"Bathos" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... own. There is, one must acknowledge, something grotesque in this endeavor to supply the warmth of the emotional imagination by the use of cold reason, and had Franklin possessed less wit and more humor he would never have fallen into such bathos. The little book still exists in which Franklin wrote out his creed and private liturgy. The creed expresses a belief in "one Supreme, most perfect Being, Author and Father of the gods themselves." Finding this God to be infinitely above man's comprehension, ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... There was the bathos of a poor speech from Colonel Nolan, and then the division. Everybody has the numbers now—34 majority—34 in spite of Saunders and Bolton, of absent Wallace, and unpaired Mr. Wilson. We cheer, counter cheer; we rise and wave our ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, shall dissolve. To this great globe itself—this paltry speck of less account in space than a dew-drop in an ocean—and all its sorrow and pain, its trials and temptations, all the pathos and bathos of our tragic human farce, the end is near. The way has been hard, and the journey overlong, and the burden often beyond man's strength. But that long-drawn sorrow now shall cease. The tears will be wiped away. The burden will fall from weary shoulders. For the fulness ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... announced, made his appearance. A multitude had collected to witness the feat; the day was unusually cold, and Sam was intoxicated. The river was low, and the falls near him on either side were bare. Sam threw himself off, and the waters (to quote the bathos of a New York newspaper) "received him in their cold embrace. The tide bubbled as the life left the body, and then the stillness of death, indeed, sat upon the bosom of the waters." His body was found past the spring at the mouth of the river, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... is bathos to speak of the Stationers' Company; but we must do so. For, at the end of the Areopagitica there is a distinct insinuation by Milton that the Ordinance he was asking the Parliament to repeal was less the invention of Parliament itself than of some cunning Stationers. "If we may ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... Mr. Pope thought it proper, for reasons specified in the preface to their 'Miscellanies,' to publish such little pieces of theirs as had occasionally got abroad, there was added to them the 'Treatise of the Bathos, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry.' It happened that in one chapter of this piece the several species of bad poets were ranged in classes, to which were prefixed almost all the letters of the alphabet (the greatest part of them at random); but such ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... from so great a saint, it seems almost a profanity—certainly a bathos—to add any more secular touches. Yet, if the portrait is even to approach completeness, it must be remembered that we are not describing an ascetic or a recluse, but the most polished gentleman, the most fascinating companion, the most ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... his description. He went through it all; he rose to eloquence in describing our departure from Forstadt. This scene ended, he seemed conscious of a bathos. It was in a dull, rather apologetic tone ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... Cervantes or of Madrid. But what need has Cervantes of "such weak witness of his name;" or what could a monument do in his case except testify to the self-glorification of those who had put it up? Si monumentum quoeris, circumspice. The nearest bookseller's shop will show what bathos there would be in a monument to the author of ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... burlesque bathos in the second couplet after the first. It would be difficult for a modern critic to accept that verdict altogether; nevertheless his objection to the first couplet as a description of physical vision is surely sound. And it is interesting ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... been opened by some kind bloke an' 'is bed a blasted swamp... Yus—you 'ave four o' rum 'ot and you'll feel like the bloomin' 'Ouse o' Lords. Then 'ave a Livin'stone Rouser." "Oh, shut up," said Dam, cursing the Bathos of Things and returning to the beginning of ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... "Oh, bathos!" said Lady Bath, while the 'prentices shouted applause. "Is this hedge-bantling to be fathered on ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... seized and sequestrated, in spite of all the plans which I have devised for their safety. The great failing of Protestants, in general, is a tendency to spring suddenly to the pinnacle of exultation, and as suddenly to fall to the lowest bathos of dejection, forgetting that the brightest day as well as the most gloomy night must necessarily have a termination. How far more wise are the members of that object of my undying detestation, the Church of Rome; ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... is plausible; but I do not find it adequate. The first objection is that the same smell of bathos haunts the soul in the case of all deliberate and elaborate visits to "beauty spots," even by persons of the most elegant position or the most protected privacy. Specially visiting the Coliseum by moonlight always struck me as being as vulgar as visiting it by limelight. One millionaire ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... to notice the bathos of his speech, he put his hands in his pockets, and began strolling up and down a beat of his own, a few yards from the track Trenholme had made, and on the other side of ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... point with this writer, is here for better managed than usual, having her customary piquancy, with less of disfigurement from flippancy and bad puns. The plot shows none of those alarming pieces of incongruity and bathos which have marred some of her stories. And one may fancy that it is not far to seek for the originals of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... exhausted, he supplies their place with metaphysical quibbles, forced antitheses, bad puns, and execrable charades. In his fifth sonnet he may, I think, be said to have sounded the lowest chasm of the Bathos. Upon the whole, that piece may be safely pronounced to be the worst attempt at poetry, and the worst attempt at wit, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is, Mr. Stephens can make the force of bathos go a little further. The passage continues ("a pause" intervening, to allow breathing ime, after the splitting pace with which Love has been riding ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... sufficient to enable my genius to take wing. If the public knew what dull work it is to write a novel, they would not be surprised at finding them dull reading. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Barnstaple, I am at the very bathos of stupidity. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... in defense of coffee was the first to be illustrated; and for all its air of pretentious grandeur and occasional bathos, it was not a bad rhyming advertisement for the persecuted drink. It was printed for Paul Greenwood and sold "at the sign of the coffee mill and tobacco-roll in Cloath-fair near West-Smithfield, who selleth the best Arabian coffee powder and chocolate in cake or roll, after the Spanish ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... pleases; nay, if he thus keeps within the rules of credibility, the more he can surprize the reader the more he will engage his attention, and the more he will charm him. As a genius of the highest rank observes in his fifth chapter of the Bathos, "The great art of all poetry is to mix truth with fiction, in order to join the credible ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... by the comradeship of boys, he retains his sense of fun, fights on in good humor, detects and saves himself on the verge of pious caricature and solemn bathos; knows how to meet important committees on microscopic reforms as well as self-appointed theological inquisitors and all the insistent cranks that waylay a busy pastor. Life cannot grow stale; and by letting the boys lead him forth by the streams of living water and into the whispering ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... the world. It is the sense-of-humor that makes the master of comedy, that helps him to see things in due proportion and perspective, that keeps him from exaggeration and emphasis, from sentimentality and melodrama and bathos. It is the sense-of-humor that prevents our making fools of ourselves; it is humor itself that softens our laughter at those who make themselves ridiculous. In his serious stories Daudet employs this negative humor chiefly, as though he had in memory La Bruyere's assertion that "he who makes ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... "Boats," and "Waggons!" Oh! ye shades Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this? That trash of such sort not alone evades Contempt, but from the bathos' vast abyss Floats scumlike uppermost, and these Jack Cades Of sense and song above your graves may hiss— The "little boatman" and his Peter Bell Can sneer at him ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... many times lapses into bathos, but as in a way it answers the other ballad, I will quote ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... for the English nature. The English story leads with a direct issue into practical life: a narrow and dry practical life, certainly, but yet enough to supply a plain motive for the story; the German story leads simply nowhere except into bathos. Shall we say that the Norman talent for affairs saves us here, or the Celtic perceptive instinct? one of them it must be, surely. The Norman turn seems most germane to the matter here immediately in hand; on the other hand, the Celtic turn, or some degree of it, some ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... of criticism from lack of musical knowledge: music being first and last an emotional art; and as our emotions are refined it requires compositions of a more and more elevated character to appeal to them. Thus, we range from the bathos and vulgarity of the music hall to ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... bathos brought about good-humor again, and soon our whole attention was absorbed in that magical music which to this hour electrifies me more than that of any other opera excepting "Norma." "Bad taste this," connoisseurs will say; but the perfection of human enjoyment ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... ineptitude; this knack of exhibiting your own favourites in an unlucky light. It is not so much that the party journalists do not tell the truth as that they tell just enough of it to make it clear that they are telling lies. One of their favourite blunders is an amazing sort of bathos. They begin by telling you that some statesman said something brilliant in style or biting in wit, at which his hearers thrilled with terror or thundered with applause. And then they tell you what it was that he said. ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... O, the sublime bathos of thy prosaism—the muddy eddy of thy logic! Thou art the only man to ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... expense, and say that you don't mind your own business. We hadn't yet got rid of Hsiang Ling with all her rubbish, and here we have a chatterbox like you thrown on us! But what is it that that mouth of yours keeps on jabbering? What about the bathos of Tu Kung-pu; and the unadorned refinement of Wei Su-chou? What also about Wen Pa-ch'a's elegant diction; and Li I-shan's abstruseness? A pack of silly fools that you are! Do you in any ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... of the name Pan, the god "Pankration" (the) Pantacles, unknown "Parsley and the rue" Pathos and bathos Patrocles, a rich miser Pauson, ruined —poverty of Peace, mother of Plutus Peacock and hoopoe Pebble, the, how held Pelargicon, the Pellen, a town Peplus, the Perfumes, on dead bodies Perseus, legend of Persian (the), cloak Phanae, land of informers Pharnaces and bribery Pharsalus, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... large hall, containing a brief chronicle of the progress of painting from Cimabue to—Carlo Dolce! There may be a still deeper descent; but that is bathos sufficient for any lover of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... feel, scarce less keenly, the dire descent to bathos in "So killed themselves." It was almost the show-example, he would tell you, of Browning's ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... misericordia plenum erat,) renovaret: ut hinc tandem cognoscerent Judi, pactum Abrahamiticum etiam post latam legem ritualem adhuc viguisse, adeoque pro foedere habendum fuisse, cui unice salus ipsorum inniteretur. (Conf. Gal. iii. 17.) ... Quis hic cum Apostolo non exclamet, bathos ploutou kai sophias kai gnses Theou! (Rom. xi. 33.) Sed hc obiter, etsi haudquaquam frustra. Pergo."—From Bp. Bull's Harmonia Apostolica, cap. xi., sect. 3.—Works, vol. iii. ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... rapture." But however fine an ear for rhythm Lewis may have had, his verse is for the most part execrable; and his jaunty, jiggling anapaests and pragmatic manner are ludicrously out of keeping with the horrors of his tale, increasing the air of bathos which distinguishes ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... and in the succeeding year Swift paid a long visit to Pope at Twickenham. These two influences may be traced in most of Pope's remaining works. In 1726, "Gulliver's Travels" saw the light, and in 1727 were issued those joint volumes of "Miscellanies" which contained the "Treatise on the Bathos," a prose satire, to be supplanted in brief space by the terrible "Dunciad." In this last, Pope entered upon a campaign against the smaller fry of the pen with a vigor, a deadly earnestness, and a determination to wound, unparalleled in the history of letters. One of the most ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... that we do not understand them. You all think that it is the right thing for me to preach about 'faith.' I daresay some of you have never tried to apprehend what it means. And I daresay there are a great many of you to whom the utterance of the word suggests that I am plunging into the bathos and commonplaces of the pulpit. Perhaps, if you would try to understand it, you would find it was a bigger thing than you fancied. What is faith? I will give you another expression that has not so many theological accretions sticking to it, and which means precisely the same thing—trust. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... comforted by this conclusion, and I tried to persuade myself that it indicated the only satisfactory termination to the brief drama of the night. I attempted to see the affair as a slightly ridiculous episode that had occupied exactly twelve hours and ended with an inevitable bathos. I pictured the return of a disgraced and penitent Brenda, and the temporary re-employment, as an antidote to gossip, of the defeated Banks. They would be parted, of course. She might be taken abroad, or to Scotland, and by the time she returned, he would have been sent back ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... its red mullet; he had meant to order red mullet for dinner. Now that he was mortifying the flesh by drinking only water, he was proportionately particular to please his appetite in eating. Yet he was not sorry that he had forgotten the fish; it would surely have been a bathos to discuss the properties and application of red mullet with a young lady who found herself in so ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... diction by Latinisms, he revealed another specific quality of his manner in Rinaldo. This is the inability to sustain heroic style at its ambitious level. He frequently drops at the close of the octave stanza into a prosaic couplet, which has all the effect of bathos. Instances are not ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... There is bathos, after these claims, in the concern some poets show over the question of priority between themselves and kings. Yet one writer takes the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... This is bathos that unfortunately goes too far. Still, I am sure, English readers love a ghost story of ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... BATHOS and pathos are closely allied in sound as well as in sense. Mr. FECHTER evidently regards them as completely identical; and in his acting, as in his pronunciation, uniformly prefers the former to the latter. He has recently exemplified this by his personation ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... in fair, square prose, with sentences solidly built, and no help from bastard rhythms. Moreover, there is a progression - I cannot call it a progress - in his work towards a more and more strictly prosaic level, until at last he sinks into the bathos of the prosy. Emerson mentions having once remarked to Thoreau: "Who would not like to write something which all can read, like ROBINSON CRUSOE? and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment which delights everybody?" I must say in passing ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mechanical pedantries, as we think now, to whom grammar is no longer, as of old, "a new invented game." Moreover, he has to give examples of the faults opposed to sublimity, he has to dive into and search the bathos, to dally over examples of the bombastic, the over-wrought, the puerile. These faults are not the sins of "minds generous and aspiring," and we have them with us always. The additions to Boileau's preface (Paris, 1772) contain abundance of examples of faults from Voiture, Mascaron, Bossuet, ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... foreign soil, and dropped into an unhonoured grave. To him English history is indebted for a heroic scene, and Ralegh for a glorious close to his splendid but checkered career. The mind shudders at the thought of the bathos into which a little remorse in that contemptible villain would have plunged ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... hours with those ridiculous Englishwomen! Those foolish, flippant girls! One had quoted poetry to him at dinner, the very scrap his lady had spoken a line of—this new poet's, who was taking the world of London by storm that year: "Loved with a love beyond all words or sense!" And it had sounded like bathos or sacrilege. What did these dolls know of love, or life? Chattering parrots to weary a man's brain! Yes, the Greeks were right, it would be better to keep them spinning ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... and gorgeous land to its farthest zenith; ay, to the uttermost diameter of its circumference. Awake! oh Vivenza. The signs of the times are portentous; nay, extraordinary; I hesitate not to add, peculiar! Up! up! Let us not descend to the bathos, when we should soar to the climax! Does not all Mardi wink and look on? Is the great sun itself a frigid spectator? Then let us double up our mandibles to the deadly encounter. Methinks I see it now. Old Bello is crafty, and his oath is recorded to obliterate us! Across this ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... appreciating the bathos. 'It is no laughing matter, she said; 'it is so uncivil, when he is so kind. I can't imagine what Felix ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... laughed next week over the ridiculous bathos of those twenty loud-sounding ballads, little guessed the misery and disgust they had cost ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... appeared the famous "Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus," written chiefly by Pope, in which he lashed the various proficients in the bathos, under the names of flying fishes, swallows, parrots, frogs, eels, &c., and appended the initials of well-known authors to each head. This roused Grub Street, whose malice had nearly fallen asleep, into fresh ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... through two generations. She could not recollect the whole of it. In Miss Strickland's Lives of the Queens of England, we find the following passage: 'An English ballad is extant, which, dwelling on the elaborate mourning of Queen Jane's ladies, informs the world, in a line of pure bathos, ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... doth to heaven upraise, Let Sam to dive into what Byron calls The hell of waters. For the sake of praise, He wooed the bathos down great waterfalls; The dizzy precipice, which the eye appals Of travelers for pleasure, Samuel found Pleasant as are to women lighted halls, Crammed full of fools and fiddles; to the sound Of the eternal roar, ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... his face black with fury. "If every word you say were true, yet with all the more reason would I drag you in my marriage procession, and force you to avow yourself my wife. Never have I been balked of woman; and you, too, with all your tragic bathos, shall learn that, if you won't have me for a slave, I'll bow your neck to ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... "thousands" less flat than "crowds collected"—but don't let me plunge into the bathos, or rise into Nat. Lee's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... into Turkey as a slave," and there gained the affections of his master's daughter, after the most approved old-ballad fashion; though, alas! it was not to her love that he owed his liberty, but (dreadful bathos!) to his skill in "cooking fowls, &c. &c. in the English taste;" which, on a certain occasion, when some English merchants came to dine with his master, "so pleased the company, that they offered to redeem him, which was accepted; and when freed he came home to ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... machine-sections, then we have added another tragic possibility to the list: the Strike situation. As yet no one tackles this situation. It is a sort of Medusa head, which turns—no, not to stone, but to sloppy treacle. Mr. Galsworthy had a peep, and sank down towards bathos. ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... modern man, who was pre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictory beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic and the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat. He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... pastures, where the fences are fair and clean and the ditches broad and deep, where there is room to gallop and room to jump, and where, as he sails along on a well-bred horse or reclines perchance in a muddy ditch (Professor Raleigh! what a watery bathos!), he may often say to himself, "It is good for me to be here!" For when the hounds cross this country there are always "wigs on the green" in abundance; and in spite of barbed wire we may ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... Phrase; That like along the finish'd Line to feel The Ruffle's Flutter and the Flash of Steel; That like my Couplet as Compact as Clear; That like my Satire sparkling tho' severe, Unmix'd with Bathos and unmarr'd by trope, I fling my Cap for Polish—and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... him the chance, he was safe to slide in some of his vulgar bathos after any heroic sentiment or personal opinion I may have uttered. This, naturally, would rouse my temper, never very pacific; and made me so cross, that I was often on the verge of quarrelling with Min on ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... wars, and are fond of "Jihading" with the Gallas, over whom they boast many a victory. I have seen a letter addressed by the late Amir to the Hajj Sharmarkay, in which he boasts of having slain a thousand infidels, and, by way of bathos, begs for a few pounds of English gunpowder. The Harari hold foreigners in especial hate and contempt, and divide them into two orders, Arabs and Somal. [26] The latter, though nearly one third of the population, or 2500 souls, are, to ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... favorable. "There is great variety in the numbers of this ode; but, in our opinion, they are not combined in such a manner as to produce a natural or agreeable harmony. There is sometimes, too, a falling off, not far removed from the Bathos. Thus, when the Author says his ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... from the soul-and partook intensely of that soul's nature. Nor is it difficult to perceive the tendency of this abandon-to elevate immeasurably all the energies of mind-but, again, so to mingle the greatest possible fire, force, delicacy, and all good things, with the lowest possible bathos, baldness, and imbecility, as to render it not a matter of doubt that the average results of mind in such a school will be found inferior to those results in ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of verses on Sophia Pringle, who was hanged and burn'd for coining. One of the strokes of pathos (which are very many, all somewhat obscure) is "She lifted up her guilty forger to heaven." A note explains by forger her right hand with which she forged or coined the base metal! For pathos read bathos. You have put me out of conceit with my blank verse by your Religious Musings. I think it will come to nothing. I do not like 'em enough to send 'em. I have just been reading a book, which I may be too partial to, as ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... thought is expected to ascend, but descends, feebleness, and sometimes confusion, is the result. The descent is called "bathos." ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... to do is to get away as quickly as possible. It would be pure bathos to suggest any of your wife's labour-saving devices, or introduce the subject of that circular bath-room with a circular bath hanging by chains from the ceiling and a spirit-stove under it—your pet invention. Recall a pressing engagement, shake the architect ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... at the same time. Who can imagine the first half of the first volume of Waverley coming out in shilling numbers? I had realised this when I was writing Framley Parsonage; and working on the conviction which had thus come home to me, I fell into no bathos of dulness. ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... far from believing, that the letters annexed to each species of bad poets in the Bathos were, as he was directed to assert, "set down at random;" for when he was charged by one of his friends with putting his name to such an improbability, he had no other answer to make than that "he did not think of it;" and his friend had too much tenderness ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... was never known to laugh, was a great wit, but his sense of humour was small, and the descent from these deities to Queen Anne savours not a little of bathos. ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... afterwards told, on complaining of certain gales that were not altogether ambrosial, it was a melting day with him. "And what, Sir," he said, after a short pause, "might the cost be?" "Only four-pence,"—(O! how I felt the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of that four-pence!)—"only four-pence, Sir, each number, to be published on every eighth day."—"That comes to a deal of money at the end of a year. And how much, did you say, there was to be for the money?"—"Thirty-two ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... addition that the Judaisers desire, and to say, the essentials of Christianity are a new creature, faith, obedience—and circumcision? That is, indeed, sewing old cloth on a new garment, and huddling together in grotesque chaos things which are utterly diverse. It is as absurd bathos as to say the essentials of a judge are integrity, learning, patience—and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to end such a story without bathos? I think it is not possible, yet I must end it. An old French priest said one day at Lourdes, to one of those with whom I travelled, that he feared that in these times the pilgrims did not pray so much as they once did, and that this was a bad sign. He spoke also of France as a whole, and its ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... waiting for the 'pistol' (A. E. G. Bennett with home-made 'blanks') started at the report of our 6-inch gun in the next orchard, which occurred a fraction of a second earlier. The evening was saved from bathos by the news that the Division was to be relieved. Life operates by contrast, and though the war was going on a few miles to the eastward I believe as much pleasure was experienced that day in the small orchard behind Headquarters at La Pierriere as in any ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... In spite of the unheavenly nature of invective, of something of a lurking conceit in the making an eclipse out of a blush, and in the positive bathos, and I fear almost indecent irrelevancy of the introduction of Beatrice at all on such an occasion, much more under the feeble aspect of one young lady blushing for another,—this scene altogether is a very grand one; and the violence itself ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Nights and a Night. The book, mutilated in Europe to a collection of fairy tales, and miscalled the Arabian Nights, is unique as a study of anthropology. It is a marvellous picture of Oriental life; its shiftings are those of the kaleidoscope. Its alternation of pathos and bathos—of the boldest poetry (the diction of Job) with the baldest prose (the Egyptian of to-day) and finally, its contrast of the highest and purest morality with the orgies of Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter, take away the reader's breath. I determined to render every word with the literalism of Urquhart's ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... which had the advantage of allowing the speaker to say anything he wished to say on any subject and still not violate the unities. I heard Tilton give this lecture twice, and it was given from start to finish in exactly the same way. It contained much learning—had flights of eloquence, bursts of bathos, puffs of pathos, but not a smile in the whole hour and a half. It was faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection—no more. It was so perfect that some people thought it great. The man was an actor and had what is called platform presence. He ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the best and help it to prevail. If the latter, they will be brought back to the state as the means of making right reason effective, and of extending to all not simply the leave to be what they want to be, of following what Arnold calls their "natural taste of the bathos," but ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the tinker's wife, who alone was near, having just wished Heaven to send a judgment on her husband, was busy putting out his smoking smallclothes. It is a way that women and wives have, and they never see the bathos ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... voters voted against him. He is, despite his talents for deception, a poor popular psychologist, and so he made an inept effort to fetch the girls by tear-squeezing: every connoisseur will remember his bathos about breaking the heart of the world. Well, very few women believe in broken hearts, and the cause is not far to seek: practically every woman above the age of twenty-five has a broken heart. That is to say, she has been vastly disappointed, either by failing to nab some pretty fellow that her ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... breath, or sense, or the most ordinary laws of grammar. The second sentence of his first prose work contains about four hundred words, and is broken in the course of them like a wounded snake. In his very highest flights he will suddenly drop to grotesque and bathos; and there is no more difficult task (haud inexpertus loquor) than the selection from Milton of any passage of length which shall not contain faults of which a modern schoolboy or gutter-journalist ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... the substance of this future intervention which, to the Psalmist's quiet faith, is present:—'My soul from death,' and after that he says, 'My feet from falling,' which looks very like an anticlimax and bathos. But yet, just because to deliver the feet from falling is so much smaller a thing than delivering a life from death, it comes here to be a climax and something greater. The storm passes over the man. What then? After the storm ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... betray'd me. Let him write farce; but let him not presume To jumble fun and opera, grave and comic, In one vile mess—then call the mixture Shakspeare. No more of him: my hopes are all evanish'd, For "Hexham's battle," slew him: "The Iron Chest" Sunk him to Shadwell's bathos; and "John Bull" Drove off in wild ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... boy, Mike, was lost. Following the messenger, out bounced Mrs. Murphy—two hundred pounds in tears and hysterics, clutching the air and howling to the sky for the loss of thirty pounds of freckles and mischief. Bathos, truly; but Mr. Toomey sat down at the side of Miss Purdy, millinery, and their hands came together in sympathy. The two old maids, Misses Walsh, who complained every day about the noise in the halls, inquired immediately if anybody ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... And yet this apparent bathos is apparent only, and the fact that so narrow and earthly a petition has its place in the pattern of all prayer is full of instruction. No less instructive is the place which it has. A single word ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... and the ever-enlarged "Heroics," is a very fat duodecimo of 1100 pages. The heroine has two lovers—one with the singular name of Cloryman,—but love does not run smooth with either, and she ends by taking the (pagan) veil. The bathos of the thought and style may be judged from the heroine's affecting mention of an entertainment as "the last ballet ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... which some one would spring to his feet, as if full to the muzzle, and the entire inconsequence and futility of his words, ending in apparent abject paralysis of speech. We dealt liberally in jeers at any exhibition of bathos or fustian; in laughter and applause at any touch of eloquence or wit. What better training was there than this? I have always had a fond lingering desire to be an orator, but when before an audience found myself as cold as a clod. Toward essay ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... frantically struggling to get some paper, or to get hold of some boy or girl. But as the scene is in London in the nineteenth century, and not in Naples in the fifteenth century, we cannot see who is in real danger, or why, or of what. And with all this, Dickens was not incapable of bathos, or tragedy suddenly exploding in farce. The end of Krook by spontaneous combustion is such a case; but a worse case is the death of Dora, Copperfield's baby wife, along with that of the lap-dog, Jip. This is one of those unforgotten, unpardonable, egregious ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... in discontent. Her critical sense was beginning to weary of the shrieking note. And the descent from the "assassin of the hopes of women" to "the reptile in the path" struck her as a silly bathos. ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... never dance to a finish. It's too much like the clown's turn after the transformation scene. It is bathos on the top of the superb. At least it would be in this case. Who in wonder taught you to dance ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... we hear it, we must hear it Now!'" repeated Adderley, with opportune bathos at this juncture—"As I have said, and will always maintain, Omar's verse always fits in with the happy approach of creature comforts! Behold the illustration and example!—Primmins ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... your attention, and for setting before you "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," which may tend, if properly applied, to the inappreciable beautification of your own valuable person. Descend we therefore from the head and trunk of man—a curious bathos—to his understandings and unmentionables; you know what we mean. And herein, as in duty bound, draw we a distinction. "We know how to call all the drawers by name," (if we may so take a liberty with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... his mesmeric experience and decide whether the outrageous compliment to E.B.B. or the experiment on M. Vandeleur [Valdemar] goes furthest to prove him mad. There is poetry in the man, though, now and then, seen between the great gaps of bathos.... 'Politian' will make you laugh—as the 'Raven' made me laugh, though with something in it which accounts for the hold it took upon people such as Mr. N.P. Willis and his peers—it was sent to me from four different quarters ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... all right," she assured him hastily, stung by a keen sense that her catastrophe had fallen headlong from impending tragedy to bathos. "Please bestow all your sympathy on Mr Bathurst, and ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... pretence of worshipping God is so. And as it is but a step from the ridiculous to the sublime, and as the true worship of God is probably the highest sublimity to which man can reach; so, perhaps, is he never so absolutely absurd, in such a bathos of the ridiculous, as when he ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Meadows's fretfulness dignified it in Sophy's eyes, yet it did not prove sufficient to make it tolerable when she tormented the window-blinds, teased the fire, was shocked at Sophy's favourite studies, or insisting on her wishing to see Maria Drury. Nay, the bathos often rendered her petty unconscious provocations the more harassing, and Sophy often felt, in an agony of self-reproach, that she ought to have known herself too well to expect to show forbearance with any one when she was under ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the absurd irrelevant particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder of their combination. A talker of a different calibre, though belonging to the same school, is Burly. Burly is a man of great presence; he commands a larger atmosphere, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... "when I received the message, that I was going to be buried under a bathos of thanks, or else have my gift declined with the expectation that I would gush over the disinterestedness of the refusal. Since I couldn't well avoid seeing him, I was quite prepared to snub him, or to take back the money without a word. ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... her countenance (though with difficulty) at this magnificent bathos; for she saw that the little man was really in earnest; and that the looks and words of the strange actress had awakened in him something far deeper and nobler than the mere sensual ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... the bathos of theological and ethical absurdity could not lie deeper; but I was mistaken. The admirer of Mr. Atkinson declared with great modesty that he thought, as did his favorite author, that the whole world had been mad on the subject of theology ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... to take seriously a delegate who asked permission "to make a short apostrophe to liberty," and then delivered himself of this bathos: ...
— The Fathers of the Constitution - Volume 13 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Max Farrand
... beginnings we too clearly foresee the hopeless bathos of the end. Poor child, her real, deep sorrows, expressed in such worn-out ill-fitting phrases, are as little touching as the beauty of a London shopgirl under the ready-made cast-off ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... thereby the sphere of divinities (mostly female) that doth hedge a curate of a parish—without being sensible of the eligibility of Penny Readings for a place in Mystic London? When the Silly Season is at its very bathos; when the monster gooseberries have gone to seed and the showers of frogs ceased to fall; after the matrimonial efforts of Margate or Scarborough, and before the more decided business of the Christmas Decorations, then there is deep mystery in the penetralia of every parish. The great scheme of ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies |
