"Bathos" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of weary life on foreign soil, and dropped into an unhonoured grave. To him English history is indebted for a heroic scene, and Ralegh for a glorious close to his splendid but checkered career. The mind shudders at the thought of the bathos into which a little remorse in that contemptible villain would have ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... into the deep is of little moment And he passed along the road, adds the Philosopher It was as if she had been eyeing a golden door shut fast My engagement to Mr. Pericles is that I am not to write Man who beats his wife my first question is, 'Do he take his tea?' Oh! beastly bathos On a wild April morning Once my love? said he. Not now?—does it mean, not now? So it is when you play at Life! When you will not go straight To know that you are in England, breathing the same air with ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... Piozzi (Anec. p. 173) says that Johnson spoke of Browne as 'of all conversers the most delightful with whom he ever was in company.' Pope's bathos, in his ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... 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.[9] Burly is a man of a great presence; he commands ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... any 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
... watching your career with interest," wrote the great man, "and we are now casting about for some one to take charge of a humorous department to be called 'Bathos and Pathos,' which we shall, in the near future, add to the magazine. May we see more of your work, as well as some of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... elder style. In striving to get out of the rut of commonplace which had so long held in its grip the wheels of English art, not originality, so much as deliberate, sought-out eccentricity, was the result. The scale of work, starting from the original bathos of domestic sentimentality, runs up to the veriest contortions of affected mediaevalism, rarely striking out a note of common sense. Simple English art is the apotheosis of the British middle-class spirit, of Mr. Arnold's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... 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; ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... sermon of his before going to bed the other night, I dreamt towards morning that I was in Heaven, from whence I was literally pulled down and awakened to get up and go to church, which, you will allow, was a ridiculous instance of bathos and work of supererogation. But, dear me, that dream was very pleasant! Rising, and rising, and rising, into ever-increasing light and space, not with effort and energy, as if flying, but calmly and steadily soaring, as if one's property was to float upwards, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... 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
... them act and speak for themselves. At moments when inspiration is running low, and a gap has to be filled up, the shorter line needs less padding, and can be more rapidly run over when it is weak. Whereas a feeble heroic couplet becomes ponderous and sinks more quickly into bathos—as in the following sample ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... laughed next week over the ridiculous bathos of those twenty loud-sounding ballads, little guessed the misery and disgust ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... excited orator, in closing a debate, dropped into poetry, and remarked that a certain catastrophe came "like a bolt from the blue"; a daily journal of vast circulation described the event as coming "like a bolt from the flue"—which was a very sad instance of bathos. The amazing thing is that such blunders should be so rare as to ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... past even 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 is ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rash act, such as Mark was contemplating, is when successful, an interruption brings with it an inevitable bathos; when he first felt that grasp on his arm, he thought himself in the power of a German policeman, and, prepared as he was a moment before to face a sudden death, he quailed before the prospect of some degrading and complicated official process; it was almost ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... they would, instead of praising you, have a laugh at your 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 way behave like ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the sublime bathos of thy prosaism—the muddy eddy of thy logic! Thou art the only ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... 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 adornments of her ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... 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 ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... you shall have his poems with 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 ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... haranguing those about him on the iniquity of removing the pews, in a passionate undertone, which occasionally rose high above the key prescribed by decorum. It was a half-baked eloquence, sadly liable to bathos, divided, indeed, between sentences ringing with the great words 'genius' and 'fame,' and others devoted to an indignant contemplation of the hassocks in the old pews, 'the touching and well-worn implements of prayer,' to quote his handsome description of them, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 of CLAUDE ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... humanity what they deny to exist as Deity, but I should be incapable of the illogical exchange. It is to deny that the seed sprang from a root; it is to replace a grand and illimitable theism by a finite and vainglorious bathos. Of all the creeds that have debased mankind, the new creed that would centre itself in man seems to me the poorest and the most baseless of all. If humanity be but a vibrion, a conglomeration of gases, a ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... sweeping generalisations, 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.[15] Burly is a man ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... (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 passion of ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Courtesies and formal Phrase; That like along the finish'd Line to feel The Ruffle's Flutter and the Flash of Steel; That like my Couplet as compact as clear; That like my Satire sparkling tho' severe, Unmix'd with Bathos and unmarr'd by Trope, I fling my Cap for ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... topics, he deserves the name from another point of view by the excellent metrical structure of his octaves, and the easy fluency of his narrative. One annoying defect, the frequent occurrence of flat single lines not far remote from bathos, must be attributed to the low standard of the most refined poetry in an age when "the judges and police of literature" had hardly begun either to make laws or to enforce them. It is a fault which he shared with most others, ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton |
