"Bathos" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 it was the delight ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... 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
... 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
... It was the sentimental act of a virtuoso in the art of pleasing women—who are so easily pleased. At the moment he had achieved forgetfulness of boudoir trickery and so retained almost all his usual assumption of dignity. Even Joan, with her quick eye for the ridiculous, failed to detect the bathos of his attitude, and merely thought that he was trying to be funny and ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... and pshawed. "Very good," I thought; "you may fume and fidget as you please: but this is the best plan to pursue with you, I am certain. I like you more than I can say; but I'll not sink into a bathos of sentiment: and with this needle of repartee I'll keep you from the edge of the gulf too; and, moreover, maintain by its pungent aid that distance between you and myself most conducive to our real ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... sperrit," said Mrs. Glegg, rising to get her knitting with the sense that any further remark after this would be bathos. ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... feeling 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
... Wilson, and yet fully three-fourths of the newly-enfranchised women 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 ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... 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 Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... 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 mere mould holding chemicals, a mere bundle of phosphorus ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... 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 ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... arrived at metaphysics; every knight he held must be a logician, and ultimate bravery is courage of the mind. One thinks of his coming to this conclusion with knit brows and balancing intentness above whole gulfs of bathos—very much as he had ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... off 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 ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... 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 ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... the thing. He felt that it was monstrous that the 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. It ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... wine and had an age-long conversation, which would have been highly delightful if Fanny and I had not been faint with hunger. The ladies each narrated the story of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the prettiest combination of sentiment and financial bathos. Abramina, specially, endeared herself with every word. She was as simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that should have been brought up to the business of a money-changer. One touch was so resplendently ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cannot intend that any of her progeny should be more bounteously endowed than herself, there is an independent intelligence that does so intend? To content oneself with pronouncing such preference to be eminently unscientific is tenderness of language nearly akin, I fear, to literary bathos. ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... is a mere coward instinct—a relic of barbarism which is being gradually eradicated from our natures by the progress of civilization. The world knows by this time that creation is an empty jest; we are all beginning to understand its bathos! And if we must grant that there is some mischievous supreme Farceur who, safely shrouded in invisibility, continues to perpetrate so poor and purposeless a joke for his own amusement and our torture, we need not, for ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... 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 me We are, in short, a civilized people We have now looked into ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... is pathos in this, there is bathos in his apostrophe to the millipede, beginning "Poor sowbug!" and eulogizing the healing virtues of that odious little beast; of which he tells us to take "half a pound, putt 'em alive into a quart or two of wine," with saffron ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... 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 ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... beloved" (Jowett). See "Symp." the finale; or if, after Weiske and Cobet, {euthumias}, transl. "to the general hilarity of myself and the whole company" (cf. "Cyrop." I. iii. 12, IV. v. 7), but this is surely a bathos rhetorically. ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... England conscience was encysted. Robert H. Newell, mirth-maker and mystic, satirized military ignorance and pinchbeck bluster to an immortality of contempt. Bret Harte in verse and story touched the parallels of tragedy and of comedy, of pathos, of bathos, and of humor, which love of life and lust of gold opened up amid the unapprehended grandeurs and the coveted treasures of primeval nature. Charles F. Browne made "Artemus Ward" as well known as Abraham Lincoln in the time the two divided the attention of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... seen.") Or else they are those old connoisseurs from the wilds of New Jersey who laboriously learn the difference between a fresco and a fire-plug and from that day forward feel privileged to void their critical bathos on painting, sculpture and architecture ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... this tale), who "traded abroad, and was took 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 ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... singulars, trumpery 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 ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... Crosbie was to be admitted into the family, thereby becoming entitled to certain privileges,—and thereby also becoming subject to certain domestic drawbacks. In Mrs Dale's little household there had been no rising to grandeur; but then, also, there had never been any bathos of dirt. Of this also Crosbie thought as he sat with his ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... 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
... telling him that he had made his supreme effort, and that anything further must be bathos, he turned abruptly and stalked into his cottage, where he drank tea and ate bacon and thought chaotic thoughts. And when his appetite declined to carry him more than half-way through the third rasher, he ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... scream. He returned with the news that Mrs. Murphy's little 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 had looked ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... Dawley, 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... 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 ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... condescends to utter a single delightfully modulated strain. He often brings his tiresome extravaganzas to a magnificent climax of melody, and just as often concludes an inimitable chant with a most contemptible bathos. But the notes of the Robin are all melodious, all delightful,—loud without vociferation, mellow without monotony, fervent without ecstasy, and combining more of mellowness of tone, plaintiveness, cheerfulness, and propriety of execution, than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... speaking of their author, says Lockhart, "with 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 ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... reaction of the same spirit that produced the 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 "Philistinism." English art departing from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... musicians themselves, deeply moved, no doubt, with the sorrows of the scene, mournfully resumed their fiddles, and struck up "ti ti tum tiddle un ti tum ti"—the jolliest jig you ever heard. The bathos was irresistible; we behind the scenes, the principal sufferers (perhaps) in the night's performance, were instantly comforted, and all but shouted with laughter. I hope the audience were equally revived by this grotesque sudden cheering of their spirits. After the tragedy ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... 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
... said, "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. But he wasn't a bit that kind of ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... me up when the hero makes half-a-million pounds in a single chapter!) better than those that had to do with Warde's domestic entanglements and the deterioration of his character. And the climax seemed inadequate to the point of bathos. But there is much in the tale to enjoy; and you might read it if only for a vivid word-picture of what Berlin used to be like before the beginning of the great debacle. This has now ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... Cullerne was celebrated for 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 ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... poem where the narrative is literally carried on through a succession of highly wrought comparisons, each paragraph beginning with an 'As' followed by a correlative 'So' half a page further on. No such series of pictures, however fairly wrought—and Browne's too often end in bathos—can possibly convey the impression of continuons action. It is the same with periphrasis. Used with discretion it may be one of the subtlest ornaments of style, and even when fulfilling no particular purpose is capable of imparting a luxuriant and somewhat rococo ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... "Oh, bathos!" said Lady Bath, while the 'prentices shouted applause. "Is this hedge-bantling to be fathered on ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... all. He had plunged in his nervousness to the lowermost bathos. Audrey saw that he looked puzzled and disheartened. She crossed over to her writing-desk, wrote out a cheque for five pounds, and gave it to him with the prettiest action in the world. "I want you to take ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... 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
... 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
... that Greek words are usually treated as Latin. Thus 'crisis' lengthens the penultima under the 'apex' rule, while 'critical' has it short under the general rule of polysyllables. Other examples of lengthening are 'bathos', 'pathos', while the long quantity is of course kept in 'colon' and 'crasis'. For the 'alias' rule we may quote '[a]theist', 'cryptog[a]mia', 'h[o]meopathy', 'heterog[e]neous', 'pandem[o]nium', while the normal shortenings are found in 'an[)o]nymous', ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... great a variety of subjects, and to have written nothing contemptibly, must indicate a genius much superior to the common standard.—His versification is almost every where beautiful; and tho' he has been ridiculed in the Treatise of the Bathos, published in Pope's works, for being too minute in his descriptions of the objects of nature; yet it rather proceeded from a philosophical exactness, than ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... 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 ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Lorison, in spite of the unconvincing bathos of this appeal, showed a sympathetic face, for one of the officers left the woman's side, and went ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... at him in admiration—real admiration—because the gross bathos he had just uttered betrayed a weakness—vanity. Now I began to understand him; vanity must also lead him to undervalue men. True, with the faintest approach to eloquence he could no doubt hold the "Clubs" of Belleville spellbound; with self-effacing adroitness to cover ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... 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 ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... work would take weeks or even months to examine with any fullness, and volumes to describe. It is as prodigal of labour, design and colour as nature herself is. In fact it is one of those things that nature has a right to do but not art. It fatigues one to look at it or think upon it and, bathos though it be to say so, it won the first prize at the Exhibitions of Ecclesiastical Art Work held a few years ago at Rome and at Siena. It has taken Signora Carletti months to do even the little she has done, but that little must be seen to be believed, for ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... 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 Polish—and for ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... may contrive vulcanized gutta-percha or other resistant steamers which can neither be billed nor gaffed, shot nor slashed into sinking—vessels beyond all capacity for bathos, and no more to be persuaded into going under than was the black Baptist convert of David Crockett's story. What would naval battles amount to between such invulnerables? The Roman mythology had a fable of a hare which had received from the gods the gift that it was ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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 was the number ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... evidently only outward tranquillity and freedom from trouble, and the good that is to come to Job is plainly mere worldly prosperity. This strain of thought is expressed even more clearly in that extraordinary bit of bathos, which with solemn irony the great dramatist who wrote this book makes this Eliphaz utter immediately after the text, 'The Almighty shall be thy defence and—thou shalt have plenty of silver!' It has not been left for commercial Englishmen to recommend religion on the ground that it produces successful ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... manifestly astonished. Tea! When broken hearts were scattered around! The suggestion was pure bathos. ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... as this 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 upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... 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 hats; ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... Strangwidge' 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
... speech a bathos? Perhaps not; for as she spoke the last word, she drew from her bosom, where it hung round her neck by a chain, a broken talisman, exactly similar to the one which she coveted so fiercely, and ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... A presentiment of his end seems to have come to him at his own table among his friends, and he said to them: "My next undertaking shall be the 'End of all things.'" The next day his graver was already busy with the strange plate which he called "The Bathos," where Father Time is seen dying, his broken scythe and hour-glass beside him, amid a chaos ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... confessions—to build up a religion of his 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 ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... final flunk; the confidence with 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 ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... patience, though (as I was afterwards told, in 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 FOURPENCE, (O! how I felt the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of that FOURPENCE!) 'only fourpence, 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 pages, sir! large octavo, closely printed. Thirty and two ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... tears orbed themselves beneath the Professor's lids,—in obedience to the principle of gravitation celebrated in that delicious bit of bladdery bathos, "The very law that moulds a tear," with which the "Edinburgh Review" attempted to put down Master George Gordon when that young man was foolishly trying to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Austen's famous "Northanger Abbey" and Eaton Stannard Barrett's little-known but very funny "The Heroine; or, Adventures of Cherubina" (1813) fall within the genre. "Heart", a slim (indeed, truncated) account of faithful love, sinks into bathos; it is, perhaps, most interesting for its opening scene of a blase New York City crowd gathering around a fallen man — and ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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
... 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 pretends to ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... merry over their wine. At last they grew so affected by the wine they had drank, that they were ready to follow a leader into any absurdity. Chapelle was, when tipsy, always melancholy, and on this occasion he addressed his companions in a strain of bathos which, had they been free from the effects of wine, would only have excited their laughter. But now they were in the same condition as himself. Chapelle finally wound up by proposing that they all proceed to a neighboring ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... though, as I was 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 pages, Sir, large octavo, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... methods. Four of the five adventures are of the mystically gruesome kind, removed however from being commonplace ghost-stories by a certain dignity of conception. It is to be admitted that but for this dignity two at least would fall into some peril of bathos. Take the first, The Regeneration of Lord Ernie, in which a young tutor, bear-leading a spiritless scion of nobility through Europe, brings his bored charge to a strange mountain village where the inhabitants ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... 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 ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... the pipe into his plates. In the tail-piece to his works, which he prepared a few months before his death, and which he called The Bathos, or Manner of Sinking in Sublime Paintings, the end of everything is represented. Time himself, supported against a broken column, is expiring, his scythe falling from his grasp and a long clay pipe breaking in two as it ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... broom against spiders and against all the young women who threaten to come near the narrator (26).[10] The mystic temperament is often capable of making connections between the spiritual and the excremental,[11] between the sublime and the bathos of "Thunder-bolts from Anus." Blake, we should recall, has poems ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... note, too, here, 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 has passed, he is not only alive, but he is standing upright. It has ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... etc. "By the by, one of my corrections in the fair copy sent yesterday has dived into the bathos ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... 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
... 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 ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of dramatic propriety needed that the girl should, before he addressed her, perform her task of clearing the table. If she had it to perform after telling her love, and after receiving his gift and his farewell, the bathos would be distressing ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... bathos caused by the Saja'-assonance: in the music of the Arabic it contrasts strangely with the baldness of translation. The same is the case with the Koran beautiful in the original and miserably dull in European languages, it is like the glorious style of the "Anglican Version" by ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... recommend a little more enthusiasm to the modern Painters; too much is certainly not the vice of the present age. The Italians seem to have been continually declining in this respect, from the time of Michael Angelo to that of Carlo Maratti,[44] and from thence to the very bathos of insipidity to which they are now sunk; so that there is no need of remarking, that where I mentioned the Italian painters in opposition to the Dutch, I mean not the moderns, but the heads of the old Roman and Bolognian ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... consequence of a blow on the forehead and those he sees by turning his gaze to the nightly sky. To every competent thinker, the bare appreciation of such a passage as that which closes Chateaubriand's chapter on the Last Judgment, with the huge bathos of its incongruous mixture of sublime and absurd, is its sufficient refutation: "The globe trembles on its axis; the moon is covered with a bloody veil; the threatening stars hang half detached from the vault of heaven, and the agony of the world commences. Now resounds the trump ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... 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 of great presence; he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 of the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... canst thou breathe us No thrilling harmony, no charming pathos, No cheerful song of love without its bathos? The Furies take thee,— Blast thy obstreperous mirth, thy foolish chatter,— Gag thee, exhaust thy breath, and stop thy clatter, And change thee to a beast, thou senseless prater!— Nought else can ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... there in his love of nature any transcendental strain; no mawkish sentimentality, and consequently in its expression no bathos. Everywhere in his poetry nature comes in, at times in artistically selected detail, at times again with a deft suggestive touch that is telling and effective, yet always in harmony with the feeling of the poem, and always subordinate to it. His descriptions of scenery ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... he, with culminating enthusiasm, "the 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 of time has come. ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... possible 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 ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... reply. "Oh! tol, lol!" And that in anything but a melodious voice. "Oh! tol, lol!" What a bathos! The beautiful Maria, whom in my imagination I had clothed with all the attributes of sentiment and delicacy, whom I had conjured up as a beau ideal of perfection, replies in a hoarse voice with, "Oh! tol, lol!" Down she went, like the English funds in a panic—down she went to the zero of a Doll ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Emilia had cried it out to herself My engagement to Mr. Pericles is that I am not to write No nose to the hero, no moral to the tale Nor can a protest against coarseness be sweepingly interpreted Oh! beastly bathos On a wild April morning Once my love? said he. Not now?—does it mean, not now? One of those men whose characters are read off at a glance Our partner is our master Passion does not inspire dark appetite—Dainty ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to preserve his countrymen from being intoxicated by the quaintness and affectation of the Salmagundi school, and the purity and wit of the other have as little proved powerful to save his work from being deserted for the bathos and silliness of the 'Backwoodsman.' I remember them both. In private life they united qualities which are seldom found together, brilliancy of conversation and modesty of deportment. In their writings ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth |
