"Bombastical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 on ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... Chatterton, and Ireland. Space (fortunately) does not permit a discussion of the Ossianic question. That fragments of Ossianic legend (if not of Ossianic poetry) survive in oral Gaelic traditions, seems certain. How much Macpherson knew of these, and how little he used them in the bombastic prose which Napoleon loved (and spelled "Ocean"), it is next to impossible to discover. The case of Chatterton is too well known to need much more than mention. The most extraordinary poet for his years who ever lived began with the forgery of a sham feudal ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... widout men and ropes," In a short time a sufficient number of the neighbors were summoned together, and proceeded to the animal's relief. Denny's importance, as well as his black dress, was miserably tarnished; he stood, however, with as dignified an air as possible, and, in a bombastic style, proceeded to direct the men as to the best manner of ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... Young is his 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 what he ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... wherein he could not flatter, Atlee talked on the entire evening, till he sent the two Englishmen home heartily sick of a bombastic eulogy on the land where a pilot had run their cutter on a rock, and a revenue officer had seized all their tobacco. The German had retired early, and the Yankee hastened to his lodgings to 'jot down' all the fine things he ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... height. He was not a small man, but he looked small; and when he first came into notoriety, with a small following, was considered of small importance and, by some, small-minded. It was to show this political insignificance in humorous contrast to his bombastic audacity that I represented him as a midget; but the idea was also suggested from time to time by his opponents in debate. Did not Mr. Gladstone once call him a gnat? and do we not find the following lines under Punch's Fancy Portraits, No. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... that men of sense should employ such titles. They would be ridiculous even applied to the greatest and best man that ever lived. They are more ridiculous than the bombastic titles given to civil officers in barbarous countries. The Sublime Porte of Turkey is outdone in this respect by secret associations in the ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher
... 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 and profound sensation. ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... denunciations, scoffed at their range-rights, said the sheep question should be dealt with in the business-like manner in which the Indian question had been settled. He was an advocate of violence—in short, a swaggering, bombastic wind-bag. He talked much of "his outfit" and "his men." "What was good enough for them was good enough for him," he would announce at meal-time, in a snivelling tone, when the food happened to be particularly ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... comedies and ranting bombastic tragedies a few only seem to have been produced at the Dorset Gardens Theatre. Among these we may mention Limberham, OEdipus, Troilus and Cressida, and The Spanish Friar. Limberham was ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... 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 ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... upon the Arabs at Lahej, two years ago, for the murder of an officer? They had often heard of the English threatening and preparing to do it, but somehow they never carried their intention into execution. I treated these vain bombastic words with the contempt which they deserved,—but said, I only wanted Sumunter to take me on, or otherwise to leave me to my fate. They then tried weakening my party by bribing Farhan to side with them and leave; but the noble-hearted Seedi disclosed their ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... have indited to his noble relative, the field marshal, bidding him bring his good lady and his retinue and abide within the castle until the festivities were ended, though in this instance the castle was a suburban cottage scarcely big enough to accommodate the bridal couple. I showed the bombastic but hospitable and genuine invitation to the actor Raymond, who chanced to be playing in Louisville when it reached me. He read it through ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... of the book contributed to its momentary effect. The literary, impressive, even bombastic style secured for it a very large public and was a constant relief after the long years of abstract and abstruse Hegelianism. The same result also proceeded from the extravagant glorification of love, which in comparison with the insufferable sovereignty of pure reason, found an excuse, if not ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... Home Rule is dead, and all the violent language, all the extravagant action, all the bombastic threats, are but indications that ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... veneration, deservedly requited as it is by feminine arrogance; it affords continual food for laughter to all Asiatics, and the Greeks would have joined in it. In the golden Middle Age the practice developed into a regular and methodical service of women; it imposed deeds of heroism, cours d'amour, bombastic Troubadour songs, etc.; although it is to be observed that these last buffooneries, which had an intellectual side, were chiefly at home in France; whereas amongst the material sluggish Germans, the knights distinguished themselves rather by drinking ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... 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, bravos, 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 ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... 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, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... for a dead husband, or laments the absence of a lover or tells of a great jealousy. In addition to her lyrics Sor Juana wrote several autos and dramas. Her poems were first published under the bombastic title of Inundacion castalida de la unica poetisa, Musa decima, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Madrid, 1689 (vol. II, Seville, 1691; ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... 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; ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... from the autobiography of Daniel Boone, written from his own dictation by John Filson, and published in 1784. Some writers have censured this production as inflated and bombastic. To us it seems simple and natural; and we have no doubt that the very words of Boone are given for the most part. The use of glowing imagery and strong figures is by no means confined to highly-educated persons. Those who are illiterate, as Boone certainly was, often indulge ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... our author, "the great quality about Mr Turner's drawings, which more especially proves their transcendant truth, is the capability they afford us of reasoning on past and future phenomena." The book teems with extravagant bombastic praise like this. Mr Turner is more than the Magnus Apollo. Yet other English artists are brought forward, immediately preceding the above panegyric; we know not if we do them justice, by noticing what is said of them. There is a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... it; it is not English, is needless and bombastic. Leave it to those who call a political office a "chair." "Gubernatorial chair" is good enough for them. So ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... 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 with suppressed ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... the first piece of chalk was applied to the first wall and advertising began its bombastic career—the advertiser's tendency has been to commend his wares, if not to excess, at any rate with no want of generosity. Everyone must have noticed it. But war changes many things besides Cabinets, and if the paper famine is to continue there will shortly be a totally ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... presented must be thoroughly weighed and understood in order to arrive at the true value of "the dogma and ritual of high magic," as Eliphas Levi terms it; because, amid the vast array of tinselled drapery, the outcome of man's vain conceit and bombastic pride, we shall find very little that can be considered as vital and really essential to the rites of magic. The show, the drapery, the priestly ornaments and instruments, are to the really spiritual Occultist, but, as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. That ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... Governor. He was not a very learned lawyer, but was quick- witted and picked up a good deal from the arguments of counsel. Aided by a natural shrewdness and sense, he got along pretty well. He had a gift of rather bombastic speech. His exuberant eloquence was of a style more resembling that prevalent in some other parts of the country than the more sober and severe fashion of New England. Just before he came to the Bench he was counsel in a real estate case in Springfield ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... 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 was wonderful, and ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... Avoid bombastic language. Work for plain expressions rather than for the unusual. Use the simplest words that the subject ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... oppressors and is moreover on the point of open revolt. Our treasury, filled from abundant resources, has harmed no one and will aid all of us. [-17-] In addition to these considerations so numerous and of such great importance I am on general principles disinclined to make any bombastic statement about myself. Yet since this too is one of the factors contributing to supremacy in war and is believed among all men to be of greatest importance,—I mean that men who are to fight well must secure an excellent general—necessity itself has rendered ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... is ill-governed, and especially in the case of inexperienced writers, the resulting style is apt to be florid or bombastic. The following passage from Headley's "Sacred Mountains," connected with a description of the crucifixion, is imaginative extravagance,—a vain, artificial effort at the sublime: "I know not but all the radiant ranks on high, and even Gabriel ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... the widow had become a little calmer, he said resolutely, and with superbly bombastic manner, "I am sure you laugh, madame, at all the despairing efforts that I make to prevent my poor stolen heart from flying quickly to your feet. It is that which has brought me here; I could not but follow, in spite of myself; yes, madame, in spite of myself. I said ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... assumed command of the ship only three weeks ago—relieving Captain Cook, who commanded her in the action of May last—began his duties in a very bombastic style. He mustered his officers and men, and assured them that in three weeks he could again attack the enemy and sink and scatter his fleet, and then he would re-take Newbern and drive the Yankees from every foot of North Carolina soil. With the Albemarle and their aid, with the ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... a job, have you," spoke Bart, forced to smile at the bombastic business air assumed ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... 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
... not wholly 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 the others had ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... Pindaric writing, as it was called, a species of poetry which required neither sound nor sense, provided only there was a sufficient stock of florid and extravagant thoughts, expressed in harsh and bombastic language. ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... them. Emancipate them. Raise them from the condition of brutes, to the level of human beings—of American slaves, at least. Do not for an instant suppose that the name of being freemen is the slightest comfort to them, situated as they are, or that the bombastic boast that "whoever touches British soil stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled," can meet with any thing but the ridicule and contempt of mankind, while that soil swarms, both on and under its surface, with the most abject and degraded wretches that ever ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... animated and had regained his self-possession. He believed in his scheme, and was ready to pledge his future. He argued that his aunt could not blame him for giving proof of his energy and daring, and he discoursed in bombastic style. ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... between the English Custom House cruisers and the English Excise cruisers there was about as much friendship as there exists usually between a dog and a cat. Similarly between the former and the Naval cruisers there was considerable jealousy, and every display of that pompous, bombastic exhibition of character which was such a feature of the life of the eighteenth century, and the first ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... life of the Italian people. Macbeth (op. 23) gives us a rather undistinguished series of musical interpretations of poetical subjects. Don Juan (op. 20) is much finer, and translates Lenau's poem into music with bombastic vigour, showing us the hero who dreams of grasping all the joy of the world, and how he fails, and dies after he ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... wondered aloud, "Where am I?" with the least little hint, perhaps, of melodrama. Sometimes in the French cafe outside the walls, among the officers of the garrison, a bantering perversity drove him on to chant the old glories of Islam, the poets of Andalusia, and the bombastic histories of the saints; and in the midst of it, his face pink with the Frenchmen's wine and his own bitter, half-frightened mockery, he would break off suddenly, "Voila, Messieurs! you will see that I am the best of Mussulmans!" He would ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... thoughts of the "Journal;" second, 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 American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... pity that 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 ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... had finished the article, which seemed to him a well-considered argument, albeit a trifle bombastic, he threw the book upon the table. Finding the armchair wonderfully comfortable, and feeling the fatigue of his journey, he yielded to a drowsy impulse, leaned his head on the cushioned back of the chair, and fell asleep. According to the habit ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... of the ultra florid or bombastic style which may be said to depend upon the pomposity of verbosity for its effect, the latter is a specimen of simple natural Style. Needless to say it is to be preferred. The other should be avoided. It stamps the writer as a person of ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... there was much feasting; and when the ale began to mount to the brains of the revellers, many of them stood up, and raising aloft the "braga goblet"— that over which vows were wont to be made—began, in more or less bombastic strains, to boast of what they meant to do in the future. Having exhausted all other sentiments, the guests then emptied the "remembrance goblet" to the memory of ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... commencement of her Regency, these returning exiles and liberated prisoners had been gathering round her until at last, formed into a faction, they gave themselves out as the Queen's party, and by adopting a high-flown, turgid, and mysterious style of phraseology, and assuming bombastic and braggart airs of authority, coupled with an affectation of capacity and profundity, obtained for themselves from the wits of the Court and city the nickname of The Importants, under which they figured until absorbed a few years later in the more general ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... 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
... 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
... America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... too late to see the castle before the next morning, and I took up at the inn "The Scottish Chiefs," in which I had not read a word since ten or twelve years old. We are in the habit now of laughing when this book is named, as if it were a representative of what is most absurdly stilted or bombastic, but now, in reading, my maturer mind was differently impressed from what I expected, and the infatuation with which childhood and early youth regard this book and its companion, "Thaddeus of Warsaw," was justified. The characters and dialogue ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 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 senior officers ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... South Africa, but he did not even hint at his thought that volunteers might be called for, at his intention, if they were, to offer himself. To do that would not only be absurdly premature, but might even seem slightly bombastic, an uncalled-for study in heroics. He kept silence. The battles of Ladysmith, of Magersfontein, of Stormberg, of Colenso, unsettled the theories of sleek people in silk hats. England came to a very dark hour when Robin was playing with ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... frowsy servant-girl, are developed and used by the author with a variety of power that has never been equalled. Don Quixote's life is entirely in the imagination; this enables him to see castles in windmills, beauty and refinement in coarseness and vulgarity, and poetry, wisdom, and genius in bombastic and absurd works on chivalry, love, and knight-errantry. To emphasize the romantic and preposterous exaltation of the mad gentleman of La Mancha, we have his coarse, vulgar, practical, almost grovelling squire, Sancho ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... a capitulation, I think that no effort will be made to oust them. They are, I believe, doing their best to organise the defence of this city, and if they waste a little time in altering the names of the streets, and publishing manifestoes couched in grand and bombastic phrases, it must be remembered that they have to govern Frenchmen who are fond of this species of nonsense. With respect to the military situation, the soldiers of all sorts are kept well together, and appear to be under the command of their officers. The National Guard, although it still grumbles ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... the manifesto to me. It was a trifle bombastic, and its composition appeared to me vague. No wonder it had roused hostility among his colleagues, I thought, as Sarakoff walked about, declaiming with outstretched arm. Put as briefly as possible, Sarakoff held all disease ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... of honor," replied the chairman; and he could not help it if his words and tone sounded rather bombastic. "But, I am sorry, my dear lady—but I have a very important engagement at this hour—a personal matter, very dear to my heart, which compels me to ask you to excuse me now. I shall be glad to call upon you tomorrow morning, at ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... ends, as does 'Vittoria Corrombona,' with half a dozen murders coram populo, howls, despair, bedlam, and the shambles; putting the reader marvellously in mind of that well-known old book of the same era, 'Reynolds's God's Revenge,' in which, with all due pious horror and bombastic sermonising, the national appetite for abominations is duly fed with some fifty unreadable Spanish histories, French histories, Italian histories, and so forth, one or two of which, of course, are known to have furnished subjects for the playwrights ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... Yet these successive condemnations in no way shook Balzac's confidence in his own genius. He wished to be a great man, and in spite of all predictions to the contrary he was going to be a great man. No doubt he re-read his tragedy in cold blood and laughed at it, realising all its emphatic and bombastic mediocrity. But it was a dead issue, and now with a new tensity of purpose he looked forward to the works which he previsioned in the nebulous and ardent future; no setback could turn him aside from the path which ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... that in face of the public impatience it was impossible to postpone the movement. "On to Richmond" was the universal cry. The halls of Congress resounded with the fervid eloquence of the politicians. The press teemed with bombastic articles, in which the Northern troops were favourably compared with the regular armies of Europe, and the need of discipline and training for the fearless and intelligent representatives of the sovereign ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... 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
... ridiculous person, under whose conduct she was exposed to the "whips and scorns," the disdain and bitter retaliation, natural to the union of a beautiful and accomplished, though vain and haughty woman, with a very eccentric, irritable, and bombastic humorist. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... individuals, each one moulding and modifying the style in a manner peculiar to himself alone. In the hands of Brunelleschi it was stern and powerful; Bramante made it chaste, elegant and graceful; Palladio made it formal, cold, symmetrical; while with Sansovino and Sammichele it became sumptuous and bombastic. ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... 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, selected by M. de St. Marc, who no doubt found ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... overrun by a swarm of painters whose prime standard of excellence was the ability to make haste. Grandeur of conception was forgotten; a grave, ample manner was no longer understood; superficial sentiment and bombastic size carried the day. Yet a few painters, though their forms had become redundant and exaggerated, retained something of what had been the Venetian glory—the deep and moist colour of old. It still glowed with traces of its old lustre on the canvases of Giovanni Contarini, or ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... 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 the stylist with character, who seeks as earnestly and perseveringly to avoid the trite phrases ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... is polished, lucid, and incisive. He does not waste words or revel in bombastic diffuseness. Every phrase of his narrative is a definite contribution towards the vivification of his realistic effects. His concise, laconic periods are pregnant with deep meaning, and instinct with that indefinable Norse essence which almost eludes the translator—that vague something ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... Christlieb ("Modern Doubt and Christian Belief," Edinburgh: Clark 1874) can even now write:—"So then the 'full age' to which humanity is at present supposed to have attained, consists in man's doing good purely for goodness sake! Who sees not the hollowness of this bombastic talk. That man has yet to be born whose practice will be regulated by this insipid theory (dieser grauen theorie). What is the idea of goodness per se? * * * The abstract idea of goodness is not an effectual motive for well-doing" (p. 104). My only comment is c'est ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... are made to supply our uncomfortable lack of a distinctly national air, but few of them have that first requisite, a fiery catchiness, and most of them have been so bombastic as to pall even upon palates that can endure Fourth of July glorification. Recognizing that the trouble with "America" was not at all due to the noble words written by the man whom "fate tried to conceal by naming him Smith," Converse has written a new air to this poem. Unfortunately, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... 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
... feature, or mannerism, as it might be called, specially marks Hawaiian music of the bombastic bravura sort in modern times, imparting to it in its strife for emphasis a sensual barbaric quality. It can be described further only as a gurgling throatiness, suggestive at times of ventriloquism, as if the singer were gloating over some wild physical ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... the literature and history of the Scandinavians, and the people listened, not as to the inspiration of an individual mind, but to the pulsation of its own past life. Their praises were desired, their satire feared, by the greatest heroes and kings. Their style was figurative, sometimes bombastic, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... this. See, the rosy sunrise still lingers in its very petals; the dew is 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 ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... strange notion Ben must have formed of a determined, remorseless, all-daring, foolhardiness, to have represented it in such a mouthing Tamburlane, and bombastic tonguebully as ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... SIMPLE ENGLISH WORDS and avoid what is called "fine writing." Young writers and newspaper writers are greatly given to this offense of fine or bombastic writing. Examples: ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... with the horrid rascal SIR EMERSOM TENNENT alludes to—with the blackguard. That he is a boaster, a talker, an idiot, a nincompoop; that he scatters "words, words, words," as Polonius did of old; that he is bombastic, wordy, prosy, nonsensical, and a fool, no one will deny. But he is no rogue, though he utters rogueries and drolleries. No one is justified in ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... come of 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, as descending to ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... I run with regular steps, and strike the 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 ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... 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 ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... 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 Persian ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... group of ambitious schemers 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 no ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... of his rival to civilize and enrich his country, and remarked "that the czar might amuse himself as he saw fit in building a city, but that he should soon take it from him, and set fire to his wooden house;" a bombastic boast, which, like most boasting, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... those who correct an abuse. Wordsworth's work was a protest—mild yet firm—against the bombastic and artificial school of the Eighteenth Century. Before his day the "timber" used by poets consisted of angels, devils, ghosts, gods; onslaught, tourneys, jousts, tempests of hate and torrents of wrath, always of course with a very beautiful ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... ever crushed the seats of landau or brougham with his rotundity. He was advancing with hands in the pockets of his green jacket and his broad shoulders thrown back, as if he had taken it upon himself to replace Atlas. His cap, placed in military fashion upon his head, his scowling brows, and his bombastic air, announced that he was upon the point of accomplishing some important deed which greatly interested him. Leonard Rousselet, walking by his side, moved his spider legs with equal activity, carefully holding up the skirts of his long coat as if ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... sailor-records, the Admiralty Petitions. Many of them, it must in justice be owned, bear unqualified testimony to the kindness and humanity of officers; but in the great majority of cases the evidence they adduce is overwhelmingly to the contrary. And if their language is sometimes bombastic, if their style is almost uniformly illiterate, if they are the productions of a band of mutinous dogs standing out for rights which they never possessed and deserving of a halter rather than a hearing, ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... bosom sin of most uneducated prose writers, not only of the ladies of the nineteenth century, but of the Middle Age monks, who, having in general no poetry on which to form their taste, except the effeminate and bombastic productions of the dying Roman empire, fell into a certain washy prolixity, which has made monk Latin a byword, and puts one sadly in mind of what is too truly called "young ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... unto that of a congress of polecats. I rode seated on a brake, showers of cinders and the cold night air swirling about me, until the festive natives thinned down enough to give me admittance. By that time we were drawing into Celaya, also in the throes of some bombastic celebration. ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... his voice and his presence of mind. The first part of the speech, the bombastic and brutally practical challenge, stunned him with surprise; but the rest of Evan's remarks, branching off as they did into theoretic phrases, gave his vague and very English mind (full of memories of the hedging and compromise ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... suddenly turned the tables on an abusive opponent. One of the Democratic orators was Colonel Dick Taylor, a dapper, but bombastic little man, who rode in his carriage, and dressed richly. But, politically, he boasted of belonging to the Democrats, "the bone and sinew, the hard-fisted yeomanry of the land," and sneered at those ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... But the substantial goose, which probably escapes those tumbles in trying to fly, will never do anything very magnificent in the way of flying. The man who in his early days writes in a very inflated and bombastic style will gradually sober down into good sense and accurate taste, still retaining something of liveliness and eloquence. But expect little of the man who as a boy was always sensible, and never bombastic. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... was promptly 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. This episode over, ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... how distressed my mother was because I insisted on carrying the sandwiches in a red and orange spotted handkerchief, which I had purchased with my own pocket-money, and to which I was deeply attached, partly from the bombastic nature of the pattern, and partly because it was big enough for any grown-up man. "It made me look like a tramping sailor," she said. I did not tell her that this was precisely the effect at which I aimed, though it was the case; but I coaxed ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... unromantic an unenthusiastic, harmonized entirely with his own. It was refreshing for him to hear her chatter about people and things with the calm good sense of a Philistine, especially in a society where the bombastic and exaggerated talk of original, poetically minded young ladies had repelled and bored him. At his first meeting with Malvine Marker he had thought that she was the wife for him, and since he had become friendly with her and her circle, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... 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
... is lengthy and pedantically bombastic, e.g., the following paraphrase for "in every British colony:"—"under Indian palm-groves, amid Australian gum-trees, in the shadow of African ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... the Irish Republic began to fill rapidly, the Fenian leaders became more hopeful and bombastic, while enthusiasm among the rank and file continued to be worked up to fever pitch. President Roberts gathered a select coterie about him at his headquarters in New York to assist in upholding his dignity, and incidentally help to boost the cause. ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... getting him to see the truth under these circumstances. The mere fact that his condition had improved so much under British rule made him all the readier to cry for the Franco-American moon. Things presently went from bad to worse. A glowing, bombastic address from 'The Free French to their Canadian Brothers' (who of course were 'slaves') was even read out at more than one church door. Then the Quebec Assembly unanimously passed an Alien Act in May 1794, and suspected ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... what was the young lady's fortune, he replied: 'Four louis, two large wicked eyes, one fine figure, one pair of good hands, and lots of mind.' 'And what do you give her?' asked the lawyer.—'Immortality,' replied he, with the air of a bombastic poet 'The names of the wives of kings die with them—that of Scarron's wife will ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... take place in Paris as a result of the Dreyfus affair, it would probably bring forward a popular military man as a candidate for leadership. Such a man is to be found in General Boisdeffre, who figured in the Zola trial and made a bombastic speech ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 10, March 10, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... met with great success both in France and elsewhere; it is a favorite of the public, though not free from imitating other musicians, particularly Auber and Rossini. The style of the text is somewhat bombastic, and only calculated for effect. Notwithstanding these defects {349} the opera pleases; it has a brilliant introduction, as well as ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... M. 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 ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... the same effect. Neither the taste of the writer nor his manner of expression was happy. Of this Dominic was quite sensible. Patronage, especially after his period of independence, was far from agreeable to him. Yet behind the verbiage, the platitudes and bombastic phrases, his ear detected a very human cry of fear and cry for help. Should he accede, doing his best to allay that fear and ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... "Catalogue," with a very few additions from other sources. As a biographer, Lenz fails as signally as in his capacity of critic. Much original matter, from one living so far away, was not to be expected; but he has made no commendable use of the printed authorities which he had at hand. His style is bombastic and feeble; there is neither a logical nor a chronological progress to his narrative; moreover, he is not always trustworthy, even in matters personal to himself;—at all events, a very interesting account of a meeting between him and Mendelssohn, at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Assyrians were 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 pillaging. ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... Of the bombastic and grotesque paeans of triumph emitted by Lord Ellenborough, whose head had been turned by a success to which he had but scantly contributed, nothing need now be said, nor of the garish pageant with which he received the armies as they re-entered British territory ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... universal competition in hisses and derision from one end of the world to the other? It is clear that the things at which everyone sneers are not of a very evident truth. What shall we say of one of Sejan's secretaries who dedicated to Petronius a bombastic book entitled—"The Truths of the Sibylline Oracles, Proved ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... altogether through vainglory he spoke. He was not a bombastic sort. I think he voiced the intent of the army ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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 and Jackson ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... send you the score of my "Kunstler" chorus, which I have had autographed here. Devote a quarter of an hour to it, and tell me plainly your opinion of the composition, which of course I look upon only as a stepping-stone to other things. If you find it bad, bombastic, mistaken, tell me so without hesitation. You may be convinced that I am not in the least vain of my works; and if I do not produce anything good and beautiful all my life, I shall none the less continue to feel genuine and cordial pleasure in the beautiful ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... enter into ephemeral alliances, in order to create majorities that can but last a day. Wrangling, calling each other reactionaries, authoritarians, and rascals, incapable of coming to an understanding on any serious measure, dragged into discussions about trifles, producing nothing better than bombastic proclamations; all giving themselves an awful importance while the real strength of the movement ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... have always suspected public taste to be a mongrel product, out of affectation by dogmatism; and felt sure, if you could only find an honest man of no special literary bent, he would tell you he thought much of Shakespeare bombastic and most absurd, and all of him written in very obscure English and wearisome to read. And not long ago I was able to lay by my lantern in content, for I found the honest man. He was a fellow of parts, quick, humorous, a clever ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... but you have, for all your cleverness, fallen a victim to the prevailing error. The lady is in every way my social equal, in her own country my superior. She is a caliph's daughter. The title which the playgoing public imagined was of the usual bombastic, just-on-the-programme sort, is hers by right. Her late father, Caliph Al Hamid Sulaiman, was one of the richest and most powerful Mohammedans in existence. He died five months ago, leaving an immense fortune to be conveyed to England to his ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... as his last effusion, I think' he observed, as far as I can judge from so cursory a review. Exaggerated passion, bombastic language, egotism to excess, and, which perhaps is the only portion that is genuine, mixed with common-place scepticism and impossible morals, and a sort of vague, dreamy philosophy, which, if it mean anything, means atheism, borrowed from his idol, Herbert, and which ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... authorities were very grateful, and he heralded the completion of his gigantic combinations with regard to the discovery of the assassin of the horse Sultan. Lola and I never spoke of him without pain; for in spite of his crazy and bombastic oddities, he ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... when they march, they will march against Austria and strive to fight us bravely in order to obtain from the French Emperor praise, honors, titles, and grants of additional territories. No, no, I cannot be blinded by brave words and bombastic phrases; I know that Austria, in case a war should break out, would stand all alone, and that she must either conquer or be ruined. In 1805, when, in consequence of the disastrous battle of Austerlitz, I lost half my states, I was ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... extreme views about this speech. According to one, Shakespeare quoted it from some play, or composed it for the occasion, simply and solely in order to ridicule, through it, the bombastic style of dramatists contemporary with himself or slightly older; just as he ridicules in 2 Henry IV. Tamburlaine's rant about the kings who draw his chariot, or puts fragments of similar bombast into the mouth of Pistol. According to Coleridge, on the other hand, this idea is 'below ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... evidently the work of an eye-witness, cf. c. 29, 'nostri ad dimicandum procedunt, id quod adversarios existimabamus esse facturos.' He is apt to be bombastic (c. 5, 'hic alternis non solum morti mortem exaggerabant, sed tumulos tumulis exaequabant'), and makes a ridiculous show of learning (quoting the combat of Achilles and Memnon, c. 25, and Ennius, c. 23, 'nostri cessere parumper'; c. 31, 'pes ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... 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 Tsar ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... savage energy of which had attracted him, in his reaction against German atony, although he was beginning to lose his taste for it, knowing intuitively the unnaturalness of such assumption of genius, always and at all costs. He had added a symphony which bore the bombastic title of the Basle Boecklin, "The Dream of Life," and the motto: "Vita somnium breve." A song-cycle completed the programme, with a few classical works, and a Festmarsch by Ochs, which Christophe had ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... if uncontrolled by morality and reason, comes into conflict with both. Freed of moral restraint it is prone to engender a peculiarly noxious brand of spurious sentiment—the patriotism of false pretence. Bombastic masquerade of the genuine impulse is not uncommon among place-hunters in Parliament and popularity-hunters in constituencies, and the honest instinct is thereby brought into disrepute. Dr Johnson was thinking solely of the frauds and moral degradation which ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... condescension was entirely different from what he had intended. Then he drew the cloud of the blue coat once more wrathfully about him, whistled more shrilly than ever, so that the big bell on the other side resounded, was doubly bombastic and raised his shoulders as high again toward his black head. The wrath and decision of his former coughing and spitting was child's play to those he displayed now. But the workmen soon knew that this went on only in Apollonius' absence; and his ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... possible from the congregation, as a lonely and secret worshipper, he soon found himself as separate from them in heart as in daily life. He felt that they, and even more than they, those flowery and bombastic pulpit rhetoricians, who were paid for their sermons by the clapping and cheering of the congregation, were not thinking of, longing after, the same things as himself. Besides, he never spoke to a Christian; for the negress at his lodgings ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... bombastic, but in those feudal forties it rang more magnificent than war. Single-voiced he overawed the host of bigots, dullards, and reactionaries. Unhappily, he let his people abandon their native tongue, while teaching them how to ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... 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, ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... his 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 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... 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
... eight to ten thousand militia. In all our marching through Georgia, he has not forced us to use any thing but a skirmish-line, though at several points he had erected fortifications and tried to alarm us by bombastic threats. In Savannah he has taken refuge in a line constructed behind swamps and overflowed rice-fields, extending from a point on the Savannah River about three miles above the city, around by a branch of the Little Ogeechee, which stream is impassable ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... 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 ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... I dined quietly with Brinsley FitzGerald at the Ritz, and here it was curious to observe how Paris, like Dover, had put on a sombre garb of war. The buoyant, optimistic nature of the French people was apparent in the few we met; but there was no bombastic, over-confident tone in the conversation around us; only a quiet, but grim, determination which fully appreciated the tremendous difficulties and gigantic issues at stake. The false optimism of "A Berlin" ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... sometimes been mistaken for depth. His "Agamemnon" is generally deemed the masterpiece of Greek tragedy. His language is stately and swelling, in keeping with the heroic part of his characters; sometimes it is too swelling, and even bombastic. Though he is the greatest of all, art in him had not arrived at technical perfection. He reminds us sometimes of the Aeginetan marbles, rather than the frieze of ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... "sermons in 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 Tom Thumb as ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... 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" ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... the well-known Chrononhotonthologos written to ridicule some bombastic tragedies of the day. Chrononhotonthologos is king of Queerummania, Bombardinian is his general, while his courtiers are Aldiborontiphoscophornio and Rigdum Funnidos. The following gives a good specimen ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... the dinner. In fact, it was one of the rare occasions upon which Hinton took the trouble to exert himself. Something in the dreary old room, with its brave attempt at cheer, in the half-witted little lady who was making such superhuman efforts to be good, and above all in the bombastic, egotistical, ignorant editor who was trying to keep up appearances against such heavy odds, touched the best and deepest that was in Hinton, and lifted him out of himself. Gradually he began to take the lead in the conversation. With great tact he relieved ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... hath sent me all 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, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... will give you some faint conception of one of the most brilliant exploits of modern days. The bulletin, believe me, is not Napoleonized into any bombastic extravagance of success. The tiling was splendid; from the brilliant firework of the old pump itself, to the figure of Perpendicular dripping with duckweed, like an insane river-god, it was unequalled. Our fellows behaved like trumps; ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... 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; ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... 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 ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... then annihilate the point of it with a cutting cynicism and set the table in a roar of laughter. Among others who were seated here was a Mr. Trevor, of Cincinnati, one of the pioneers of Asquith. Mr. Trevor was a trifle bombastic, with a tendency towards gesticulation, an art which he had learned in no less a school than the Ohio State Senate. He was a self-made man,—a fact which he took good care should not escape one,—and had amassed his money, I believe, in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... history. Under the wise and mild government of a Vespasian and a Titus, and more especially of a Trajan, the Romans returned to a purer taste. But whatever period may have given birth to the tragedies of Seneca, they are beyond description bombastic and frigid, unnatural both in character and action, revolting from their violation of propriety, and so destitute of theatrical effect, that I believe they were never meant to leave the rhetorical schools ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... declaring that his vow of poverty and humility would not allow it; and he strongly blamed his dear host, the prior, for daring to suggest, without his consent, an exchange of things eternal for things temporal. On other matters he refused to explain his views, and took refuge in ambiguous and bombastic replies. God would inspire him, he said, and at the approaching festival of the Virgin, at the august and sublime hour of holy communion, he expected to hear the voice of Jesus speaking to his heart and ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... 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, ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... with the most ostentatious air and bombastic confidence. Two or three of the company could not refrain from laughing at his airs, not ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... Queen, which she never received; and Evelyn might have had the honour of knighthood of the Bath, but declined it. He was present at the Coronation in Westminster Abbey on St. George's Day, 1661, and had prepared and printed a Panegyric poem on the occasion, a screed of bombastic doggerel in fulsome praise of the King. He was a frequent visitor at the Court, and loved to sun himself in the royal presence. One of the finest examples of this feature of Evelyn's character is his Fumifugium, published in 1661, which will be more particularly referred ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... themselves from the restraint of form, the great danger of which consisted in its similarity to common-place sentence construction, so that the verse ran the risk either of becoming prosaic, or else, in trying forcibly to avoid this, of growing bombastic. An escape was provided by inserting, in moments of emotion, a metre of a more lyrical quality into the uniform structure of the usual vehicle of dramatic dialogue, particularly when partaking of the nature of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... position until within a few months had been a humble one, was brow-beaten and dominated by powerful personalities and forced to stand for acts and words which were not really his own. He declared, said Cox, that his bombastic and truculent orders were practically dictated by others. The declaration that his headquarters would be his saddle, which Lee so wittily turned, saying, "then his headquarters would be where his hindquarters ought to be," Pope declares he never made. When his environment ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... everyday novelist would at once have become bombastic and conceited at being the cause of such a universal upheaval—not so Spout. He retired quite quietly to his cosy kitchenette apartment in Harlem and wrote that charming and winsome essay in sentiment ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... shades drawing.] The lady, it seems, would have been quite satisfied if you had merely called her husband a traitor to his country, a robber of blind widows, a bombastic egotist, a thieving ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... 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 ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... 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, was personally ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... face. No, no, I am still of the opinion that the original could never please me, and if the physiognomist Lavater should see it, he would say: 'That is the portrait of a puffed-up, quaint, powerful genius, who imagines himself something important, and who is nothing! The likeness of a bombastic fellow, with an empty head behind the pretentious brow, and meaningless phrases ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach |
