"Bombastical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fountain of sound sense," and again, "the use of the true comedy is to awaken thoughtful laughter." "Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... as I run. You should hear ME. Look at that broad-faced, flat-headed sundial away down there. It has not a word to say. I am going to strike now. One—two—three! There—how musical!' But when this bombastic speech was ended, the sun broke forth, and the Dial only smiled to show that the boasting clock had not told the truth by some hours. The thirteenth chapter of John is the Lord's sundial on feet-washing. Probably, after all, the best way to discuss ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... enter into ephemeral alliances, in order to create majorities that can but last a day. Wrangling, calling each other reactionaries, authoritarians, and rascals, incapable of coming to an understanding on any serious measure, dragged into discussions about trifles, producing nothing better than bombastic proclamations; all giving themselves an awful importance while the real strength of the ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... there was about as much friendship as there exists usually between a dog and a cat. Similarly between the former and the Naval cruisers there was considerable jealousy, and every display of that pompous, bombastic exhibition of character which was such a feature of the life of the eighteenth century, and the first years ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... the insolence with which their enemy had then triumphed over them. They now triumphed in their turn. The Dutch struck medals. The Spaniards sang Te Deums. Many poems, serious and sportive, appeared, of which one only has lived. Prior burlesqued, with admirable spirit and pleasantry, the bombastic verses in which Boileau had celebrated the first taking of Namur. The two odes, printed side by side, were read with delight in London; and the critics at Will's pronounced that, in wit as in arms, England had ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... SIMPLE ENGLISH WORDS and avoid what is called "fine writing." Young writers and newspaper writers are greatly given to this offense of fine or bombastic ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... Lincoln's wit suddenly turned the tables on an abusive opponent. One of the Democratic orators was Colonel Dick Taylor, a dapper, but bombastic little man, who rode in his carriage, and dressed richly. But, politically, he boasted of belonging to the Democrats, "the bone and sinew, the hard-fisted yeomanry of the land," and sneered at those "rag barons," those Whig ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... against Servia as mere child's play; the Austrians with their German military organization; the Austrians, who constitute one-sixth of the entire European military power, started against Servia with the same logic, the same haughtiness, the same bombastic prediction of the result of the unequal war with which the ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... ("Modern Doubt and Christian Belief," Edinburgh: Clark 1874) can even now write:—"So then the 'full age' to which humanity is at present supposed to have attained, consists in man's doing good purely for goodness sake! Who sees not the hollowness of this bombastic talk. That man has yet to be born whose practice will be regulated by this insipid theory (dieser grauen theorie). What is the idea of goodness per se? * * * The abstract idea of goodness is not an effectual ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... on behalf of my poem. We thereupon went through it together. Its well-constructed and well-rhymed verses, written in stanzas of eight lines, determined him to revise the whole of it carefully. Much of its imagery was bombastic, and far beyond the conception of a boy of my age. I recollect that in one part I had drawn extensively from the monologue in Addison's Cato, spoken by Cato just before his suicide. I had met with this passage in an English grammar, and it had made a deep impression upon ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... wits to climb, swim, boat, skate, run, hide, go it blind, pick a lock, take the long way, round, when it's the short way across, run away at the right time, or fight when it's wise—all in one afternoon." Rolf set out for the north carrying a bombastic (meant to be reassuring) message from Hampton that he would annihilate any enemy who dared to desecrate the ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... in 1676, formed one of the rare diversions in the provinces, and were apparently largely attended by "sentimentalists," as one book-dealer called book-buyers. The business of book-auctioneering was called, in the bombastic language of the times, "the sublimest Auxiliary which Science Commerce and Arts either has or perhaps ever will possess," while the bookseller was called "Provedore to the Sentimentalists and Professor of Book Auctioneering." These sales or vendues were frequently ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... licentious comedies and ranting bombastic tragedies a few only seem to have been produced at the Dorset Gardens Theatre. Among these we may mention Limberham, OEdipus, Troilus and Cressida, and The Spanish Friar. Limberham was acted at the Duke's Theatre, in Dorset Gardens; because, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... as well as the musicians, are all Italian; and there can certainly be no comparison between it and the French, which is generally feeble and insipid in pathetic expression, and extravagant and bombastic in all attempts at grandeur. The first singer at the Odeon was Madame Sessi, who has since been in London; but Madame Morelli, with a voice somewhat inferior in power, appeared to us a more elegant actress. ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... longer verses, but, what was still much worse, prose, and that, whole pages at a time. Thus, as the poetical Pleiad of the day said, the first king in the world was seen descending from his horse with an ardor beyond compare, and on the crown of his hat scrawling bombastic phrases, which M. de Saint-Aignan, aid-de-camp in perpetuity, carried to La Valliere at the risk of foundering his horses. During this time, deer and pheasants were left to the free enjoyments of their nature, hunted so lazily, that, it was said, the art of venery ran great ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... shall send you the score of my "Kunstler" chorus, which I have had autographed here. Devote a quarter of an hour to it, and tell me plainly your opinion of the composition, which of course I look upon only as a stepping-stone to other things. If you find it bad, bombastic, mistaken, tell me so without hesitation. You may be convinced that I am not in the least vain of my works; and if I do not produce anything good and beautiful all my life, I shall none the less continue to feel genuine and cordial pleasure in the beautiful and good things ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... Ellenborough was Governor-General, a bombastic memorandum, addressed "To all the Princes and Chiefs and People of ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... and although, God knows, we have more time than anything else in this land of the poppy where only the horses run, still there are more profitable ways of employing it than to listen to meaningless and bombastic words. Moreover, your brother is a dangerous man. No man is so safe in seclusion as the one of large vanities and small ambitions. He is not big enough to conceive a revolution, but is ready to be the tool of any unscrupulous man who is, and, having too ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... liberal sacrifices are made by black men for the safety of the Empire, INCLUDING BRITISH SOUTH AFRICA, one is constrained to ask: Where are those loud-mouthed pen-men who, possessed of more pretension than foresight, wrote bombastic articles in the Transvaal Press before the war, threatening that "South Africa will cut the painter", and "paddle her own canoe", if men and women in Europe made themselves a nuisance by advocating ideas ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... I was inclined to laugh at such bombastic assertion. Little, indeed, did I dream that within twelve months his prophecy would be fulfilled, and that the ex-horse-stealer, whose secretary I had become, would actually rule Russia through the lethargic weakling who sat upon the throne as ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... over the eventful years of 1830-35 'King William's style,' says the uncourtly biographer, "abounds to overflowing in what is called in England Parliamentary circumlocution, in which, instead of direct, simple expressions, bombastic paraphrases are always chosen, which become in the end intolerably prolix and dull, and are enough to drive a foreigner to despair." The style is indeed august; but the real penman is not the King, whose strong point was not grammatical composition, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... time the candidate of his party for Governor. He was not a very learned lawyer, but was quick- witted and picked up a good deal from the arguments of counsel. Aided by a natural shrewdness and sense, he got along pretty well. He had a gift of rather bombastic speech. His exuberant eloquence was of a style more resembling that prevalent in some other parts of the country than the more sober and severe fashion of New England. Just before he came to the Bench he was counsel in a real estate case in Springfield where Mr. Chapman, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... leaves of the play, after wading through the slime of the "Epistle," is to find amusing proof of the high-flown and at times bombastic expression which elicited such admiration from audiences of the old regime. (Do not laugh at it, reader; you tolerate an equal amount of absurdity in modern melodrama). The very first lines are charmingly suggestive of the starched ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... that lay heaped up made me shudder with joy, what to take first, where to cease. Among other things, he also showed me the scores of several symphonies, of which many had never been heard, while others had been tried, but put back, on the score of their being too difficult and bombastic." One of these symphonies, that in C major, the largest and grandest in conception, Schumann chose and sent to Leipzig, where it was soon afterward produced under Mendelssohn's direction at one of the ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... whirring shells into the masses of Matabele, whose assegai blades glistened in the morning sun. While this opening cannonade was proceeding Baden-Powell found useful work to do. With a few native scouts he started off on his own account and soon found a large body of the enemy elsewhere enjoying a bombastic war-dance, which plainly portended the staggering of humanity and the driving of the British into the sea. Thinking that Colonel Plumer ought not to miss this performance, Baden-Powell sent back word of it, and calling together the Native Levy proceeded to attack ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... footsteps of Cowley; delighted, probably, to discover in Pindaric writing, as it was called, a species of poetry which required neither sound nor sense, provided only there was a sufficient stock of florid and extravagant thoughts, expressed in harsh and bombastic language. ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Phaedon which contains the last conversation of Socrates, and his death. The incident of the reading of the Dialogue, and the reflections which it suggested, have been used by Addison in his frigid and bombastic tragedy of Cato.] ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... two extreme views about this speech. According to one, Shakespeare quoted it from some play, or composed it for the occasion, simply and solely in order to ridicule, through it, the bombastic style of dramatists contemporary with himself or slightly older; just as he ridicules in 2 Henry IV. Tamburlaine's rant about the kings who draw his chariot, or puts fragments of similar bombast into the mouth of Pistol. According to Coleridge, on the other hand, this idea is 'below criticism.' ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... had looked sufficiently bewildered became frankly incredulous. But the room was now filled with the strains of Kirk's music. The Maestro would not, perhaps, have altogether approved of its bombastic nature—but triumphant it certainly was, and sincere. And what the music lacked was amply made up in Kirk's face as he played—an ineffable expression of mingled joy, devotion, and the solid satisfaction of a creator in his own handiwork. He finished his performance with one long-drawn and ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... to all our readers and as it has already been extensively dissected in the above quotations, further comment is hardly necessary. The new stamps naturally caused lots of criticism on account of their somewhat bombastic legend "We hold a vaster Empire than has been". This was taken from the jubilee ode written by Sir Lewis Morris on the occasion of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, the last stanza of ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... as good as my name. Don't let me shock you; I have lost faith and hope; I have become—what's the last new name for a free-thinker? Oh, I keep up with the times, thanks to old Miss Redwood! She takes in the newspapers, and makes me read them to her. What is the new name? Something ending in ic. Bombastic? No, Agnostic?—that's it! I have become an Agnostic. The inevitable result of marrying an old man; if there's any blame it ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... and understood in order to arrive at the true value of "the dogma and ritual of high magic," as Eliphas Levi terms it; because, amid the vast array of tinselled drapery, the outcome of man's vain conceit and bombastic pride, we shall find very little that can be considered as vital and really essential to the rites of magic. The show, the drapery, the priestly ornaments and instruments, are to the really spiritual Occultist, but, as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. That they had, and still have, their ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... become animated and had regained his self-possession. He believed in his scheme, and was ready to pledge his future. He argued that his aunt could not blame him for giving proof of his energy and daring, and he discoursed in bombastic style. ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... Rhegium, because they, although they were Phoenicians, yet did not seem to enjoy a piece of deceit when it was at their own expense. They then sent an ambassador in a trireme to Tauromenium, who made a long speech to Andromachus, threatening him in a bombastic and barbarian style with their vengeance if he did not at once turn the Corinthians out of his city. At last he pointed to his outstretched hand, and turning it over threatened that he would so deal with the city. Andromachus laughed, and made no ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... have always suspected public taste to be a mongrel product, out of affectation by dogmatism; and felt sure, if you could only find an honest man of no special literary bent, he would tell you he thought much of Shakespeare bombastic and most absurd, and all of him written in very obscure English and wearisome to read. And not long ago I was able to lay by my lantern in content, for I found the honest man. He was a fellow of parts, quick, humorous, ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a race of hunters and soldiers. Their bas-reliefs ordinarily represent them armed with bow and lance, often on horseback. They were good knights—alert, brave, clever in skirmish and battle; also bombastic, deceitful, and sanguinary. For six centuries they harassed Asia, issuing from their mountains to hurl themselves on their neighbors, and returning with entire peoples reduced to slavery. They apparently made war for the mere pleasure ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... as much as possible from the congregation, as a lonely and secret worshipper, he soon found himself as separate from them in heart as in daily life. He felt that they, and even more than they, those flowery and bombastic pulpit rhetoricians, who were paid for their sermons by the clapping and cheering of the congregation, were not thinking of, longing after, the same things as himself. Besides, he never spoke to a Christian; for the negress at his lodgings seemed ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... aloft, warmed his fancy and the sheen of Byzantine brocades and the quaint paraphernalia of bygone days inspired his apocalyptic words. His language in those telegrams and letters was highfaluting and bombastic. And I read other communications of his—mostly abject appeals for help—devoid of dignity and manliness, when the gloom of dissipated illusions was made unbearable by fear of dethronement and death. And the figure cut by the Tsarlet, who addressed ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... more like that of a den of outlaws upon a doubtful frontier,—of a lewd tavern for the revels and debauches of banditti, assassins, bravoes, smugglers, and their more desperate paramours, mixed with bombastic players, the refuse and rejected offal of strolling theatres, puffing out ill-sorted verses about virtue, mixed with the licentious and blasphemous songs proper to the brutal and hardened course of life ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... from his imperfect command of language has sometimes been mistaken for depth. His "Agamemnon" is generally deemed the masterpiece of Greek tragedy. His language is stately and swelling, in keeping with the heroic part of his characters; sometimes it is too swelling, and even bombastic. Though he is the greatest of all, art in him had not arrived at technical perfection. He reminds us sometimes of the Aeginetan marbles, rather than ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... widout men and ropes," In a short time a sufficient number of the neighbors were summoned together, and proceeded to the animal's relief. Denny's importance, as well as his black dress, was miserably tarnished; he stood, however, with as dignified an air as possible, and, in a bombastic style, proceeded to direct the men as to the ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... him that the success of his condescension was entirely different from what he had intended. Then he drew the cloud of the blue coat once more wrathfully about him, whistled more shrilly than ever, so that the big bell on the other side resounded, was doubly bombastic and raised his shoulders as high again toward his black head. The wrath and decision of his former coughing and spitting was child's play to those he displayed now. But the workmen soon knew that this went on only in Apollonius' ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... to her side, seated himself, leaned forward until his face fronted hers, and talked. His manner was florid, almost bombastic. He had a fashion of working his face a good deal when he talked. He conversed quite rapidly and fluently, but was wont to interlard his conversation with what seemed majestically reflective pauses, during which he leaned back in his chair and tapped the arm slowly. ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of a political party. As the chief of a powerful party which he transformed with amazing audacity, as the victorious destroyer of the old Whig oligarchy and the founder of the new Tory democracy, as a man of Jewish birth and alien race, as a man to whom satire was the normal weapon and bombastic affectation a deliberate expedient for dazzling the weak—Disraeli, even in his writings, has been exposed in England to a bitter system of disparagement which blinds partisans to their real literary merit. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... by Voltaire, a half bombastic, half satirical account of Henry IV's wars to gain the crown of France. This poem also contains some very fine and justly famous passages, but is too long and too artificial, as a whole, to ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... artillerists, some five or six thousand good infantry, and, it may be, a mongrel mass of eight to ten thousand militia. In all our marching through Georgia, he has not forced us to use any thing but a skirmish-line, though at several points he had erected fortifications and tried to alarm us by bombastic threats. In Savannah he has taken refuge in a line constructed behind swamps and overflowed rice-fields, extending from a point on the Savannah River about three miles above the city, around by a branch of the Little Ogeechee, which stream is impassable from its ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... has met with great success both in France and elsewhere; it is a favorite of the public, though not free from imitating other musicians, particularly Auber and Rossini. The style of the text is somewhat bombastic, and only calculated for effect. Notwithstanding these defects {349} the opera pleases; it has a brilliant introduction, as well ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... entirely abandoned one "manner" for another, or for any length of time to have risen above or sunk below a certain level of excellence. Andre, extolled by her latest critics as "a delicious eclogue of the fields," was contemporary with the bombastic, false Byronism of Jacques; the feeble narrative of La Mare au Diable with the passion-introspection of Lucrezia Floriani. The ever-popular Consuelo immediately succeeded the feeble Compagnon du Tour de France. La Marquise, written in the first year of her literary ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... vow of poverty and humility would not allow it; and he strongly blamed his dear host, the prior, for daring to suggest, without his consent, an exchange of things eternal for things temporal. On other matters he refused to explain his views, and took refuge in ambiguous and bombastic replies. God would inspire him, he said, and at the approaching festival of the Virgin, at the august and sublime hour of holy communion, he expected to hear the voice of Jesus speaking to his heart and announcing the line of conduct ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... we can not appreciate the glory of the morning star of our destiny as a nation. Let us henceforth aim to be less superficial in our views of the National Anniversary. Let orators cease grandiloquent displays of bombastic rhetoric, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," and discourse with the sober earnestness of true philosophy upon the antecedents—the remote springs—of that event, every where visible in the history of the world; and by expatiating upon the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... friend to come and see the satire which he has carefully introduced: "A perfect portrait of the Bishop, only with claws instead of legs! So very droll! And dear brother, while you are here, just look at the expression of this little rabbit's ears, while he listens to the bombastic utterance of this monkey ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... material for use upon the lecture platform; and finally, the essays in their present form. The oral method thus predominates: a series of oracular thoughts has been shaped for oratorical utterance, not oratorical in the bombastic, popular American sense, but cunningly designed, by a master of rhetoric, to capture the ear and then the ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... present recall what my recitation was, but it was probably Catiline's Defense or some other of the turgid declamatory pieces of classic literature with which all our readers were filled. It was bombastic stuff, but my blind, boyish belief in it gave it dignity. As I went on my voice cleared. The window sashes regained their outlines. I saw every form before me, and the look of surprise and pleasure on the smiling face of my principal ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... book contributed to its momentary effect. The literary, impressive, even bombastic style secured for it a very large public and was a constant relief after the long years of abstract and abstruse Hegelianism. The same result also proceeded from the extravagant glorification of love, which in comparison with the insufferable ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... as it might be called, specially marks Hawaiian music of the bombastic bravura sort in modern times, imparting to it in its strife for emphasis a sensual barbaric quality. It can be described further only as a gurgling throatiness, suggestive at times of ventriloquism, as if the singer were gloating over ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... bombastic sophistry again, Stephen told himself, but he met it without subterfuge or evasion. "And you believe that such people as Gershom can serve the cause of justice ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... Bjoernson's predecessors there are but two lyrists of the first order, viz., Wergeland and Welhaven. The former was magnificently profuse and chaotic, abounding in verve and daring imagery, but withal high-sounding, declamatory, and, at his worst, bombastic. There is a reminiscence in him of Klopstock's inflated rhetoric; and a certain dithyrambic ecstasy—a strained, high-keyed aria-style which sometimes breaks into falsetto. His great rival, Welhaven, was soberer, clearer, more gravely melodious. He sang in beautiful, tempered strains, along the middle ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... feminine arrogance; it affords continual food for laughter to all Asiatics, and the Greeks would have joined in it. In the golden Middle Age the practice developed into a regular and methodical service of women; it imposed deeds of heroism, cours d'amour, bombastic Troubadour songs, etc.; although it is to be observed that these last buffooneries, which had an intellectual side, were chiefly at home in France; whereas amongst the material sluggish Germans, the knights distinguished themselves rather by drinking and stealing; they were ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... there would be war in South Africa, but he did not even hint at his thought that volunteers might be called for, at his intention, if they were, to offer himself. To do that would not only be absurdly premature, but might even seem slightly bombastic, an uncalled-for study in heroics. He kept silence. The battles of Ladysmith, of Magersfontein, of Stormberg, of Colenso, unsettled the theories of sleek people in silk hats. England came to a very dark hour when Robin was playing with a new set of bricks which his Aunt Beattie had given ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... "A thousand times no! The great poet praised the verses you allude to simply to cover his depreciation of my 'Captive Queen,' which is among my best efforts, but too much in his own style. How Germany can worship his bombastic —— but that's ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... all about you everything you have done. There is no use for you to deny anything. You make a clean confession of everything.' Mr. Choi replied, 'I have done nothing. If I knew what you wanted, I would tell you.' More pressure was urged in the way of bombastic speech. Finally the police said, 'If you won't tell of your own free will we will make you tell!' Then the tortures, which the Government published broadcast had been done away with, began. They brought out a round stool with four legs and laid it down on its side with the sharp legs ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... Heed no bombastic talk, While guards the British Sentry Pall Mall and Birdcage Walk. Let European thunders Occasion no alarms, Though diplomatic blunders May cause a cry "To arms!" Sleep on, ye pale civilians; All thunder-clouds defy: On Europe's ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... him to see the truth under these circumstances. The mere fact that his condition had improved so much under British rule made him all the readier to cry for the Franco-American moon. Things presently went from bad to worse. A glowing, bombastic address from 'The Free French to their Canadian Brothers' (who of course were 'slaves') was even read out at more than one church door. Then the Quebec Assembly unanimously passed an Alien Act in May 1794, and suspected characters ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... is the well-known Chrononhotonthologos written to ridicule some bombastic tragedies of the day. Chrononhotonthologos is king of Queerummania, Bombardinian is his general, while his courtiers are Aldiborontiphoscophornio and Rigdum Funnidos. The following gives a good ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... official Egyptian history is altogether silent. Most of these autobiographies are found cut upon the walls of tombs, and, though according to modern notions their writers may seem to have been very conceited, and their language exaggerated and bombastic, the inscriptions bear throughout the impress of truth, and the facts recorded in them have therefore especial value. The narratives are usually simple and clear, and as long as they deal with matters of fact they are easily understood, but ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... out-Herod Herod, run riot, talk at random. heighten, overcolor^; color highly, color too highly; broder^; flourish; color &c (misrepresent) 544; puff &c (boast) 884. Adj. exaggerated &c v.; overwrought; bombastic &c (grandiloquent) 577; hyperbolical^, on stilts; fabulous, extravagant, preposterous, egregious, outre [Fr.], highflying^. Adv. hyperbolically &c adj.. Phr. excitabat enim fluctus ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... unromantic an unenthusiastic, harmonized entirely with his own. It was refreshing for him to hear her chatter about people and things with the calm good sense of a Philistine, especially in a society where the bombastic and exaggerated talk of original, poetically minded young ladies had repelled and bored him. At his first meeting with Malvine Marker he had thought that she was the wife for him, and since he had become friendly with her and her circle, he said to himself, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... his "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface," to his "Poems" of 1815, Wordsworth, commenting on a passage on Night in Dryden's Indian Emperor, says, "Dryden's lines are vague, bombastic, and senseless.... The verses of Dryden once celebrated are forgotten." He is not passing any general criticism on "him who drew Achitophel." In a letter to Sir Walter Scott (November 7, 1805), then engaged on his great edition ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... were the saviours of science, and promoted the greatest learning and depth of thought known in Europe in their time. As for Liszt, there is such an astounding wealth of poetry and deep feeling beneath the somewhat "flashy," bombastic trick of speech he inherited, that the true lover of music can no more allow his feelings to be led astray by such externals than one would judge a man's mind by the cut of his coat or the hat ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... confidence in his own genius. He wished to be a great man, and in spite of all predictions to the contrary he was going to be a great man. No doubt he re-read his tragedy in cold blood and laughed at it, realising all its emphatic and bombastic mediocrity. But it was a dead issue, and now with a new tensity of purpose he looked forward to the works which he previsioned in the nebulous and ardent future; no setback could turn him aside from the path which he had traced ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... on Shakspere, but to see how great an artist Racine was, in his own somewhat narrow way, one has but to compare his Phedre, or Iphigenie, with Dryden's ranting tragedy of Tyrannic Love. These bombastic heroic plays were made the subject of a capital burlesque, the Rehearsal, by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, acted in 1671 at the King's Theater. The indebtedness of {169} the English stage to the French did not ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... when Rutford appeared, slightly flushed of countenance and visibly annoyed, the School emphasized their displeasure by derisive cheers. Rutford, ever tactless where boys were concerned, was unwise enough to make a speech from the steps condemning, in his usual bombastic style, a demonstration which he ought to have known he was quite powerless to punish or to prevent. When he had finished, the School cheered more derisively than before. After Bill, he left the Yard, purple with rage ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... of polecats. I rode seated on a brake, showers of cinders and the cold night air swirling about me, until the festive natives thinned down enough to give me admittance. By that time we were drawing into Celaya, also in the throes of some bombastic celebration. ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... a touch of the bombastic in his manner even yet! She laughed a little ironically. Then all at once her thoughts reverted to Elise, and some latent cruelty in her awoke. Though she believed the girl, she would accuse the man, the more so, because ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... motives of the Fer Diad episode all appear previously in other episodes (e.g. the fights with Ferbaeth and with Loch). Further, the account even in YBL is not marked by old linguistic forms as are other parts of the tale, while much of it is in the bombastic descriptive style of LL. In the condition in which we have the tale, however, this adventure is treated as the climax of the story. Its motive is to remove Cuchulainn from the field, in order to give the rest of Ulster a chance. But in the account of the final ...
— The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge (Tain Bo Cualnge) • Unknown
... his noble relative, the field marshal, bidding him bring his good lady and his retinue and abide within the castle until the festivities were ended, though in this instance the castle was a suburban cottage scarcely big enough to accommodate the bridal couple. I showed the bombastic but hospitable and genuine invitation to the actor Raymond, who chanced to be playing in Louisville when it reached me. He read it through ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... laughed at Thorpe's bombastic figures of speech and told him to go and talk to a credulous elevator boy somewhere, and asked him if he had the girl aboard the lugger yet and Professor Peabody had wanted to know seriously if he had found any traces of pre-Shakespearian drama in ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... ready for the revolution of 1868 before Perry came. We saw the Shogun, under the bombastic title of Tycoon, in spite of the remonstrance of the Emperor and his court, conclude a treaty with Perry at Kanagawa in 1854. Here at last was found a pretext for the Imperialists to raise arms against the Shogun. The Shogun or his ministers had no right ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... bravest nations in the world; and it was under the auspices of a man who dared scarce fire a pistol, that the greatest generals in France began their careers of conquest. He had neither eloquence nor imagination; but substituted in their stead a miserable, affected, bombastic style, which, until other circumstances gave him consequence, drew on him general ridicule. Yet against so poor an orator, all the eloquence of the philosophical Girondists, all the terrible powers of his associate Danton, employed in a popular assembly, could not enable them to make an ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... manifesto to me. It was a trifle bombastic, and its composition appeared to me vague. No wonder it had roused hostility among his colleagues, I thought, as Sarakoff walked about, declaiming with outstretched arm. Put as briefly as possible, Sarakoff held ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... when they march, they will march against Austria and strive to fight us bravely in order to obtain from the French Emperor praise, honors, titles, and grants of additional territories. No, no, I cannot be blinded by brave words and bombastic phrases; I know that Austria, in case a war should break out, would stand all alone, and that she must either conquer or be ruined. In 1805, when, in consequence of the disastrous battle of Austerlitz, I ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... dull. He is like a bad swimmer, strikes out with great force, makes a confounded splash, and never gets a yard the further for it. It is a great effort not to sink. Indeed, Monsieur D'A—, your literature is at a very reduced ebb; bombastic in the drama—shallow in philosophy—mawkish in poetry, your writers of the present day ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had attracted him, in his reaction against German atony, although he was beginning to lose his taste for it, knowing intuitively the unnaturalness of such assumption of genius, always and at all costs. He had added a symphony which bore the bombastic title of the Basle Boecklin, "The Dream of Life," and the motto: "Vita somnium breve." A song-cycle completed the programme, with a few classical works, and a Festmarsch by Ochs, which Christophe had ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... "holocaust city" provided the extreme Nationalists with a private stage where—in uniforms of their own design, in cloaks and feathers and flowing black ties and with eccentric arrangements of the hair—they could strut and caper and fling bombastic insults at the authorities in Rome, until the Government found it opportune to take them in hand. The greatest Italian poet and one of the greatest imaginative writers in Europe will now be able to devote himself—if his rather morbid Muse has suffered no ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... remarkable is the Apologia. There are few speeches of antiquity that give such a vivid impression of the character of the author and of the life of the society in which he moved. The style, it is true, is often bombastic and affected, many of the arguments are almost more puerile and absurd than the accusations, while the intense conceit and complacency of the author often make him ridiculous. A man of wide and varied knowledge, ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... a discussion of the Ossianic question. That fragments of Ossianic legend (if not of Ossianic poetry) survive in oral Gaelic traditions, seems certain. How much Macpherson knew of these, and how little he used them in the bombastic prose which Napoleon loved (and spelled "Ocean"), it is next to impossible to discover. The case of Chatterton is too well known to need much more than mention. The most extraordinary poet for his years who ever lived began with the forgery of a sham feudal pedigree for ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... modern Socialism. First, however, a word as to the term "scientific" as commonly applied to Marxian Socialism. Even some of the friendliest of Socialist critics have contended that the use of the term is pretentious, bombastic, and altogether unjustified. From a certain narrow point of view, this appears to be an unimportant matter, and the vigor with which Socialists defend their use of the term seems exceedingly foolish, and accountable for only as a result of enthusiastic fetish ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... that although the part of Almanzor contains these and other bombastic passages, there are many also which convey what the poet desired to represent—the aspirations of a mind so heroic as almost to surmount the bonds of society and even the very laws of the universe, leaving us often in doubt whether the vehemence of the wish does not even disguise ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... saw that the widow had become a little calmer, he said resolutely, and with superbly bombastic manner, "I am sure you laugh, madame, at all the despairing efforts that I make to prevent my poor stolen heart from flying quickly to your feet. It is that which has brought me here; I could not but follow, in spite of myself; yes, madame, in spite of myself. ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... ages shall turn the leaves of "Zmyrna" in distant days. But Volusius' Annals shall perish at Padua itself, and shall often furnish loose wrappings for mackerel. The short writings of my comrade are gladsome to my heart; let the populace rejoice in bombastic Antimachus. ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... Grievances" in Upper Canada, and three months before O'Connell's celebrated motion in the House of Commons for the Repeal of the Union between England and Ireland, the Assembly of Lower Canada, at Papineau's instance, passed the equally celebrated "Ninety-two Resolutions." Bombastic and diffuse, like parts of O'Connell's speech, this historic document nevertheless was as true in all really essential respects as Mackenzie's manifesto and as O'Connell's tremendous indictment of the system of Government in Ireland. All ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... external badges of a sect or creed, and insisted that the great end of science is to learn how to live and how to die. The style of Seneca is too elaborate to please. It is affected, often florid, and bombastic; there is too much sparkle and glitter, too little repose ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... is evidently the work of an eye-witness, cf. c. 29, 'nostri ad dimicandum procedunt, id quod adversarios existimabamus esse facturos.' He is apt to be bombastic (c. 5, 'hic alternis non solum morti mortem exaggerabant, sed tumulos tumulis exaequabant'), and makes a ridiculous show of learning (quoting the combat of Achilles and Memnon, c. 25, and Ennius, c. 23, 'nostri cessere parumper'; c. 31, 'pes ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... before the assembly at the games. Lucian lets us hear the speeches, descriptive of Peregrinus's life, delivered before the decisive act. A certain Theagenes, an admirer of Peregrinus, delivers a bombastic eulogy, 3-7, repelling the charge of vanity imputed to him, and comparing his proposed death with that of Hercules, &c. Lucian opposes to this some invectives delivered by another, whose name he professes to have forgotten, which refer, 7-30, to the ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... "eternal truths," all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public. And on its part, German Socialism recognised, more and more, its own calling as the bombastic representative ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... Under the wise and mild government of a Vespasian and a Titus, and more especially of a Trajan, the Romans returned to a purer taste. But whatever period may have given birth to the tragedies of Seneca, they are beyond description bombastic and frigid, unnatural both in character and action, revolting from their violation of propriety, and so destitute of theatrical effect, that I believe they were never meant to leave the rhetorical schools for the stage. With the old tragedies, those sublime ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... friendship. In the following year M. Recamier, now very rich, established himself in a fine chateau at Clichy, a short distance from Paris, where he kept open house. Thither came Lucien Bonaparte, at that time twenty-four years of age, bombastic and consequential, and fell in love with his beautiful hostess, as everybody else did. But Madame Recamier, with all her fascinations, was not a woman of passion; nor did she like the brother of the powerful First Consul, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... foot, fluttering and purring, as if endowed with affection for its unlovable master. None so mastered the missile; but for all his weird influence over it, he was subject to the restraints of another weapon which seldom left his hands. Is there not a spiritual law which imposes checks on the bombastic tricks of crude and cultured alike, or was it by force of gravity that the point of the dwarf's long and slender spear dipped into the ground, punctuating mock martial struts with perverse irregularity? Prodigious in his ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... to supply our uncomfortable lack of a distinctly national air, but few of them have that first requisite, a fiery catchiness, and most of them have been so bombastic as to pall even upon palates that can endure Fourth of July glorification. Recognizing that the trouble with "America" was not at all due to the noble words written by the man whom "fate tried to conceal by naming him Smith," Converse has written a new ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... to my wagons after this semi-tragical interview with that bombastic and self-seeking old windbag, Umbezi, it was to find that Saduko and his warriors had already marched for the King's kraal, Nodwengu. A message awaited me, however, to the effect that it was hoped that I would follow, in order to make report of the affair of the destruction of ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... mystery of the German Chancellor is all about—some peace proposals, I suppose—which are sure to prove bombastic and unacceptable. It seems to us out here as though the war must go on forever. Like a boy's dream of the far-off freedom of manhood, the day appears when we shall step out into the old liberty of owning our own lives. What a celebration ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... settled at the court of the emperor Theodorus Lascaris, and devoted himself to literature. He died between 1210 and 1220. His chief work is his History, in 21 books, of the period from 1180 to 1206. In spite of its florid and bombastic style, it is of considerable value as a record (on the whole impartial) of events of which he was either an eye-witness or had heard at first hand. Its most interesting portion is the description of the capture of Constantinople, which should be ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... prisoners had been gathering round her until at last, formed into a faction, they gave themselves out as the Queen's party, and by adopting a high-flown, turgid, and mysterious style of phraseology, and assuming bombastic and braggart airs of authority, coupled with an affectation of capacity and profundity, obtained for themselves from the wits of the Court and city the nickname of The Importants, under which they figured until absorbed a few years later in the more general and popular ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... It sounds bombastic, but in those feudal forties it rang more magnificent than war. Single-voiced he overawed the host of bigots, dullards, and reactionaries. Unhappily, he let his people abandon their native tongue, while teaching them how to balance the rival parties in England, the latter a policy that has proved ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... intended as a reply was applicable only to some individual edifice or some of the minor works, the cost of which his fortune might have defrayed. We can scarcely indeed suppose, that if the affected generosity were but a bombastic flourish, it could have excited any feeling but laughter among ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Petitions. Many of them, it must in justice be owned, bear unqualified testimony to the kindness and humanity of officers; but in the great majority of cases the evidence they adduce is overwhelmingly to the contrary. And if their language is sometimes bombastic, if their style is almost uniformly illiterate, if they are the productions of a band of mutinous dogs standing out for rights which they never possessed and deserving of a halter rather than a hearing, these are circumstances that do not in the least ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... opposition to Home Rule is dead, and all the violent language, all the extravagant action, all the bombastic threats, are but indications that the battle ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... Avoid bombastic language. Work for plain expressions rather than for the unusual. Use the simplest words that the ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... Rome, the seashore at Sorrento, and the life of the Italian people. Macbeth (op. 23) gives us a rather undistinguished series of musical interpretations of poetical subjects. Don Juan (op. 20) is much finer, and translates Lenau's poem into music with bombastic vigour, showing us the hero who dreams of grasping all the joy of the world, and how he fails, and dies after he ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... exercised was great. It formed a meeting-place for the educated Jews of all countries and all shades of opinion. Besides news bearing on politics and literature, and philological essays, and poems more or less bombastic, Ha-Maggid published a number of original articles of great value. Its issues formed the link between the old masters, Rapoport and Luzzatto, and young Russian writers like ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... voice shrieked bombastic platitude into my ears for an illimitable time. I answered occasionally with the fringe of my mind. Could my agonised state of being have remained unperceived by any human creature save this young, hustling, dollar-centred ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... then annihilate the point of it with a cutting cynicism and set the table in a roar of laughter. Among others who were seated here was a Mr. Trevor, of Cincinnati, one of the pioneers of Asquith. Mr. Trevor was a trifle bombastic, with a tendency towards gesticulation, an art which he had learned in no less a school than the Ohio State Senate. He was a self-made man,—a fact which he took good care should not escape one,—and had amassed his money, I believe, in the dry-goods business. He always wore a long, shiny coat, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Bela for desiring the beauty of the village for himself—he was rich and could marry whom he pleased, and that he should loudly and openly proclaim his determination to possess himself of the beautiful prize was only in accordance with the impulsive, hot-headed, somewhat bombastic temperament ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... altogether through vainglory he spoke. He was not a bombastic sort. I think he voiced the intent of the army to which ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... Raise them from the condition of brutes, to the level of human beings—of American slaves, at least. Do not for an instant suppose that the name of being freemen is the slightest comfort to them, situated as they are, or that the bombastic boast that "whoever touches British soil stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled," can meet with any thing but the ridicule and contempt of mankind, while that soil swarms, both on and under its surface, with ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... to oust them. They are, I believe, doing their best to organise the defence of this city, and if they waste a little time in altering the names of the streets, and publishing manifestoes couched in grand and bombastic phrases, it must be remembered that they have to govern Frenchmen who are fond of this species of nonsense. With respect to the military situation, the soldiers of all sorts are kept well together, and appear to be under the command of their officers. The National Guard, although it still ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... those blessings which should be carefully treasured up; and bestowing much information concerning the secular plans of economy practiced by your own to the other sex is not approved; and where to talk of literary matters would be termed bombastic pedantry and small display, and would serve to exhibit accomplishments which might be enticingly dangerous. Nevertheless, an hour passes away very agreeably and even rapturously with those who there chance to meet with an especial ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... look, bordering upon the aspect and attitude of anger. The eyes open, but with the eyebrows considerably drawn down; the mouth pouting out, mostly shut, and the lips pinched close. The words walk out a-strut, with a slow, stiff bombastic affectation of importance. The arms generally a-kimbo, and the legs at a distance from one another, taking large ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... astonishing, and Macpherson followed it up with Temora (1763), another epic in the same strain. In both these works Macpherson succeeds in giving an air of primal grandeur to his heroes; the characters are big and shadowy; the imagery is at times magnificent; the language is a kind of chanting, bombastic prose: ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... choral music, made his English "Pindaric" odes an outlet for rebellion against all stanzaic law. The finer the poetic frenzy, the freer the lyric pattern! But, alas, rhetoric soon triumphed over imagination, and in the absence of metrical restraint the ode grew declamatory, bombastic, and lowest stage of all, "official," the last refuge of laureates who felt obliged to produce something sonorous in honor of a royal birthday or wedding. This official ode persisted long after the pseudo-Pindaric flag was lowered and ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... left the whole business to chance; or, willing to evade instead of encountering the difficulties of his subject, fills up the intervals of true inspiration with the most vapid and worthless materials, pieces out a beautiful half line with a bombastic allusion, or overloads an exquisitely natural sentiment or image with a cloud of painted, pompous, cumbrous phrases, like the shower of roses, in which he represents the Spring, his own lovely, fresh, and innocent Spring, as ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... have a maid Armenia, at Maple Grove, and I could not resist designating her brother as Ararat, by way of localizing their relationship,—but also the young settlements of the country have often the most bombastic names. In the backwoods, one time, I found a party of honest settlers in a tavern over an old romance, searching for some sufficiently high-sounding title to confer on their ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... degree of his father's confidence—which James wholly lacked—and he spared himself no pains to cultivate it. Though far less ready of wit than his stubby, bombastic brother, he was a tenacious plodder, and was for this reason much more likely ultimately to achieve his sordid purposes. His energy was tireless, and he never admitted defeat. He never worked openly; he never appeared ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... which the above is a fair specimen were not very remarkable for literary merit or political wisdom. For the most part they were simply bits of bombastic rhetoric couched in doggerel rhyme, and they have consequently been long since consigned to well-merited oblivion—so completely that it is now difficult to obtain copies of them.* They have, however, an historical interest, because they express in a more or less exaggerated form ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... disturbed; I did it. If the little old fellow grows grandiloquent or garrulous at times—he did that. If you find him growing super-sentimental, remember that sentimentalism was the life-breath of chivalry, just then approaching its absurdest climax in the bombastic conscientiousness of Bayard and the whole mental atmosphere laden with its ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... is taken from the autobiography of Daniel Boone, written from his own dictation by John Filson, and published in 1784. Some writers have censured this production as inflated and bombastic. To us it seems simple and natural; and we have no doubt that the very words of Boone are given for the most part. The use of glowing imagery and strong figures is by no means confined to highly-educated persons. Those who ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... a specimen of the ultra florid or bombastic style which may be said to depend upon the pomposity of verbosity for its effect, the latter is a specimen of simple natural Style. Needless to say it is to be preferred. The other should be avoided. It stamps the writer as a person of shallowness, ignorance ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... his translation of the celebrated moonlight scene in the 'Iliad.' A blind man, in the habit of attending accurately to descriptions casually dropped from the lips of those around him, might easily depict these appearances with more truth. Dryden's lines are vague, bombastic, and senseless;[14] those of Pope, though he had Homer to guide him, are throughout false and contradictory. The verses of Dryden, once highly celebrated, are forgotten; those of Pope still retain their hold upon public estimation,—nay, there is not a passage of descriptive poetry, which at ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... universal competition in hisses and derision from one end of the world to the other? It is clear that the things at which everyone sneers are not of a very evident truth. What shall we say of one of Sejan's secretaries who dedicated to Petronius a bombastic book entitled—"The Truths of the Sibylline Oracles, ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... lucid, and incisive. He does not waste words or revel in bombastic diffuseness. Every phrase of his narrative is a definite contribution towards the vivification of his realistic effects. His concise, laconic periods are pregnant with deep meaning, and instinct with that indefinable Norse essence which almost eludes the translator—that vague ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... to ask you to behold the American as he is, as I honestly found him—great, small, good, bad, self-glorious, egotistical, intellectual, supercilious, ignorant, superstitious, vain, and bombastic. In truth, so very remarkable, so contradictory, so incongruous have I found the American that I hesitate. Shall I give you a satire; shall I devote myself to eulogy; shall I tear what they call the "whitewash" aside and expose them to the winds of excoriation; or shall I devote myself to an ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... Herculean labors of his rival to civilize and enrich his country, and remarked "that the czar might amuse himself as he saw fit in building a city, but that he should soon take it from him, and set fire to his wooden house;" a bombastic boast, which, like most boasting, came most signally ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... All bombastic expressions, all systematic views should be discarded, and attention paid only to facts, in order to discover the fine intellectual figure of Lord Byron so completely lost ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... so elevated that all could have a good view of the spectacle it presented. To witness the conduct of nobles and of ladies, of boys and of girls, while passing through the horrors of a sanguinary death, was far more exciting than the unreal and bombastic tragedies of the theater, or the conflicts of the cock-pit and the bear garden. A countless throng flooded the streets, men, women, and children, shouting, laughing, execrating. The celebrity of Madame Roland, her extraordinary grace ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... the delightful agitation, followed by bitter mortification, of his intercourse with Madame de Castries, we must remember that from time to time he received a flowery epistle from Russia, written in the turgid and rather bombastic ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... all the fun, the burlesque, the amusing exaggerations and the bombastic humor runs a scheme of advice and instruction. Sometimes it takes the form of a direct caution to the reader, again it may be shown by inference, and lastly the events speak for themselves and give their own lesson. The author meant to teach adults as well ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... like themselves, in street attire. It was her first New York meal that was not read off a badly thumbed menu and eaten off thick-lipped china. A stringed orchestra played the Duo of Parsifal and Kundry, which was enough to set the blood rocking in her veins and some of its bombastic maternal passion to ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... newspapers with such fulsome praise that the popular nominee for an honor six years in the distance, and shrouded in the smoke of battle, sought to add fuel to the flame by waving the Crown aside! In a weak bombastic letter which deceived ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... the personality of Don Pedro is not unknown to us, from other sources, and the bombastic account[38] written by his faithful squire, Gutierre de Gamez, has so many interesting points in it about Rouen at this date that I must refer to it, if only to bring out of its obscurity a book that is hardly known, and almost deserves ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... will show Himself more merciful to those of our clergy who take so little interest in the religious instruction of our youth; who make little or no exertions to establish Catholic schools, where we could have our children properly educated; who, when they condescend to instruct them, do so in bombastic language, in scholastic terms which the poor children cannot understand, taking no pains to give their instructions in plain words, and in a manner attractive ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... king of Spain; frantic and filthy slanders against Elizabeth, Burghley, Leicester, Essex (the elder), Sidney, and every great and good man (never mind of which party) who then upheld the commonweal; bombastic attempts to terrify weak consciences, by denouncing endless fire against those who opposed the true faith; fulsome ascriptions of martyrdom and sanctity to every rebel and traitor who had been hanged for the last twenty years; wearisome arguments about the bull In Caena Domini, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... County, grinds exceeding fine, so far as the number of convictions is concerned. Of those brought to the bar for trial few escape; for modern talesmen, being hard-headed men, regard the whole thing as a matter of business and try to get through with it as quickly and as efficiently as possible. The bombastic spread-eagle orator, the grandiloquent gas bag, the highfaluting stump speaker gain few verdicts and win small applause except from their clients. And district attorneys who ape the bloodhound in their mien and tactics win scant approval and less acquiescence from the bored gentlemen who ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... observed that while Euripides accuses AEschylus of being 'pomp-bundle-worded,' which I suppose means bombastic and given to rodomontade, AEschylus retorts on Euripides that he is a 'gossip gleaner, a describer of beggars, and a rag-stitcher,' from which it may be inferred that he was truer to the life of his own times than AEschylus was. It happens, however, ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... into a hissing whisper as he bent over the wax he was twisting and pressing. Gianbattista glanced at his pale face, and inwardly wondered at the strange mixture of artistic genius, of bombastic rhetoric and relentless hatred, all combined in the strange man whom destiny had given him for a master. He wondered, too, how he had ever been able to admire the contrasts of virulence and weakness, of petty hatred and impossible ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... habit of late critics to decry the merits of this famous oration, and even to charge it with being frivolous, outrageous, and bombastic, an immense accumulation of calumny and clap-trap, which the craft of Sheridan would not submit to the public ordeal, and which he has therefore left to its chance of a fantastic and visionary fame. But this we find it impossible ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... Eurycomis, Artycomis, &c. In all these works, the outline is the same; the lovers undergo endless buffetings by sea and land, imaginary deaths, and escapes from marauders; but not a spark of genius or fancy enlivens these dull productions, which, sometimes maudlin and bombastic, often indecent, would defy the patience of the most determined novel reader. One of these writers, Xenophon of Ephesus, the author of the "Ephesiacs, or Habrocomas and Anthia," is commended by Politian for the classical purity of his language, in which he considers him scarcely inferior to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... frequently found in New England. It was the first English collection of psalms containing any smoothly flowing verses. Many of the descendants of the Puritans clung with affection to the more literal renderings of the "New England Psalm-Book," and thought the new verses were "tasteless, bombastic, and irreverent." The authors of the new book were certainly not great poets, though Nahum Tate was an English Poet-Laureate. It is said of him that he was so extremely modest that he was never able ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... of facts, the candour, combined with strong sound sense, which appear throughout, might put to shame the bombastic striving after originality of many a modern author. The scheme and execution of the work are complete and agreeable; strict truth shines forth from every page, and no one can doubt but that so pure and noble a mind must see things in a right point of view. This circumstance is sufficient in itself ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... of sheer gibberish; then a dialogue of the noblest and most dramatic eloquence; then a chaotic alternation of sense and nonsense, bad Italian and mixed English, abject farce and dignified rhetoric, spirited simplicity and bombastic jargon. It would be more and less than just to take this act as a sample or a symbol of the author's usual way of work; but I cannot imagine that a parallel to it, for evil and for good, could be found in the ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... man over there. He is a bombastic mutt, a windjammer nonentity, a false alarm, and an encumberer ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... neither shoes nor socks. His feet were like flat-irons turned the wrong way, and his legs seemed to be slipped into the middle of them, like the handles of two queer-shaped hoes. His intense, magnificent importance, and the bombastic way he swaggered about the deck, were so perfectly absurd, that we three youngsters should probably have never had any feeling towards him but that of contempt, if it had not been that we were now quite enough of seamen to appreciate ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... ill-governed, and especially in the case of inexperienced writers, the resulting style is apt to be florid or bombastic. The following passage from Headley's "Sacred Mountains," connected with a description of the crucifixion, is imaginative extravagance,—a vain, artificial effort at the sublime: "I know not but all the radiant ranks on high, and even ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... populous county—important as regards those social ties by which society is held together—important as regards a legislative enactment, and important as regards the well-being and prosperity of the whole nation—(bang, bang, bang). I admire the bombastic eloquence with which my learned friend introduced his most distinguished client—his most delicate minded—sensitive client!—Truly, to hear him speaking I should have thought he had been describing a lovely, blushing young lady, but when he comes to exhibit his ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees |
