"Bombast" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish spell of number; do not talk to me—to me who am to die outright—of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast, show, delusion! They call me a master because of some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in the ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... And so the bombast rolls, and one brags against the other like systole and diastole which balance each other in the same heart. But the worst of the matter is, that Prince Henry and Hotspur, as we have already noticed, have both the same soul and the same ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... circle. The whining passions and little starved conceits are gently wafted up by their own extreme levity to the middle region, and there fix and are frozen by the frigid understandings of the inhabitants. Bombast and buffoonery, by nature lofty and light, soar highest of all, and would be lost in the roof if the prudent architect had not, with much foresight, contrived for them a fourth place, called the twelve-penny gallery, and there planted a suitable colony, who greedily ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... words, which we believe every critic thinks were intended for Shakspeare: 'Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.' Again: with this view, the disputed passages—those in which critics have agreed that the genius is found wanting—the meretricious ornaments sometimes ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... Brigade" seems bombast and gallery play after July 1st. In that case some men on horses who had received an order rode out and rode back, and verse made ever memorable this wild gallop of exhilaration with horses bearing ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the prince, with bitter sneer. "Man, know thy station and thy profession. When I want homilies, I seek my confessor; when I have resolved on a vice, I come to thee. A truce with this bombast. For Fonseca, he shall be consoled; and when he shall learn who is his rival, he is a traitor if he remain discontented with his lot. Thou shalt aid ...
— Calderon The Courtier - A Tale • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mantle of the Holy Roman Empire still dragging from his shoulders, is no more than a puzzled, broken old man, crowded in this bad business beside the Grand Turk, against whom his fathers defended Europe. The preposterous Ferdinand, shorn of his bombast, is only a chicken-hearted assassin. The leader of the band, the All Highest himself, when stripped of his white cloak and silver helmet, shows the slouch and the furtive ferocity of the street-corner bravo. ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... could be worse! Nothing could be more shameful and disastrous. The Americans had evidently been expecting this useless bombast, and ere the words were well uttered, they answered them with a yell of defiance. I do not think more than one proclamation was necessary, but Morello went from point to point in the city and the Americans followed him. I can tell you this, Maria: all the ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... hang to a somewhat battered optimism, and one of the chief causes of that optimism is the fact that Huneker, after all these years, yet remains unhanged. A picturesque and rakish fellow, a believer in joy and beauty, a disdainer of petty bombast and moralizing, a sworn friend of all honest purpose and earnest striving, he has given his life to a work that must needs bear fruit hereafter. While the college pedagogues of the Brander Matthews type still worshipped the ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... poem is mentioned in the Spectator, in opposition to such performances, as are generally written in a swelling stile, and in which the bombast is mistaken for the sublime. It is meant as a compliment to his late majesty, on his arrival ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... imaginative in the highest dramatic sense, but the need of imaginativeness pressed on him while it was ceasing to press on his brother playwrights. He could not reach the sublime, but neither could he content himself as they did with the prosaic; he rants, fumes, and talks wild bombast in ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... out their hate chorus, "Keep your head down, you dirty Hun. If you want to see your father in your Fatherland, Keep your head down, you dirty Hun." Maybe so, maybe not. Maybe morale is made of finer stuff than hate and bombast. Maybe idealism does enter into it. Of course there are reactionary periods in the history of a people when selfishness and narrowness and bigotry combine to cry down the expression of its ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... making discoveries at a rate which left their skill in words outstripped; that having to invent their terms as they went along, yet being careless and contemptuous of a science in which they have no training, they would bombast out our dictionaries with monstrously invented words that not only would have made Quintilian stare and gasp, but would affront the decently ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... although by no means addicted to quarrelling, are very fond of satire. They are also prone to go straight to the point in conversation, and although fond of similes and figurative language, they seldom indulge in bombast. ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... the crude taste of the actors and the cruder taste of the public—"is all traceable to their idiot art-masters that intrude themselves as the alchemists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse, indeed it may be the ingrafted overflow of some killcow conceit, etc. Among this kind of men that repose eternity in the mouth of a player I can but engross some deep read school men or grammarians, who have no more learning in their skull than will serve to take ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... he heard was Macpherson's private character, and by his prejudice against all unrhymed poetry, whether it was blank verse or rhythmical prose. And yet, his own prose was rhythmical, and often as tumid as the worst bombast in Macpherson. He was too, on the whole, an artificial writer, while the best parts of Ossian are natural. He allowed himself therefore to see distinctly and to characterise severely the bad things in the book—where it sunk into the bathos or soared into the falsetto,—but ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... 'The blind archer, Love.' For information about the pagan orientalism of the Troubadours, the blasphemous bombast by which they provoked their persecution in Provence, and their influence on the Courts of Europe, see Sismondi, Lit. Southern Europe, Cap. ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... his words with breathless attention, he appealed no longer directly to the people, but drew, in graphic language, the picture of the desolations brought by war. The simplicity of his phrases, his entire absence of showiness or bombast, made his influence indescribably deep and powerful. A mere ranter, a frothy mob orator, would have ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... trio! we poor sons of song Oft find 'tis fancied right that leads us wrong. I prove obscure in trying to be terse; Attempts at ease emasculate my verse; Who aims at grandeur into bombast falls; Who fears to stretch his pinions creeps and crawls; Who hopes by strange variety to please Puts dolphins among forests, boars in seas. Thus zeal to 'scape from error, if unchecked By sense of art, creates a new defect. Fix on some casual sculptor; he shall know ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... exception played in history, and he depicted to Fairhaven the many glories of Fairhaven—past, present and approaching—in superlatives that would hardly have seemed inadequate if applied to Paradise. His oration, in short, was of a piece with the amiable bombast that the college students and Fairhaven at large were accustomed to applaud at every Finals—the sort of linguistic debauch that John Charteris himself remembered to have applauded as an undergraduate more years ago than ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... of feeling, a greater appropriateness and adequateness of expression, and, above all, a greater truth to life and nature. It was felt that the degenerated classicists were "barren of imagination and invention," offered in their insipid artificialities nothing but "rhetoric, bombast, fleurs de college, and Latin-verse poetry," clothed "borrowed ideas in trumpery imagery," and presented themselves with a "conventional elegance and noblesse than which there was nothing more common." On the other hand, the works of the master-minds ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... where could I learn this art best? Nowhere better than the open book of nature, written with God's own finger." We shall see, however, that this "book of nature" taught Paracelsus some very strange lessons. Modesty was not one of these. "Now at this time," he declares, "I, Theophrastus Paracelsus, Bombast, Monarch of the Arcana, was endowed by God with special gifts for this end, that every searcher after this supreme philosopher's work may be forced to imitate and to follow me, be he Italian, Pole, Gaul, German, or whatsoever or whosoever he ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... her name Dorothy would at first tell him nothing. Her captors briefly stated the little they knew concerning her presence in the town. The self-constituted dictator tried bombast, threats and flattery to gain information from her, but they were of no avail. His authority being thus disputed by a woman, and his absurd self-esteem ruffled, he gave way to a torrent of abuse, but Dorothy was ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity,{353} are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... effect of anger and fear on animals was observed centuries before America was discovered. Statius, a writer who fully equals Mr Slick both in his affectation and bombast, thus ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... their faces perpetuated upon the canvas would go down to posterity, they exaggerated somewhat the qualities which are so characteristic of their high and responsible office in our prison. A certain bombast of pose, an exaggerated expression of stern authority, an obvious consciousness of their own importance, and a noticeable contempt for those on whom their eyes were directed—all this disfigured their ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... admits no other interpretation but of Christ, as the Jehovah incarnate. In any other sense, it would be a specimen of more than Persian or Moghul hyperbole and bombast, of which there is no other instance in Scripture, and which no Christian would dare to attribute to an inspired writer. We know, too, that the elder Jewish Church ranked it among the Messianic Psalms. N.B. The Word in St. John, and the Name of the Most ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... return to our dramatic writers:... Thomas Kyd was the author of a tragedy entitled Jeronimo, which for the absurd horrors of its plot, and the mingled puerility and bombast of its language, was a source of perpetual ridicule to rival poets, while from a certain wild pathos combined with its imposing grandiloquence it was long a favorite with the people. The same person also ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... types, both of poetry and of prose, originated with the Greeks. Their writings are the fountainhead of the literature of Europe. They prized simplicity: they always had an intense disrelish for obscurity and bombast. The earliest poetry of the Greeks consisted of hymns to the gods. It was lyrical, an outpouring of personal feeling. The lyrical type was followed by the epic, where heroic deeds, or other events of thrilling interest, are the theme of song, and the personal emotion ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... gratification. Swarms of wits, accordingly, who are never wanting in any reign, either to eulogize what the government has sanctioned, or to infuse something of literary immortality into popular enthusiasm, were in requisition on this extraordinary occasion, and, as usual, vied with each other in bombast and the fervour of exaggeration. If one might credit the legends, Sir Francis accomplished much more than a visit to the antipodes, much more indeed, than ever man did before or since. Witness an epigram on him preserved in the Censura Literaria. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... resumed my walk. "The key to an empire!" I said my own words over, and could have blushed for their tone of bombast. They were true, but they sounded false, I looked at my surroundings, and marveled that a situation that was of real dignity could wear so mean a garb. The sandy cove where I stood was on the mainland, and sheltered four settlements. Behind lay the forest; in front stretched Lake ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... praises Oxford?—some small buzzing thing, Some starveling songster on a tiny wing,— (N.B. They call the insect Bob, I know, I heard a printer's devil call it so)— So fondly tells his admiration vast No one can call the chastened strains bombast, Though epitheted substantives immense Claim for each lofty sound the caret sense," ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... most unlike the rooster is the most spiritual part of love. All will agree on that, schisms only arise when one tries to decide what does go farthest from the bird's automatic mechanism. Certainly not a Dante-Beatrice affair which is only the negation of the rooster in terms of the swooning bombast of adolescence, the first onslaught of a force which the sufferer cannot control or inhabit with all the potentialities of his body and soul. But the rooster is troubled by no dreams of a divine orgy, no carnival-loves like Beethoven's Fourth Symphony, no heroic and shining lust gathering and ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... body politic, of which we ourselves are a part, and are they not entitled to their opinion and modes of expressing it, providing it be done with decorum and with a proper respect for the opinions of their adversaries? Why then do we or they employ, through the press and in rhetorical bombast, opprobrious epithets, fit only for the pot-house or the shambles? Shall we men and citizens, each of us a pillar upholding the crowning dome of our nationality, be taught, like vexed and querulous children, the impotence of personal abuse? Why seek to lay ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... established as significant, the cry for the emphasis of that fact was—without phosphorus no thought is possible. We can much more relevantly declare that without thyroid, no thought, no growth, no distinctive humanity or even animality is possible. For the epigram about phosphorus was bombast, since it can be declaimed with equal truth that without oxygen, without carbon, without nitrogen, without any of the food elements that go to make up the chemical composition of brain matter, no thought ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... (loquitur). — The mischief a secret any of them know, above the consuming of coals and drawing of usquebaugh! Howsoever they may pretend, under the specious names of Geber, Arnold, Lulli, or bombast of Hohenheim, to commit miracles in art, and treason against nature! As if the title of philosopher, that creature of glory, were to be fetched out of a furnace! I am their crude, and their sublimate, their precipitate, and their unctions; ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... a worse than inadequate idea of this wonderful oration, for they give merely a few fragments, in which they have contrived either to select their examples with the most curious infelicity, or to blunder them into bombast. But nothing can be more childish than to suppose, that Pitt would have given his praise to tawdry metaphor, that Burke would have done honour to feeble truisms, that Fox should have been unable to distinguish between logic and looseness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... Theophrastus, Bombast of Hohenheim, known by the name of Paracelsus, and the substance of his teachings concerning Cosmology, Anthropology, Pneumatology, Magic and Sorcery, Medicine, Alchemy, and Astrology, Philosophy, and Theosophy, extracted and translated from his rare and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... Nereids! A barn metamorphosed into a cascade in a pantomime is full as sublime an effort of genius. I do not know whether the "Arabian Nights" are of Oriental origin or not: I should think not, because I never saw any other Oriental composition that was not bombast without genius, and figurative without nature; like an Indian screen, where you see little men on the foreground, and larger men hunting tigers above in the air, which they take for perspective. I do not think the Sultaness's narratives very natural or very probable, but there ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... translations, both from the Spanish of Juan Perez de Montalvan (1602-1638), is dedicated by Phillips to the Marchioness of Dorchester, in what Godwin calls "an extraordinary style of fustian and bombast."[2] With the exception, of such affectation in style, which Phillips afterwards threw off, there is nothing ill to report of these early performances of his; and two translations from the Spanish were a creditable proof of accomplishment. But still ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... name, Bombast, used to this day as a synonym of loud, violent, and empty talk. To understand it at all, we must go back and think a little over these same occult sciences which were believed in by thousands during the fifteenth and ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... august character of the assembly to which they are addressed, sufficiently indicate the manner in which they ought to be uttered. Instead of this Mr. Cooper (no doubt with the view to avoid pomposity and bombast) threw into them an air of familiarity like that of a person narrating a private transaction to an intimate friend or acquaintance: Yet no sooner does he come to the impassioned parts, where strong emotions call forth the manly energies, than he flames up with the character. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... ideas of which style is the garb, his taste was excellent. He was well acquainted with the great Greek writers; and, though unable fully to appreciate their creative genius, admired the majestic simplicity of their manner, and had learned from them to despise bombast and tinsel. It is easy, we think, to discover, in The Spectator and The Guardian, traces of the influence, in part salutary and in part pernicious, which the mind of Boileau had on the mind ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... cups, of his coming marriage with one of the belles of W——, and, last evening, he openly avowed that to-day, he should 'carry off Miss Sybil Lamotte, in spite of her high and mighty family, and in the face of all the town.' Of course, no one who heard regarded these things, save as the bombast of a half drunken braggart and liar. To-day, young Evarts and his still wilder chum, encountered him just setting forth with his fine turnout and wonderfully gotten up. They jested on his fine appearance, and for once he evaded their questions, and seemed anxious to be rid of them. ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Men are human still, certainly, yet genuine patriotism appears to be a sine qua non now, where bombast answered in the old day. Corruption is no longer accepted. Public men then were surprisingly simple, surprisingly cheap and limited in their methods. There were two rules for public and private life. It was thought quixotic, I gather from studying the documents of the ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... Being unable to write to purpose with my own hand, this forenoon was a sort of holiday to me. The third volume of Count Robert is fairly begun, but I fear I shall want stuff to fill it, for I would not willingly bombast it with things inappropriate. If I could fix my mind to the task to-day, my temper, notwithstanding my oath, sets strong towards politics, where I would be sure of making a figure, and feel I could carry with me a great part of the middle-class, who wait ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... owing to an evening light, which cast strong mellow shades on the figures, and gave an effect of reality to the fine white marble of which they are composed; but their merits are very striking, and are quite unalloyed by the graphic bombast of which the most able French artists have been with too much truth accused. The character of the Dauphin, whose exemplary life in the midst of a corrupt court, was a tacit reproof which his haughty father could ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... reissued in a volume, provided a somewhat solemn preface, in which they say: "The principal poems in this volume, under the title of the 'Echo,' owed their origin to the accidental suggestion of a moment of literary sportiveness, at a time when pedantry, affectation, and bombast pervaded most of the pieces published in the gazettes, which were then the principal vehicles of literary information. Willing to lend their aid to check the progress of false taste in American literature, the authors conceived that ridicule ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... other hand, how he despised fustian and bombast. His "Bah!" delivered explosively, was often like a breath of fresh air in a stuffy room. Several years ago, before I came here—and it is one of the historic stories of the county—there was a semi-political Fourth of July celebration with a number of ambitious orators. One of ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... himself the credit of having advised the despatch of a letter to Strongbow. He also gives us the letter, which probably was his own composition, as it is written in the same strain of bombast as his praises of his family.—Hib. Expug. lib. i. c. 12. It commences thus: "We have watched the storks and swallows; the summer birds are come and gone," &c. We imagine that Dermod's style, if he ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... direction nearly east from the Three Marys, the reader will find, on most maps, a small river, called by the Spaniards, in their usual style of bombast, El Rio Grande, or the Great River; though the identical legs that I now stand upon have waded across it at low water, and, except cutting my foot with an oyster-shell, there was nothing very remarkable in the exploit. At the mouth of this mighty stream is an ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... the afternoon the straggling remnant of a sea breeze drifted up the river and tempered the scorching heat. Then the captain of the Honda drained his last glass of red rum in the posada, reiterated to his political affiliates with spiritous bombast his condensed opinion anent the Government, and dramatically signaled the pilot to get ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... if Carleton persisted in holding out, and a prophecy attributed to Montgomery that he would eat his Christmas dinner either in Quebec or in Hell—these were some of the blood-curdling items that came in by petticoat or arrow post. One of the most active purveyors of all this bombast was Jerry Duggan, a Canadian 'patriot' barber ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... complete and intelligible sentence.[1693] The words I shall utter will be fraught with sense, free from ambiguity (in consequence of each of them not being symbols of many things), logical, free from pleonasm or tautology, smooth, certain, free from bombast, agreeable or sweet, truthful, not inconsistent with the aggregate of three, (viz., Righteousness, Wealth and Pleasure), refined (i.e., free from Prakriti), not elliptical or imperfect, destitute of harshness or difficulty of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... the creed must fail that cannot recognise any degrees of mental capacity; that cannot understand that man has a soul that cannot be confined within any man-drawn boundaries. This German-creed sweeps the earth with all the bombast of a war-mad Kaiser. It is going to fail, but not till men who think will rise and fight for recognition of their immortality. It will be the ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... interpretation but of Christ, as the Jehovah incarnate. In any other sense it would be a specimen of more than Persian or Moghul hyperbole, and bombast, of which there is no other instance in Scripture, and which no Christian would dare to attribute to an inspired writer. We know, too, that the elder Jewish Church ranked it among the Messianic Psalms.—N.B. The word in St. John and the Name of the Most ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... rolled off the couch like Richard the Third. He sat a moment on the floor, with a finger in each eye; and then, finding he was neither daubing, ranting, nor deluging earth with "acts," he accused himself of indolence, and sat down to write a small tale of blood and bombast; he took his seat at the deal table with some alacrity, for he had ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... said; I at once come to the conclusion that they are either hypocrites, or there is nothing in them. But, with respect to Shakespeare, whom I have not read for thirty years, is he not rather given to bombast, 'crackling bombast,' as I think I have said in ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... best can belie, 50 A thousand are prudes who for CHARITY write, And fill up their sheets with spleen, envy, and spite[,] One million are bards, who to Heaven aspire, And stuff their works full of bombast, rant, and fire, T'other million are wags who in Grubstreet attend, 55 And just like a cobbler the old writings mend, The twenty are those who for pulpits indite, And pore over sermons all Saturday night. And now my good friends—who come after I mean, As I ne'er wore a cassock, or dined ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... authorities in thwarting their plans, to cross the border, as was the case in 1866. So they worked unceasingly and enthusiastically in maturing their plans, while they maintained absolute silence as to their intentions. The boasting bombast which had been so largely indulged in previous to the Raid of 1866 was not manifested on this occasion, consequently little interest was taken by the general ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... of a shock to remember that this medley of poetry, bombast, and myth will eventually reach the ears of no other person than the Octavius of Antony and Cleopatra; and the contrast is the more remarkable when one recalls the brilliant scene of negotiation and diplomacy in the latter play, which ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... the miraculous is excused, the reader will find nothing else unworthy of his perusal. There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... so grand, we men, "noble animals, great in our deaths and splendid even in our ashes," that we can not yield to a common fate without some overstrained and bombast conceit that the elements themselves give warning. Casca, in "Julius Caesar," rehearses some few of the prodigies which predicted ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... as a nation, are following closely this golden mean, that our wisdom has enabled us to discover that which for so many ages has remained hidden from men, were simply egotistical bombast; for it were to assert that with us human nature had lost its fallibility and human judgment become unerring. Yet we may safely assert that no system exists at the present day which so clearly tends toward the attainment of such a mean, and which contains within itself ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the movement, foolish men then tried to stay these moral forces. Northern merchants and politicians cried, "Peace!" and the Southern successors of Calhoun lifted the old club, the threat of secession; but the agitation went on all over the North. Toombs, the Southern senator, tried sheer bombast, and said he would call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill monument. Timid men in the North began to cry: "Conciliate, conciliate!" But there can be warfare, and only warfare between darkness and light, between ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... it to himself with his mouth pulled down at the corners, the worst of it was that under the bombast, under the vituperative utterances, the catch phrases of radicalism, there remained the grains of truth. Starr knew that the masses of Mexico were suffering, broken under the tramplings of revolution and counter-revolution that swept back and forth from gulf to gulf. Still, ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... poor chap's foolish bombast, as I thought it; but I have often wondered since whether the gift of that cheap pipe did not, after all, alter ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... morbid and unnatural fatness; and, when it is in such a state that it would be sent away in disgust from any table, he offers it to the judges. The object of the poetical candidate, in like manner, is to produce, not a good poem, but a poem of that exact degree of frigidity or bombast which may appear to his censors to be correct or sublime. Compositions thus constructed will always be worthless. The few excellences which they may contain will have an exotic aspect and flavour. In general, prize sheep are good ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat and insipid; his comick wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him: No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... Koerner's soul was most ardently engrossed with the supposed and the real sufferings of his time, with the dignity and the misfortune of his people, and with the necessity and sacredness of the war. Let no one scent any bombast in all this, but, on the contrary, let him admire my cleverness in condensing into three lines, everything that Theodor Koerner expressed in a whole volume, in Lyre and Sword! If, therefore, his war-songs are bad, we shall be justified in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... in any literature. Nature is systematically outraged in one and all—from beginning to end. Never was such mouthing seen and heard beneath moon and stars. Through the whole range of rant he rages like a man inspired. He is the emperor of bombast. Yet these plays contain many passages of powerful declamation—not a few of high eloquence; some that in their argumentative amplitude, if they do not reach, border on the sublime. Nor are their wanting outbreaks of genuine passion among the utmost extravagances of false sentiment—when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... analyse its excellence. In the domain of art the word 'Hellenic' implies absolute truth of form, absolute truth of taste, grace and elegance. It means the selecting and simplifying of essentials into an ideal shape; and therefore it implies the absence of all superfluity, incongruousness, bombast, extravagance or purposelessness. The Parthenon and the statue of the grey-eyed goddess standing up in faultless symmetry against the clear blue sky of Attica; Plato's Apology of Socrates breathing serene and ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Boileau, hurried along by the prevailing enthusiasm, forgot the good sense and good taste to which he owed his reputation. He fancied himself a lyric poet, and gave vent to his feelings in a hundred and sixty lines of frigid bombast about Alcides, Mars, Bacchus, Ceres, the lyre of Orpheus, the Thracian oaks and the Permessian nymphs. He wondered whether Namur, had, like Troy, been built by Apollo and Neptune. He asked what power could subdue a city stronger than that before ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the amazingly minute and graphic dramatisation of the life, disappointments, and excuses of any shrub or beast that he happened to be addressing, his genius has a curious resemblance to that of Burns. But if he avoided the weakness of Burns' verses to animals, the occasional morbidity, bombast, and moralisation on himself, the credit is surely due to a cleaner ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... will stir up a few of the respectable otiose souls there if he has an opportunity. There is a good deal of swagger about him; he believes in carry a stick and turning it; in admiring himself and letting other people know that he is of a cypher; there is much conceit and ever so much bombast about him; he likes giving historical lectures; thinks he is an authority on everything appertaining to Elizabeth, Mary, the Prince of Orange, &c.; is fond of attacking Bishop Goss, and getting into a groove of garrulous declamation concerning Papists; ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... significant of, sweet images or thoughts, were themselves sweet. Mr. C. was asked what he thought of Klopstock. He answered, that his fame was rapidly declining in Germany; that an Englishman might form a correct notion of him by uniting the moral epigram of Young, the bombast of Hervey, and the minute description of Richardson. As to sublimity, he had, with all Germans, one rule for producing it;—it was, to take something very great, and make it very small in comparison with that which you ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... impressiveness. And then the pitfalls which lie about the feet of the Frenchman who has to speak of 1793,—the terrible year of the modern epoch! The delirium of the Terror haunts most of the revolutionary historians, and the choicest examples in all literature of bombast, folly, emptiness, political immorality, inhumanity, formal repudiation of common sense and judgment, are to be found in the rhapsodies which men of letters, some of them men of eminence, call histories of the Revolution, or lives of this or ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... order, our friend became from that moment something superior, something exclusive, something supercilious, arrogant, exacting,—Asirvadam, the high Brahmin,—a creature of wide strides without awkwardness, towering airs without bombast, Sanscrit quotations without pedantry, florid phraseology without hyperbole, allegorical illustrations and proverbial points without sententiousness, fanciful flights without affectation, and formal strains of compliment without ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... only when the shades of night have settled down that the fire within manifests itself, making the hill appear an immense glowing mass. All the hills around the town, some of which are very high, have a scorched and blackened look. An old Anglesea bard, rather given to bombast, wishing to extol the abundant cheer of his native isle said: "The hills of Ireland are blackened by the smoke from the kitchens of Mona." With much more propriety might a bard of the banks of the Taf, who should wish to apologise for the rather smutty appearance of his native vale ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... the jury on the subject of dishonored womanhood and the merciless bestiality of certain male types had been more than a legal oration. He had expressed himself in it and had spent two full days lost in admiration of the echoes of his bombast.... "Men who follow the vile dictates of their lower natures, who sow the whirlwind and expect to reap the roses thereby; cynical, soulless men who take a woman as one takes a glove, to wear, admire, and discard; depraved men who prowl like demons at the heels of virtue, fawning ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... nor at any other time should I advise you to go any further," said Madeline laughingly, for it was hard to take the bombast of Mr. Early very seriously. He made her think now of a sort of pouter pigeon. And Sebastian remained only partly satisfied as to the effect which he wished to produce. He wanted to give her something to think about, and so ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... from the text. 1. Bombast and mock-heroics. 2. Horse-play and slap-sticks. 3. Burlesque, farce and extravagance of situation and dialogue. a. True burlesque. b. True farce. c. Extravagances obviously unnatural and merely ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... should be in one place, its whole action deal with one single series of events, and the time it represented as elapsing be no greater than the time it took in playing. He was always pre-eminently an Englishman of his own day with a scholar's rather than a poet's temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, and only limited because in ruling out these things he ruled out much else that was essential to the spirit of the time. As a craftsman he was uncompromising; he never bowed to the tastes ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... fashionable for its wit; so famous in the court of Queen Elizabeth, and is said to have introduced so remarkable a change in our language, I have seen and read. It is an unnatural affected jargon, in which the perpetual use of metaphors, allusions, allegories, and analogies, is to pass for wit, and stiff bombast for language; and with this nonsense the court of Queen Elizabeth (whose times afforded better models for stile and composition, than almost any since) became miserably infected, and greatly help'd to let in all ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... many good men, wise, men, learned men to attend upon him with all submission, as an appendix to his riches, for that respect alone, because he hath more wealth and money," [336]"to honour him with divine titles, and bombast epithets," to smother him with fumes and eulogies, whom they know to be a dizzard, a fool, a covetous wretch, a beast, &c. "because he is rich?" To see sub exuviis leonis onagrum, a filthy loathsome carcass, a Gorgon's head puffed up by parasites, assume this unto himself, glorious titles, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... whether it may have the same operation upon other men that it has upon me, but when I hear our architects thunder out their bombast words of pilasters, architraves, and cornices, of the Corinthian and Doric orders, and suchlike jargon, my imagination is presently possessed with the palace of Apollidon; when, after all, I find them but the paltry pieces of my own ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... of English poetry—of solid honest thought expressed in straight forward Saxon. The story, which is one of the chivalrous days of Spain, while it is devoid of trick is full of thrilling interest, and its style, while it is eminently poetical, neither swells into bombast nor descends to the foppery so common among the verse-makers of our day. There is a stately, old-fashioned tread in the diction, as of a man in armor, who, should he attempt to gather flowers of mere prettiness, would crush them at the first touch of his iron ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... garters, and roses, and with the help of many pillows and other such farcing, so filled the garments which otherwise had hung upon him like a shawl from a peg, and made of himself such a 'sweet creature of bombast' that, with ludicrous unlikeness of countenance, he bore in figure no distant resemblance ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... ferocious. Imperial Gardes look magnificent. Innumerable little red-legged soldiers of the line dance about, gesticulating vehemently. Grisettes hang about the necks of departing braves. A great many tears are shed, and a great deal of bombast uttered. For the invincible soldiers of France are off to fight for an idea; and doesn't every one of them carry a marshal's ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... side with this chastened English prose, we have men of genius who have fallen into evil habits. Bulwer, who knew better, would quite revel in a stagey bombast; Dickens, with his pathos and his humour, was capable of sinking into a theatrical mannerism and cockney vulgarities of wretched taste; Disraeli, with all his wit and savoir faire, has printed some rank ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... this does not exist, laughter accompanies the appreciation of humour, and in silence there would be little pleasure. The cause of mirth also differs as the persons affected, and the farce which creates a roar in the pit will often not raise a smile in the boxes. Swift writes—"Bombast and buffoonery, by nature lofty and light, soar highest of all in the theatre, and would be lost in the roof, if the prudent architect had not contrived for them a fourth place called the twelvepenny gallery and there planted a suitable colony." ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... the torch to the wooden images set up by his political predecessors. He made a speech that is unintelligible, all wind, sound and bombast, but was cheered ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... derived from the demeanor of the prisoner in our several examinations is that he is truthful in his statements and shows no desire to conceal anything. He undoubtedly has an elevated idea of his importance, but is free from bombast. In the course of his examination when the question of his views or opinions about himself came up he drew from his pocket the document herewith submitted as Exhibit 4, which he says he prepared as a defense, saying: "Perhaps I can help you, Gentlemen." He has shown every ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... haranguing way; he was no stranger to the rules of art, and knew well how to make his matter subservient to the subject he handled. His diction and language was easy and fluent, void of all affectation and bombast, and has a kind of undesigned negligent elegance which arrests the reader's attention. Considering the time he lived in, it might be said, that he carried the orator's prize from his contemporaries in Scotland, and was not at that time inferior to the best pulpit orator in England. While he lived ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... fellow-passengers with the air of a lord. Nothing could overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was written on his brow. He was then in his ill days; but I can imagine him in Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder. As we moved in the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society. I do not think I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or interesting; but there was entertainment ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not about to be put down, though the huge globe crack about his ears. After this, he calmly worded on, seeming to regard the judge's stinging observation with the same sort of indifference as the lion would a dew-drop on his mane; and having poured out all manner of voluminous bombast, he gradually ran down, and came to a conclusion; then, jumping up refreshed, like the bounding of a tennis-ball, he proceeded to call witnesses; and, judging from what happened at the inquest, as well as because he wished to overwhelm a suspected and suspecting witness, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and exclaimed pompously, "Don't you attempt bombast with me, Mr. Cospatric. I am as safe from your personal violence here as I should be ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... long, except the last. They are written in the best modern Lied style, and are quite unhackneyed. It is always the unexpected that happens, though this unexpected thing almost always proves to be a right thing. Without any sense of strain or bombast he reaches superb climaxes; without eccentricity he is individual; and his songs are truly interpreters of the words they express. Of these five, "Wann die Rosen aufgeblueht" is a wonderfully fine and fiery work; "Die Stunde sei ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... came from the lions, whereof there were great numbers in this veld. The prevalence of these hungry beasts forced us to watch our cattle very closely while they grazed, and at night, wherever it was possible, to protect them and ourselves in "bombast," or fences of thorns, within which we lit fires to scare away wild beasts. Notwithstanding these precautions, we lost several of the oxen, and ourselves ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... thing. I have a conception of history more just, I am confident, than theirs."[68] "Gibbon," said Carlyle in a public lecture, is "a greater historian than Robertson but not so great as Hume. With all his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave a more futile account of human things than he has done of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; assigning no profound cause for these phenomena, nothing but diseased nerves, and all sorts of miserable motives, to ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... the work of Luther, and the rector of the University had pled for mercy. Luther replied that Leipzig deserved to be placed in the pillory[31], that he had no desire to make sport of the city and its university, but was pressed into it by the bombast of the Romanist, who boasted that he was a "public teacher of the Holy Scripture at Leipzig"; and by the fact that Alveld had dedicated his work to the city and its Council. Alveld answered Lonicer and Luther bitterly, but ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... halt before we come to Zagreb, your capital." Those five will perhaps some day explain to their comrades how quickly Zagreb can be reached.... As yet those whom they left behind them had not lost their bombast: a manifesto was issued by them which declared that five true patriots had sallied forth to Saint Anna, for the purpose of parleying with the Constituent Assembly, and that in a barbarous fashion they had been ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... instinct with genius and have proved to be so immortal that they may well be considered as ideal witnesses to the triumph of quality over mere quantity or sensational display. To-day, when we suffer from musical bombast, their refined message ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... two particular claims upon our regard. He gave us laudanum, a discovery of incalculable blessing to mankind. And from his fourth baptismal name, which he inherited from his father, we have our familiar term, 'bombast.' Readers interested in the known facts concerning the "master-mind, the thinker, the explorer, the creator," the forerunner of Mesmer and even of Darwin and Wallace, who began life with the sounding appellation ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... believe Garrick borrowed some of his improvements from Otway's "Caius Marius.") I don't know, and don't care. It is not Shakespeare. It may "show something of the skill of kindred genius," as the preface to the acting edition says it does. I confess I do not see it. I would have such bombast delivered with the traditional accompaniment of red fire; and the curtain should descend majestically to the sound of slow music. That would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... of the rank to which you have been raised. Of course, it has been different hitherto," he said, endeavouring in his own mind to excuse the indiscretion of that Kappa-kappa. This lecture also she turned to wholesome food and digested, obtaining from it some strength and throwing off the bombast by which a weaker mind might have been inflated. She understood, at any rate, that St. James' Square must be her doom; but while acknowledging this to herself, she made a little resolution that a good deal would have to be done to the house before it was ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... some little len'th o' time, your honour," said Jones. "Me and my messmates took little heed o't for a time, thinkin' it were only Scrivings' bombast, 'cause ye see, sir, he's only a blessed mouth of a ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... purposely wander from the subject; you wish to escape the prison as well as the gallows, in spite of your philosophical bombast. ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... operated to bring it about but British greed, and the British lust for paramountcy and suzerainty and possession? Liberal, or Conservative, or Radical, or Unionist, the diplomats and lawyers and financiers who urge on your political machinery by bombast and bribes and catchwords and lying promises, are swayed by one motive—governed by one desire—lands and diamonds and gold. Wealth that is the property of other men, soil that has been fertilised by the sweat of a ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... characters had all been prepared for a different sort of man. Our tragedy hero was a round, robustious fellow, with an amazing voice; who stamped and slapped his breast until his wig shook again; and who roared and bellowed out his bombast, until every phrase swelled upon the ear like the sound of a kettle-drum. I might as well have attempted to fill out his clothes as his characters. When we had a dialogue together, I was nothing before him, with ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... the woman who through all confusion and filthiness keeps her adamantine soul unscathed, to the moment when she attains her destiny, namely, to spend a night of love with the dying Agathon Geyer and to bear him the first child of a better time, Beatus, the fortunate. Sultry sensuality and outrageous bombast characterize the work, the action of which is not clearly set forth, but floats in a sea of nebulous somnambulistic vagueness. Visionary representation and mythical creation are indeed the program which Wassermann lays out for himself in a theoretical treatise, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... amid these stupid exhibitions of mob violence. Then to end up, after tramping the streets with other gaping idlers till late at night, he would make his way back, with weary limbs and aching ribs, his head whirling confusedly with bombast and loud talk, through the sleeping city to the Faubourg Saint-Germain. There, as he strode past some aristocratic mansion and saw the scutcheon blazoned on its facade and the two lions lying white in the moonlight on guard before its closed portal, he would cast a look of hatred at the building. ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... bad; the verse is generally very bad; and one turns with relief to the author's connecting links, wishing only at times that he would not worry about proving his point quite so thoroughly. The bombast and the bullying, the self-pity and the cruelty, and, most of all, the instinctive claim, typical of Germany to-day, to prescribe one law for themselves but something quite different for the rest of the world, run through all these quotations, even the earliest. But the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... of bombast was not out of place. It jumped so far with the humour of the convicts that they set up a feeble cheer, at which Sylvia frowned. Frightened as she was, the prison-bred child was as much astonished at hearing convicts cheer as a fashionable ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... and trying to dissuade them from "spending their wits" any longer in "making plays," spitefully declares: "There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in the country." Doubtless this charge of adopting and adapting the productions of others includes some dramas which have not been preserved, as the company to which Shakespeare ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... characteristics and by the lack of a third. The two that he possessed were taste and rhythm. At the start he was free from the prevalent vice of his time, rhetoricality. His "Address to the Voters of Sangamon County" which was his first state paper, was as direct, as free from bombast, as the greatest of his later achievements. Almost any other youth who had as much of the sense of language as was there exhibited, would have been led astray by the standards of the hour, would have mounted the spread-eagle and flapped its wings in rhetorical clamor. But Lincoln ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... to put the sin at a distance. And at last his eyes seemed to open to some new ways. He found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... German Press is to me a revelation of bombast, self-righteousness, falsehood, and hypocrisy. What shocks one most is the familiar and perpetual calling upon God to witness that He alone has led the Germans to victory and blessed their cause. I read a poem yesterday, which began "Du Gott der Deutschen," ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... the very teeth of the accepted theories of war and the theatre. Shaw does not know that it is unpardonable sin to have his characters make long speeches at one another, apparently thinking that this embargo applies only to long speeches which consist mainly of bombast and rhetoric. There never was an author who showed less predilection for a specific medium by which to accomplish his results. He recognized, early in his days, many things awry in the world and he assumed the task of mundane reformation with a confident spirit. It seems ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... bombast, had found some difficulty in maintaining her expression of uplifted approbation while Mr. Potts's rhetoric rolled; her willingness that Mr. Potts should serve the cause did not blind her to his inadequacy unless kept under ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... subsequent plays he brought it to a degree of strength and flexibility which left little for Shakspere to do but to take it as he found it. Tamburlaine was a crude, violent piece, full of exaggeration and bombast, but with passages here and there of splendid {105} declamation, justifying Ben Jonson's phrase, "Marlowe's mighty line." Jonson, however, ridiculed, in his Discoveries, the "scenical strutting and furious vociferation" of Marlowe's hero; and Shakspere put a quotation from ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... letters, one is struck with the diplomatically(?) cunning composition of them. There does not seem to be a manly phrase from beginning to end. Trickery, suspicion, cruelty, veiled or apparent, and an occasional dash of pious consideration and bombast sums up these perfidious documents. A few extracts will convey precisely the character of the men who were carrying on negotiations which should have ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... it was not unmerited. Ellenborough's theatrical bombast, like that of Napoleon at the Pyramids, recoiled upon him, bringing a hornets' nest about his own ears and leading to his recall. As a matter of fact, too, the gates which he held in such reverence were found to be replicas ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... it were better to stand or fly, two active young men, clad in fantastic masking habits, resembling wild men, and holding great clubs, seized upon him, saying, in a tragical tone: "Yield thee, man of bells and bombast—yield thee, rescue or no rescue, or truly thou art ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... thing. I have heard men speak of my kind of art as 'the noble pursuit of Truth,' and so on. I don't care for such phrases; they may mean something, but as a rule come of the very spirit so opposed to my own—that which feels it necessary to justify art by bombast. The one object I have in life is to paint a bit of the world just as I see it. I exhaust myself in vain toil; I shall never succeed; but I am right to persevere, I am right to go on ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... or Pope Joan," is a bombast, silly performance of Elkanah Settle; the catastrophe of which consists in the accouchement of the Pope in the streets of Rome. The aid necessary in the conclusion of an English tragedy, (usually ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... geht fortan in Deutschland auf." Reden Friedrich Wilhelms, p. 9. In conversation with Bassermann Frederick William at a later time described his ride through Berlin as "a comedy which he had been made to play." The bombast at any rate was all ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... art, leisure, and study." The "taste" and the "art" are principally those of the pseudo-classic style, an imitation of "ancient Greece and imperial Rome," which the French of the XVIII century carried to such unpleasant excess. The general characteristics of the imitation, size and bombast, are well epitomised in the principal statue of Montpellier's fine Champ de Mars, which represents the high-heeled and luxurious Louis XIV in the unfitting armour of a Roman Imperator, mounted on a huge and restive charger. ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... the son of Ammon. Heracles and Dionysus, indeed! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Alexander; when will you learn to drop that bombast, and know yourself for ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... has been called by an able historian "the afterclap of the Revolution." The Revolution was, indeed, true thunder—a courageous and, in the main, high-principled struggle. Its afterclap of 1812 displayed little but empty bombast and greed. In the one, brave leaders risked their lives in that defence of rights which has made their enterprise an epoch in man's history; in the other, a mean and braggart spirit actuated its promoters to strike in the back ...
— An Account Of The Battle Of Chateauguay - Being A Lecture Delivered At Ormstown, March 8th, 1889 • William D. Lighthall
... Russia, and the said Northerne regions, into Turkie. The foresaid merchants transport thither ermines and gray furres, with other rich and costly skinnes. Others carrie cloathes made of cotton or bombast, and silke, and diuers kindes of spices. [Sidenote: The citie of Matriga.] But vpon the East part of the said prouince standeth a Citie called Matriga [Footnote: Azou.], where the riuer Tanais [Footnote: The Don.] dischargeth his streames into the sea of Pontus, the mouth whereof is twelue miles ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... such a snow-storm in his imagination, when telling the shepherds to be kind to their helpless charge, addressed them in language which, in an ordinary mood, would have been bombast. "Shepherds," says he, "baffle the raging year!" How? Why merely by filling their pens with food. But the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the scholar Gian Antonio Porcellio dei Pandoni, commissioned by Alfonso of Naples to write a report of the campaign. It is written, not in the purest, but in a fluent Latin, a little too much in the style of the humanistic bombast of the day, is modelled on Caesar's Commentaries, and interspersed with speeches, prodigies, and the like. Since for the past hundred years it had been seriously disputed whether Scipio Africanus or Hannibal was the greater, Piccinino through the whole ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... had said that "in four weeks from the time of the declaration of war the whole of Upper and part of Lower Canada would be in possession of the United States." All of this was only the spread-eagle bombast of amateur filibusters, as events proved, but good cause for Brock, who had been appointed janitor of Canada and been given the keys of the ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... means a fool. I have occasionally been tempted to think he is, especially when he talks about having his throat cut at night; but he has always shown me in the end that he has in him a vein of strong common sense. He recognized that I was talking bombast when I spoke about the supreme crisis; but, curiously enough, he is quite convinced of Babberly's sincerity when he says things of ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... beginning lost.] Vices of Style opposed to the Sublime: Affectation, Bombast, False Sentiment, Frigid Conceits. The cause ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... sincerity will render me unaffected; for wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, nor in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart. I shall be employed about things, not words! and, anxious to render my sex more respectable members of society, I shall try to avoid that flowery diction which has ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... Drink deep, my brave boys, of the bastinado; Of stramazons, tinctures, and slie passatas; Of the carricado, and rare embrocado; Of blades, and rapier-hilts of surest guard; Of the Vincentio and Burgundian ward. Have we not bravely tossed this bombast foil-button? Win gold and wear gold, boys, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... tragedians may give some weak reflection of Euripides or even of Sophocles, but none have ventured upon the sacred territory of the father of the tragic drama. He defies all imitation. His genius is so near the verge of bombast, that to approach his sublime is to rush into the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was awake, he was full of bombast, that major! When he was asleep he snored outrageously. Ugh! For the first time in my life I hate ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... me more than to see people assenting to everything that they hear said; I at once come to the conclusion that they are either hypocrites, or there is nothing in them. But, with respect to Shakespeare, whom I have not read for thirty years, is he not rather given to bombast, "crackling bombast," as I think I have said in one of ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... he came from the Temple, his morals do show; But where his deep law is, few mortals yet know: His rhetoric, bombast, silly jests, are by far More like to lampooning, than pleading at bar. Knock ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... turned in their seats—gazing through the dimness to a point in the Promenade near to where I was. The ghosts on the screen were forgotten. The faked patriotism of the songs we had listened to had become a thing of naught. Through the welter of bombast, excitement and emotion ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... nor was I fully carried away by their influence till after my uncle had procured me several opportunities of proving my proficiency in my calling. I may say without vanity that my speeches won approval; but I was revolted by the pompous, flowery bombast, without which I should have been hissed down, and though my parents rejoiced when I went home from Niku, Arsmoe, or some other little provincial town, with laurel-wreaths and gold pieces, to myself I always seemed an impostor. Still, for my father's sake, I dared not give ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... gets callous about the character of Washington, from a long experience of Fourth of July bombast in his praise. But seeing the struggles of other nations, and the deficiencies of the leaders who try to sustain them, the heart is again stimulated, and puts forth buds of praise. One appreciates the wonderful combination of events and influences that ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... me add] into dry and indelectable affectation, one sort of these scholars assume a style as rough as frequently are their manners; they spangle over their productions with metaphors; they tumble into bombast: the sublime, with them, lying in words, and not in sentiment, they fancy themselves most exalted when least understood; and down they sit, fully satisfied with their own performances, and call them MASCULINE. While a second ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... good that no Horses in the kingdom would match them. Homer, after having been very lavish in their praise, has given us their names, and the pedigree of two of them, which it seems were full brothers. He tells us, they were as swift as the wind, and in his bombast** way of writing, says they were immortal; which expression is exactly of the same style and meaning with our modern phrase high-bred, and could mean nothing else, because in the recital of the pedigree, he tells us, they were got by this same North-country ...
— A Dissertation on Horses • William Osmer
... finally been collected in a remarkable one-volume Inclusive Edition (1885-1918), an indispensable part of any student's library. This gifted and prolific creator, whose work was affected by the war, has frequently lapsed into bombast and a journalistic imperialism. At his best he is unforgettable, standing mountain-high above his host of imitators. His ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... unfortunate Emmet before him as a model. He addressed the judges as if he were about to expiate his error upon the scaffold, whereas he knew, as all Ireland knew, that it was not the intention of government to put the sentence of the law in force. This circumstance gave an air of display and bombast to a speech that, if the realities of the speaker's position had corresponded with it, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... essentially artificial. The music was pretty, the scenery was very fine, and the costumes were dazzling enough—from a distance; but when you've said that you've said everything. The situations were impossible and absurd. The speeches were bombast. The sentiment was silly and untrue. And Sardanapalus himself was none so distraught by his unpleasant dream and all his other troubles but that he was looking forward to his glass of whiskey-and-water between the acts. No, he didn't ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... "Pleasures of Hope," we find the last modified specimen of the evil. Hence, in Falconer the obsolete mythological allusions—the names with classical terminations—the perpetual apostrophes—the set and stilted speeches he puts into the mouths of heroes—the bombast, verbiage, and sounding sameness of much of his verse. Nor do we greatly admire the story which he introduces with the poem, nor the discrimination of his characters, nor, what may be called strictly, the pathos of the piece. Indeed, considering the size of the poem, there is ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... more interest in this melancholy, middle-aged man than she would have done if she had not been on the outlook for her Western type,—the man who was to combine all the qualities of chivalry, daring, bombast, and generosity, seasoned with piquant grammar, which she firmly believed to be the real thing. But notwithstanding this kindly and somewhat curious interest, she might never have made his acquaintance if it had not been for a rather ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... this, Vern, whose silly vanity would by no means allow him to put up with his not having been elected Commander-in-Chief, all on a sudden cried out in his sort of bombast, "Here they are coming, boys: now I will lead you to death or victory!"—actually a band of men was tramping full ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... Ruffhead, to have told Warburton, that "Young had much of a sublime genius, though without common sense; so that his genius, having no guide, was perpetually liable to degenerate into bombast. This made him pass a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets: but his having a very good heart enabled him to support the clerical character when he assumed it, first with decency, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson |
