"Bombastical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the next csarda, Maria allowed Hanak to draw nearer to her; her escort had to explain to the mob of peasants drinking in front of the door on what errand they were speeding. He did so in his usual boisterous bombastic fashion. ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... 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 are illiterate, ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... Murphy's Euphrasia presented to her. This frightened me a great deal; Juliet and Belvidera scarcely anybody can do ill, but Euphrasia I thought few people could do well, and I feared I was not one of them. Moreover, the language is at once so poor and so bombastic that I took double the time in getting the part by rote I should have taken for any part of Shakespeare's. My dress was beautiful; I think I will tell it you. You know you told me even an account of hat and feathers would interest you. My skirt was made immensely ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... and unadorned relation 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 ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... Pope 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;[9] 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 ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Rollin took place in 1842. His first speech was delivered on the subject of the secret-service money. The elocution was easy and flowing, the manner oratorical, the style somewhat turgid and bombastic. But in the course of the session M. Rollin improved, and his discourse on the modification of the criminal law, on other legal subjects, and on railways, were more sober specimens of style. In 1843 and 1844 M. Rollin frequently spoke; but though his speeches were a ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... perfect dignity returned, when the time had come, into a country privacy of life. His powerful sense never deserted him, and from the first he recognised that his Edinburgh popularity was but an ovation and the affair of a day. He wrote a few letters in a high-flown, bombastic vein of gratitude; but in practice he suffered no man to intrude upon his self-respect. On the other hand, he never turned his back, even for a moment, on his old associates; and he was always ready to sacrifice an acquaintance ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 best ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... Hervey could not learn to be less bombastic in his style and less vapid in his sentiments, for, after all, he had an eye for the sublime and beautiful both in the world around him and in the heavens above his head—a faculty very rare in the age in which he lived, and especially in the school to which he belonged. Occasionally he condescends ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... sweetly anent their American cousins and "the indissoluble bond of Anglo-Saxon brotherhood," when there was a fair prospect that John Bull would have to toe the scratch alone, at once forgot the blessed ties of consanguinity and assured the bombastic Spaniard that he would have "plenty of help should he decide to humble American impudence." The press of France and Germany discoursed in much the same manner, while the diplomats of those countries agreed ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... sure, also involves chance. Every man realizes it, and even the most bombastic bachelor has moments in which he humbly whispers: "There, but for the grace of God, go I." But that chance has a sugarcoating; it is swathed in egoistic illusion; it shows less stark and intolerable chanciness, so to speak, than the bald hazard of the die. Thus ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... homesick for Lancia, Quinones' gatherings, and, above all, the jokes of his colleague Valero; so he left the Gallician regions and came back to live with the Lancians. Valero, having become President of the Chamber, became every day more bombastic, noisy, and lisping. He was sitting on the left of the distinguished host. Facing him was Moro, the unattainable ideal of all the marriageable girls, whose indefatigable head easily stood twelve hours of tresillo without any ill-effects, or fatigue. Of all the institutions ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... who determined to make him President. They filled the 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
... natural form'; also the rule that each form of art should produce 'not every sort of pleasure but its proper pleasure'; and the sober language in which Aristotle, instead of speaking about the sequence of events in a tragedy being 'inevitable', as we bombastic moderns do, merely recommends that they should be 'either necessary or probable' and 'appear to happen ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... six or eight feet square, upon which, in high relief, is a bust of the great discoverer. As a work of art, the less said of this effigy the better. Beneath the image is an inscription sufficiently bombastic and Spanish in tone, but therein we observed no mention was made of the chains and imprisonment with which an ungrateful country rewarded this man whom history so delights to honor. It will be remembered that Columbus died at Valladolid ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... inundated with communications from the different nations, drawn in the most bombastic manner; for although they must have by this time realized that they were absolutely in his power, they were unable to set aside the boastful method of addressing their fellow-men which they had inherited from their savage ancestors, who, ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... can; cement it with blood; try the experiment!" Mr. Chestnut of South Carolina wished to "unfurl the Palmetto flag, fling it to the breeze ... and ring the clarion notes of defiance in the ears of an insolent foe." Such bombastic but confident language, of which a great quantity was uttered in this winter of 1860-61, may exasperate or intimidate according to the present temper of the opponent whose ear it assaults; for a while the North was more in condition ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... him, wrote to her frequently, no longer verses, but, which was much worse, prose, and that whole pages at a time. Thus, as the political 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, aide-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 enjoyment of their nature, ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... 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 those humble ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... not allowed, under the pretext that it scatters 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 favorite; succeeded ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... they durst not venture back to their drunken, miserable, desperate parents? I could tell things at which angels might shed tears, with much better reason for doing so than seems to me to exist in some of those more imposing occasions on which bombastic writers are wont to describe them as weeping. Ah, there is One who knows where the responsibility for all this rests! Not wholly with the wretched parents: far from that. They, too, have gone through the like: they had as little chance as their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... other hand, the rhetoric of the minor key, which seems poor at first blush, soon reveals itself to be more attractive. It moves with a livelier, more life-like rhythm; it is less bombastic. This rhetoric implies continence and basic economy of effort; it is like an agile man, lightly ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... 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 ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... where he 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 of slaying, ravaging, and ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... felt that for the particular time and place he bore the weight and responsibility of his race; that for him to fail meant general defeat; but he won, and nobly. His oration was Wendell Phillips's "Toussaint L'Ouverture," a speech which may now be classed as rhetorical—even, perhaps, bombastic; but as the words fell from "Shiny's" lips their effect was magical. How so young an orator could stir so great enthusiasm was to be wondered at. When, in the famous peroration, his voice, trembling ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... suffered a heavy defeat, though only 2500 of his big army had come into action. His casualties were 25 killed, 245 wounded, and 1036 drowned. A truce was effected and the forces withdrew to Taga, while, as for Kosami, though he attempted to deceive the Court by a bombastic despatch, he was recalled and degraded together with all the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... resulted from that act, 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 ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... instance, we 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 cluster ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... 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
... General John Pope, who had taken over a newly created Union Army made up of the commands of McDowell, Banks and Fremont, issued a bombastic and tactless order to his new command, making invidious comparisons between the armies in the west and those in the east. He said, "I hear constantly of 'taking strong positions and holding them,' of 'lines of retreat,' and of 'bases of supplies.' ...
— Rebel Raider • H. Beam Piper
... 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 ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... alliance—an alliance between Capitalism, with its great material influence, but barren of any one single exalted idea or principle on the one hand, and Jingoism, sterile, empty, soulless, but with a rich stock-in-trade of bombastic ideas and principles, prompted by the most selfish aspirations, ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... 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 the most abject and degraded ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... 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; ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... 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 ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... 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 three men, O'Connell ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... 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 sight of by ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... a 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 to have a decided line of conduct; and no one could ever say what particular ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... With one voice they decided in the negative, since they had only four hundred men available for landing, while the French garrison was no doubt much stronger, having had ample time to call the inhabitants to its aid. Church, therefore, after trying the virtue of a bombastic summons to surrender, and destroying a few houses, sailed back to Boston. It was a miserable retaliation for a barbarous outrage; as the guilty were out of reach, the invaders turned their ire ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... floor by this time, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, an anxious look upon his face that belied his bombastic words. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... 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 he ought ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... fresh upon it. Dear little mountain baby! I really believe that fellow got up before daylight, to climb that giddy height and secure its virgin freshness. And to think, in a moment of spite, I'd have given it to that bombastic warrior! (Pause.) That was a fine offer you refused just now, Miss Mary. Think of it: a home of luxury, a position of assured respect and homage; the life I once led, with all its difficulties smoothed away, its uncertainty dispelled,—think of it! My poor mother's dream fulfilled,—I, her daughter, ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... however, 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 ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... action and genuine passion. The tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up 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 stop ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... manner of manna for breakfast—and for lunch? a banana. Yes; on my way 'down town' I shall pass the Studio Building, where the B.'s live; I will buy one of them, but shall also steal—many glances at the Hamburg grapes, those peachiest of peaches, bombastic blackberries, and, O ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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 began ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... hours of the day 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 this question ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... as it is said, takes the place in the modern of fate in the ancient drama. Every man is run in a mould of iron, and may break, but cannot bend. The fitting prologue to the whole literature is provided by Marlowe's Tamburlaine, with his superhuman audacity and vast bombastic rants, the incarnation of a towering ambition which scorns all laws but its own devouring passion. Faustus, braving all penalties, human and divine, is another variety of the same type: and when we have to do with a weak character like Edward ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... invariably regret the things I do on the spur of the moment. That disclaimer of mine was a case in point. I am ashamed every time I think of my bursting out before an unconcerned public with that bombastic pow-wow about burning publishers' letters, and all that sort of imbecility, and about my not being an imitator, etc. Who would find out that I am a natural fool if I kept always cool and never let nature come ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... those who are not satisfied with proportion in form and harmony in tint; it will certainly not seem so to those who are more fortunately gifted. Indeed, compared either with Wilson's welter of words, now bombastic, now gushing, now horse-playful, or with the endless and heartbreaking antitheses of what Brougham ill-naturedly but truly called "Tom's snip-snap," it is infinitely preferable. The conclusion of the essay ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... 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, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... obeyed him only as the first among equals. What an inconsistency! The splendour and show that accompanied him everywhere, the pageantry and courtly pomp that surrounded him, and the decorations of the stars and ribands of the Legion of Honour, which he distributed with bombastic speeches among troops—to whom those political impositions and social cajoleries were novelties—made such an impression upon them, that had a bridge been then fixed between Calais and Dover, brave as your countrymen are, I should have trembled ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... was obtained a perfect system of intonation. The Chinese system is minutely exact in theory, bombastic in fancy. The Hindus sedulously avoided applying mathematics to their scales. The development of the scale is shown in the construction of the ancient Greek scale, the modern Japanese, and the aboriginal Australian scale, and the phonographed tunes of some of the Red Indians of North ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... exhilarant to which fatal reactions could not but attach. It was no part of the Diet of the Natural Man. The two nations that alone consume it—the English and the Chinese—are become, by its baneful influence on the imagination, the most easily deceived in the world. Their politics are a mass of bombastic illusions. Also it dries their skins. It tans the liver, hardens the coats of the stomach, makes the brain feverishly active, rots the nerve-springs; all that is still true. Nevertheless I now drink it, and shall drink it; for of all the effects ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... in their realism and naturalness are these little plays of the common folk than the elaborate Christmas dramas of more learned German writers, Catholic and Lutheran, who in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became increasingly stilted and bombastic. ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... 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 ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... 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 ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... Mrime's literary output is a triumph for the cause of local color. What he meant, and illustrates in his work, is that local color and remoteness in time and place are secondary to treatment and style, and that he regarded the romantic treatment and style as exaggerated and bombastic. After "La Guzla" he soon shows that Beyle's ideas have "singularly colored" his own, though not to the extent of affecting his originality. He attempts themes more closely allied to France and to his own time, choosing ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... to me Hath a somewhat bombastic savor. Any small scrap of paper's good. Thy signature will need a ...
— Faust • Goethe
... it! The "Santisima Trinidad," The old "Redoubtable's" hard sides, and ours, Will take the touse of this bombastic blow. Your grapnels and your boarding-hatchets—ready! We'll dash our eagle on the English deck, And swear ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... 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 has ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... 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 lost half my states, I was not alone, Russia was my ally. But Russia has ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... when Lord Ellenborough was Governor-General, a bombastic memorandum, addressed "To all the Princes and Chiefs and People of India," was ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... answered Ryhove; "I would rather make the attempt, relying upon God alone, and die like a man if needful, than live in eternal slavery. Like an ancient Roman," continued the young republican noble, in somewhat bombastic vein, "I am ready to wager my life, where my fatherland's welfare ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... years later (1862) J. Nevison, an Englishman, drifted into town and opened at 85 North Fourth Street. He got out a very bombastic circular which caused us to put out the one I enclose (illustration, page 436). Then came a party named Childs; and after him, Hugh Menown, grand-uncle of the present Menown, of Menown & Gregory; and Mat Hunt; all passed over to the Great Majority. After the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... considered their campaign 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
... Professor Sillig, with the view of urging him to intervene 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 ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... said to have 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 ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... radical insincerity as a poetic artist. This, added to the thin and artificial texture of his wit, is the true explanation of the paradox—that a poet who is often inopportunely witty has the opposite vice of bombastic absurdity. The source of all grandiloquence is the want of taking for a criterion the true qualities of the object described or the emotion expressed. The grandiloquent man is never bent on saying what he feels or ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... naturally contented with obscurity, wanting the restless desire for distinction and eminence which is common in great men, hating to put forward personal claims, disliking competition and "disputes who should be greatest," finding something bombastic in the titles of royalty, fond of what is simple and homely, of children, of poor people, occupying himself so much with the concerns of others, with the relief of sickness and want, that the temptation to exaggerate the importance of ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... most ostentatious air and bombastic confidence. Two or three of the company could not refrain from laughing at his airs, ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... longbow, shoot with a longbow; deal in the marvelous. 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 in simpulo ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... infamous John Munro who, as a justice of the peace under commission from New York, was such a thorn in the flesh of the settlers. The sheriff was a very pompous Dutchman who believed without question in the validity of New York's jurisdiction over the Grants, and who, despite his bombastic manner, ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... and now heard Gallus assure Cleopatra of his master's sympathy. With the most bombastic exaggeration he described how bitterly Octavianus mourned in Mark Antony the friend, the brother-in-law, the co-ruler and sharer in so many important enterprises. He had shed burning tears over the tidings of his death. Never had more sincere ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... kind were those far isles in the eyes of the monks who were the first settlers in the wilderness. The author of the "History of Ramsey" grows enthusiastic, and somewhat bombastic also, as he describes the lovely isle, which got its name from the solitary ram who had wandered thither, either in extreme drought or over the winter ice, and, never able to return, was found feeding among the wild ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... la Henriade, also 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 please ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... lofty 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, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... nomination for Governor of New York in 1912. All these years he was known as a Tammany man. During his campaign for Governor he made many promises for reform, and after his election he issued a bombastic declaration of independence. His words were discounted in the light of his previous record. Immediately after his inauguration, however, he began a house-cleaning. He set to work an economy and efficiency commission; he removed a Tammany superintendent of ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... the 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
... the rearrangement of this 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
... of us at home would be the wiser; but I'm sure that now he has won he will brag and bluster and be very conceited and disagreeable over his triumph. That is the man's nature—to be cowed by failure and bombastic over success. It's singular, come to think it over, how one who has the soul to create a wonderful painting can be so crude ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... 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 ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... not illogical, but those who were working in secret for the furtherance of their own ambition, oared little to be convinced, and their myrmidons obeyed them blindly, and gloated over the wild, bombastic language of the demagogic press, which, though they did not understand it, impressed them no less with its ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... bulk of the songs are very defective. Most of those hitherto in use were composed during the last century, and therefore their structure is irregular, their grief slavish and despairing, their joy reckless and bombastic, their religion bitter and sectarian, their politics Jacobite and concealed by extravagant and tiresome allegory. Ignorance, disorder, and every kind of oppression weakened and darkened the lyric genius of Ireland. Even these, such as they ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... and stiffly precise everything was here! How many backs bowed low, how softly bombastic, high-sounding words were murmured! It seemed as if every free, warm impulse would lapse into stiffness and coldness; moreover, those assembled here were not the poor petitioners of other antechambers, but lords and ladies who belonged to the most ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the handsomest, and perhaps the most genteelly attended of any of the Parisian theatres. The music here, 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. The performance of Girard on the flute ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... suddenly shot like a burning star across the sky, but for the first time there was apprehension in his soul. He had seen but little of the new general, Pope, but he had read his proclamations and he had thought them bombastic. He talked lightly of the enemy and of the grand deeds that he was going to do. Who was Pope to sweep away such men as Lee ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Memoirs of the Reign of George III, iv. 297, he says:—'With a lumber of learning and some strong parts Johnson was an odious and mean character. His manners were sordid, supercilious, and brutal; his style ridiculously bombastic and vicious, and, in one word, with all the pedantry he had all the gigantic littleness of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... the very thought disgusted the two friends was that jumping-jack of an Arthur Papillon. Universal suffrage, with its accustomed intelligence, had not failed to elect this nonentity and bombastic fool, and to-day he flounders about like a fish out of water in the midst of this political cesspool. Having been enriched by a large dowry, he has been by turns deputy, secretary, vice-president, president, head of ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... 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, he has no depth of intellect. He is always half charlatan, and the reader ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... old Democratic politician and at one 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 ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... my respects and renew my offers of good services if conciliation were to be attempted, expecting to see a civilized general, but I found only a conceited and bombastic old man who had not the least idea of what he had undertaken. He pooh-poohed conciliation, and assured me that his plans were so perfect that within two weeks after his setting out for the conquest of the island all would be over and the insurrection at his mercy. I ventured ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... the ground, Hats, boots and clothing flying round; In vain his helpmeet cried "Hold on!" He went right through that sable John. Sing, sing, O Muse, what deeds were done This morn by God-like Peleus' son; Descend, O fickle Goddess, urge My lyre to his bombastic splurge. ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... all had 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
... strain: full of huge promises from the Pope and the 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; ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... drew a chair 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 ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... heroic or touching stories must lose much of their dignity when made into opera, since in that case the "music's the thing," and not the "play." For this reason it has seemed necessary to tell the stories of such operas as "Il Trovatore," with all their bombastic trimmings complete, in order to be faithful in showing them as they really are. On the other hand, it has been necessary to try to treat "Pinafore" in Gilbert's ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... case—does not therefore seem an offence in any sense to our Philistine, but a most delightful restorative in the barren wilderness of everyday German. He still, however, considers all really productive things to be offensive. The wholly bombastic, distorted, and threadbare syntax of the modern standard author—yea, even his ludicrous neologisms—are not only tolerated, but placed to his credit as the spicy element in his works. But woe to ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... 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 of justice ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... moment 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
... crossing the great hall in the wake of an attendant delegated to conduct him to the council chamber his sensations are not to be described. It is only necessary to say that he was in a reverential condition, and that is saying a great deal for Mr. Blithers. A certain bombastic confidence in himself gave way to mellow timidity. He was in a new world. He was cognisant of a distinct sensation of awe. His ruthless Wall Street tread became a mincing, uncertain shuffle; he could not conquer the absurd notion that he ought ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... itself, he 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, ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... experience taught Disraeli one great truth, and that was this: the most effective oratory is not bombastic. Among educated people (or illiterate) the quiet, deliberate and subdued manner is best. Reserve is a very necessary element in effective speaking. It is soul-weight that counts, not mere words, words, words. The extreme deliberation ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... reported to General Jackson, and Williamson as promptly released. The bombastic major had little idea that among the men he was so uselessly reprimanding was a son of General Lee, as well as Lieutenant Williamson, who was a nephew of Gen. Dick Garnett, who was later killed in Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... William IV., purporting to be drawn up by himself, and extending 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, but some confidant, very likely Sir ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... and retired. Then came half a dozen performers, only one being visible at a time. They were dressed, as I conjectured, to represent Chinese divinities, and as each appeared upon the stage he made a short recitation in a bombastic tone. The costumes of these actors were brilliantly decorated with metal ornaments, and there was a luxuriance of beard on most of the performer's faces, quite in contrast to the scanty growth which nature gave them. When the deities were assembled the animals returned and prostrated ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... perpetually merges into something 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 seem ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... In this manner the bombastic fellow continued to entertain me all through dinner, and by a common error of drunkards, because he had been extremely talkative himself, leaped to the conclusion that he had chanced on very genial company. He told me his name, his address; he begged we should meet again; finally ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... possessing a real school of drama which is affecting the whole of the European stage. What did we do in his honor and for the honor of our dramatic literature? We chose a play of sixty years ago—our worst period—a piece of clever bombastic fustian mildewed with age; and we chose it merely because it contained the greatest possible number of small 'effective' parts in which 'star' actors could strut across the stage, make their bow before an extremely distinguished audience, and speak ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... stones," in which the Fauxbourg de St. Germain so much abounds; and presents also more pleasing recollections of Louis Quatorze (a prince possessing many of the good points of the bon Henri) than the bombastic personification of him as Jupiter Tonans, in the palace of Versailles, which is on a par as a painting with ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... the faults of youth and of his time. Exaggeration and lack of restraint are shown in almost all his work. In Tamburlaine, written when he was twenty-two, he is often bombastic. He has hardly any sense of humor. He does not draw ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... while the firing is interminable, "all their shots are fired in the air." Before this "frightful clatter" can be reported, the papers of the day are obliged to make all sorts of excisions, to prune away "nonsense," and reduce the "inflated and bombastic style." Chatter and clamor, that is the whole substance of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... 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
... have been made on the self-respect and delicate sensibility of a feminine soul by this other sonnet, which is clumsy and bombastic because it is full ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... veritable madman, for all his many years and seeming wisdom! Hath he not denounced the faith of Nagaya and foretold the destruction of the city times out of number? ... and are we not all weary to death of his bombastic mouthing? If the King deemed a poet's counsel worth the taking, he would long ago have shut this bearded ranter within the four walls of a dungeon, where only rats and spiders would attend ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... be very interesting rascals though we do not poke our walking-canes into the face of majesty, or go out on a fool's errand against the Queen's lieges with Mr. John Frost." The author's style is described as very unsatisfactory, though full of pretension. He is "very bombastic, very inexact, and strangely independent in the current of his thoughts and in the arrangement of his words." But the Times admits nevertheless the interesting quality of the work, and in its own better language gives the following resume of one of the most celebrated ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... 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 Ge-wandhaus concerts, and produced an immediate ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... Gringos make much bombastic use of that term, while other Gringos scoff at the word 'honor,'" replied the mine owner, thoughtfully. "But even suppose that these Gringos have absurdly fanciful ideas of honor? They will never guess for what I really ...
— The Young Engineers in Mexico • H. Irving Hancock
... Horace Mann, June 18.-Resignations. New ministry. Epigram on Lord Holderness. The two Miss Gunnings. Extravagant dinner at White's. Bubb de Tristibus. Dodington's bombastic eulogium on the Prince. Sale of the pictures ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... learned that Adrian was putting the finishing touches to his novel, I had dismissed them from my mind. Such accounts as I had given of Adrian had been in a jocularly satirical vein. I had mentioned his pontifical attitude, the magnification of his office, his bombastic rhetoric over the Higher Life and the Inspiration of the Snows, and, all that being part and parcel of our old Adrian, we had laughed. Six months before I would have told Jaffery quite a different story. But now that Adrian had practically won through, what was ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... the style Major Favraud?" I asked. "I remember the time when I thought these two lines the most soul-stirring in the language—they seem very bombastic ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... 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 ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... yet so great was the rage and excitement of the crowd that the vigilance committee could do no less. The mass of the mob demanded fiercely the death of the prisoners, and it was evident that many of the committee took side with the people. I shall never forget how horror-struck I was (bombastic as it now sounds) at hearing no less a personage than the Whig candidate for representative say that the condemned had better fly for their lives, for the "Avenger of Blood" was on their tracks! I am happy to say that said very worthy but sanguinary individual, the Avenger of Blood, represented ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... 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 with ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... 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 movement is in ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... your brother. He has ten thousand words for every idea, 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, ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... reassure them. The little Belgian was too bombastic to win their confidence in his judgment. Yet Jones declared that Maurie doubtless knew the country better than anyone they had yet met and the doctor likewise defended his patient. Indeed, Gys seemed to have taken quite a fancy to the little man and long after ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... with similar bombastic and extravagant expressions which were the subject of international comment for many years. Other countries besides Germany have maintained great armies, but their maintenance has been but an incidental part of the general ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... ever before read such a mixture of the bombastic and the burlesque? We are called upon to cry over every joke, and, for the life of us, we cannot hold our sides when the catastrophes occur. It is a salad in which the pungency of the vinegar has been wholly subdued by the oil, and the fatness of the oil destroyed by the tartness ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... 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
... it was not altogether through vainglory he spoke. He was not a bombastic sort. I think he voiced the intent of the ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... Lucifer, of Paradise Lost, Goethe in Faust, Byron in Manfred, Shelley in Prometheus Unbound. The Greek Titan is resigned, uncomplaining, knowing himself to be a victim of Fate, which may not be opposed; Marlowe's Titan is bombastic and violent; Milton's is ambitious, proud, revengeful; Goethe's is cultured and philosophical; Byron's is gloomy, rebellious, theatrical. So all these poets portray each his own bent of mind, and something also of the temper of the age, in the character of his ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... often describe events about which 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 when the writers describe their own personal characters ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... examples of the misapplication of language have been published to weariness, and the bombastic compositions of educated Indian students held up to ridicule, the fault does not lie with the pupil but with ourselves, who are ultimately responsible for the subjects which are set him to learn. So long ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... 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 ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... consciousness of superior power, "Look at a real man!" I should have been able to show you antecedents which, if not intensely romantic, are not altogether antagonistic to romance. But the present fashion of associating with one particular class everything that is ludicrous and bombastic overpowers me when I think of it in relation to myself and your known sensitiveness. When the well-born poetess of good report melts ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... 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
... stamp. As an example of this, witness the recent effort of our Canadian cousins in celebration of the achievement of the long-desired ocean penny postage, at present an inter-colonial rate of the British Empire, but some day to be an international rate. The motto is a trifle bombastic and suggests the Teutonic superlative; "So bigger as never vas," and the "Xmas 1898" reads like the advertisement of a department store: "Gents pants for Xmas gifts." But we must admit that the stamp is a pretty conceit, ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... grew excited. She produced further obituaries. From her pocketbook, from her bosom, from her pockets and one from under her hat. I read them. They were all alike, couched in vaguely bombastic terms. We sat in the rain ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... 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 ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... 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 ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... episode, Leech's famous cartoon of "Cock-a-doodle-do!" (February 13th, 1858) promised at one time—less directly, it is true—to bring unpleasant consequences in its train. In the spirit of the Prince de Joinville, whose bombastic language towards England in 1848 had set an example not to be resisted, were the fire-eating words of a few French officers, who offered to "unsheathe their swords and place them at their sovereign's disposal," and so forth. Leech replied with a cartoon of a Gallic ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... down a few hawks on the wing with my bow and arrows, and then the amazement of the natives was quite comical to witness. Shooting arrows in a straight line astonished them somewhat, but the more bombastic among them would say, "Why I can do that," and taking his woomerah he would hurl a spear a long distance. Not one of them, however, was able to throw a spear upwards, so I scored over even the most redoubtable chiefs. It may be well to explain, ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... part, German Socialism recognized more and more its own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... capital of a great empire. Their society was 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 belonging to that sort of wretches. This system of manners in itself ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the day of McClellan's bombastic proclamation about his having cleared Pennsylvania and Maryland of the enemy. On the same day McClellan and other generals straggled about the country, visiting cities hundreds of miles distant from the camp. And such generals complain of straggling! Make the army fight! inspire with confidence ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... Among 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, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... recollection. It was agreeable to observe, that he was free from the discontent and fretfulness which too often molest old age. He in the summer of that year walked to Rotherhithe, where he dined, and walked home in the evening. He died on the 31st of December, 1791. BOSWELL. The version of Maphaesus's 'bombastic' additional Canto is advertised in the Gent. Mag. 1758, p. 233. The engraver of Mr. Ellis's portrait in the first two editions is ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill |
