most protected privacy. Specially visiting the Coliseum by moonlight always struck me as being as vulgar as visiting it by limelight. One millionaire ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... voice! I have my voice! Emilia had cried it out to herself My engagement to Mr. Pericles is that I am not to write No nose to the hero, no moral to the tale Nor can a protest against coarseness be sweepingly interpreted Oh! beastly bathos On a wild April morning Once my love? said he. Not now?—does it mean, not now? One of those men whose characters are read off at a glance Our partner is our master Passion does not inspire dark appetite—Dainty innocence ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... seen that Greek words are usually treated as Latin. Thus 'crisis' lengthens the penultima under the 'apex' rule, while 'critical' has it short under the general rule of polysyllables. Other examples of lengthening are 'bathos', 'pathos', while the long quantity is of course kept in 'colon' and 'crasis'. For the 'alias' rule we may quote '[a]theist', 'cryptog[a]mia', 'h[o]meopathy', 'heterog[e]neous', 'pandem[o]nium', while the normal shortenings ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... bits, parts, machine-sections, then 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
... 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 one (ceteris ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... comforted by this conclusion, and I tried to persuade myself that it indicated the only satisfactory termination to the brief drama of the night. I attempted to see the affair as a slightly ridiculous episode that had occupied exactly twelve hours and ended with an inevitable bathos. I pictured the return of a disgraced and penitent Brenda, and the temporary re-employment, as an antidote to gossip, of the defeated Banks. They would be parted, of course. She might be taken abroad, or to Scotland, and by the time she returned, he ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... pshawed. "Very good," I thought; "you may fume and fidget as you please: but this is the best plan to pursue with you, I am certain. I like you more than I can say; but I'll not sink into a bathos of sentiment: and with this needle of repartee I'll keep you from the edge of the gulf too; and, moreover, maintain by its pungent aid that distance between you and myself most conducive ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... the confusion and final flunk; the confidence with which some one would spring to his feet, as if full to the muzzle, and the entire inconsequence and futility of his words, ending in apparent abject paralysis of speech. We dealt liberally in jeers at any exhibition of bathos or fustian; in laughter and applause at any touch of eloquence or wit. What better training was there than this? I have always had a fond lingering desire to be an orator, but when before an audience found myself as cold as a clod. Toward essay writing and reading our attitude was somewhat ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... learned in the divine lore to separate the gold from the dross. What was good and productive he was ready to recognize and assimilate; leaving the opium pomps and splendors of the discourse, and all the Oriental imagery with which the speaker decorated his bathos, to those who could find profit therein. It is still more curious and sorrowful to see this great Coleridge, endowed with such high gifts, of so various learning, and possessing so marvellous and plastic a power over all the forms of language, forsaking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... an enormous prize. But with his friend's discovery of the Tatler, Addison's calling was found, and the most delightful talker in the world began to speak. He does not go very deep: let gentlemen of a profound genius, critics accustomed to the plunge of the bathos, console themselves by thinking that he couldn't go very deep. There are no traces of suffering in his writing. He was so good, so honest, so healthy, so cheerfully selfish, if I must use the word. There is no deep sentiment. ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... by side, serious and merry by turns, conversing interchangeably, and walking down, hand in hand, to posterity." Of the various fragments contributed by Pope, there is only one which need be mentioned here—the treatise on Bathos in the third volume, in which he was helped by Arbuthnot. He told Swift privately that he had "entirely methodized and in a manner written it all," though, he afterwards chose to denounce the very same statement ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... this church. Lovers of art who mistrust this play of the audacious fancy—aiming at sublimity in supersensual regions, sometimes attaining to it by stupendous effort or authentic revelation, not seldom sinking to the verge of bathos, and demanding the assistance of interpretative sympathy in the spectator—such men will not take the point of view required of them by Tintoretto in his boldest flights, in the Worship of the Golden Calf and in the Destruction of the World by Water. It is for them ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... of history. Yet will the labor not be wholly barren. It will bring him in contact with all the famous of letters and poetry; he will fight over again numberless quarrels of authors; he will soar in boundless Pindaric flights, or sink, sooth to say, in unfathomed deeps of bathos. With one moral he will be profoundly impressed: Of all the more splendid results of genius which adorn our language and literature,—for the literature of the English language is ours,—not one owes its existence to the laurel; not one can be directly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... is pathos in this, there is bathos in his apostrophe to the millipede, beginning "Poor sowbug!" and eulogizing the healing virtues of that odious little beast; of which he tells us to take "half a pound, putt 'em alive into a quart or two of wine," with saffron and other ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... He had a way of regarding the triumph of the Republic as a question of personal interest, as an era of happy idleness and endless junketing, which chilled his nephew's purely moral aspirations. However, he perceived that he was on the wrong track, and plunged into strange bathos, a string of empty but high-sounding words, which Silvere accepted as a satisfactory proof of his civism. Before long the uncle and the nephew saw each other two or three times a week. During their long discussions, in which the fate of the country was flatly ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... was, likewise, very far from believing, that the letters annexed to each species of bad poets in the Bathos were, as he was directed to assert, "set down at random;" for when he was charged by one of his friends with putting his name to such an improbability, he had no other answer to make than that "he did ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... world, shut up within the circuit of a little island of the Mediterranean, and dwindled to the condition of an humble and degraded pensioner on the bounty of those he has most injured. How miserably, how meanly, has he closed his inflated career! What a sample of the bathos will his history present! He should have perished on the swords of his enemies, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... BATHOS and pathos are closely allied in sound as well as in sense. Mr. FECHTER evidently regards them as completely identical; and in his acting, as in his pronunciation, uniformly prefers the former to the latter. He has recently ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various |
