"Bombastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... at, however, was this bizarre figure of a despot who held the power of life and death. It was one of his quieter interludes when he laid aside the ferocious and bombastic play-acting which made it hard to discover whether he was very cunning or half-mad. The immense beard flowed down his chest instead of being tricked out in gaudy ribbons. He was idly running a comb through it when his small, rum-reddened eyes took ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... Congress. But his chief accomplishments lay in the wonderful ease and fluency with which he imitated the eloquent appeals of certain ambitious members of the Kockville bar, and in his travesties of the bombastic flights of ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... 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 by ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... realism and naturalness are these little plays of the common folk than the elaborate Christmas dramas of more learned German writers, Catholic and Lutheran, who in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became increasingly stilted and bombastic. ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... condemned the sheep-men with foul-mouthed 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 ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... must have formed of a determined, remorseless, all-daring, foolhardiness, to have represented it in such a mouthing Tamburlane, and bombastic tonguebully as this ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... century Isla, a Jesuit, undertook with entire success, to purify the Spanish pulpit, which had become lowered both in style and tone. His history of Friar Gerund, which slightly resembles Don Quixote, aimed a blow at bombastic oratory, causing it soon to die out. Proverbs which Cervantes had styled "short sentences drawn from long experience," have always been a distinctive Spanish product, and can be traced back to the earliest ages of the country. No ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... celebrated motion in the House of Commons for the Repeal of the Union between England and Ireland, the Assembly of Lower Canada, at Papineau's instance, passed the equally celebrated "Ninety-two Resolutions." Bombastic and diffuse, like parts of O'Connell's speech, this historic document nevertheless was as true in all really essential respects as Mackenzie's manifesto and as O'Connell's tremendous indictment of the system of Government in Ireland. All three men, O'Connell with far the most justification, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... 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 pedigree for Mr. Bergum, ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... an inimitable past excites the pity and resentment of thoughtful men. The attempt to outdo the works of the great has exhibited the contemptible imbecility of the little, and the coarse-grained vanity of Clement the Eleventh has parodied the poetry of art in the bombastic prose of a vulgar tongue. Pope Pelagius took for his church the pillars and marbles of Trajan's Forum, in the belief that his acts were acceptable to God; but Clement had no such excuse, and the edifice which ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... 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 ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... am surprised you should do these honest men the injustice to suppose that such an impudent, flimsy, bombastic tirade as that same proclamation of Burgoyne's, should have a feather's weight with any mother's son ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... with communications from the different nations, drawn in the most bombastic manner; for although they must have by this time realized that they were absolutely in his power, they were unable to set aside the boastful method of addressing their fellow-men which they had inherited from their savage ancestors, who, standing ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... to pay my respects and renew my offers of good services if conciliation were to be attempted, expecting to see a civilized general, but I found only a conceited and bombastic old man who had not the least idea of what he had undertaken. He pooh-poohed conciliation, and assured me that his plans were so perfect that within two weeks after his setting out for the conquest of the island all would be over and the insurrection ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... loved, for Moll Hawk's troubles would pass like a whiff of the wind while Viola's would endure to the end of time,—always a shadow hanging over her brightest day, a cloud that would not vanish. Out of the silence had come a murmur more desolating than the thunderbolt with all its bombastic fury; out of the silence had come a voice that would go on forever whispering into her ear an ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... Side district in New York City in 1895 and served continuously until his nomination for Governor of New York in 1912. All these years he was known as a Tammany man. During his campaign for Governor he made many promises for reform, and after his election he issued a bombastic declaration of independence. His words were discounted in the light of his previous record. Immediately after his inauguration, however, he began a house-cleaning. He set to work an economy and efficiency commission; he removed a Tammany superintendent of prisons; made unusually good appointments ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... to ask you to behold the American as he is, as I honestly found him—great, small, good, bad, self-glorious, egotistical, intellectual, supercilious, ignorant, superstitious, vain, and bombastic. In truth, so very remarkable, so contradictory, so incongruous have I found the American that I hesitate. Shall I give you a satire; shall I devote myself to eulogy; shall I tear what they call the "whitewash" aside and expose them to the winds of excoriation; ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... at my post and now heard Gallus assure Cleopatra of his master's sympathy. With the most bombastic exaggeration he described how bitterly Octavianus mourned in Mark Antony the friend, the brother-in-law, the co-ruler and sharer in so many important enterprises. He had shed burning tears over the tidings of his death. Never had more ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... splendidly equipped chariot, which was surrounded by a number of pretended captives of rank, some noble Parthian hostages being utilised for the occasion. At the centre of the bridge the procession halted, and the crazy prince next indulged in an absurd bombastic harangue, wherein he congratulated his soldiers on their glorious campaign just concluded, and declared to them that the famous feats of Xerxes and Darius had at length been surpassed. Finally, he invited his troops to a magnificent banquet upon this bridge of boats, an ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... far-fetched they can discover,—for instance, we have a maid Armenia, at Maple Grove, and I could not resist designating her brother as Ararat, by way of localizing their relationship,—but also the young settlements of the country have often the most bombastic names. In the backwoods, one time, I found a party of honest settlers in a tavern over an old romance, searching for some sufficiently high-sounding title to confer ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... Mrime's literary output is a triumph for the cause of local color. What he meant, and illustrates in his work, is that local color and remoteness in time and place are secondary to treatment and style, and that he regarded the romantic treatment and style as exaggerated and bombastic. After "La Guzla" he soon shows that Beyle's ideas have "singularly colored" his own, though not to the extent of affecting his originality. He attempts themes more closely allied to France and to his own time, choosing from a number of possible features the salient, the most ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... 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
... argument; so that while the firing is interminable, "all their shots are fired in the air." Before this "frightful clatter" can be reported, the papers of the day are obliged to make all sorts of excisions, to prune away "nonsense," and reduce the "inflated and bombastic style." Chatter and clamor, that is the whole substance of most of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... 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 sensation, glutting his appetite of savagery, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... 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 acted ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... emperor Theodorus Lascaris, and devoted himself to literature. He died between 1210 and 1220. His chief work is his History, in 21 books, of the period from 1180 to 1206. In spite of its florid and bombastic style, it is of considerable value as a record (on the whole impartial) of events of which he was either an eye-witness or had heard at first hand. Its most interesting portion is the description of the capture ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... rather bombastic introduction Chippendale says that he has been encouraged to produce the book "by persons of distinction and taste, who have regretted that an art capable of so much perfection and refinement should be executed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... was in full flow—turgid, studiedly ornate, egotistical, and bombastic, but the final effect, even upon Weissmann, was that of one deluded, rather than of one carrying on a deep and far-reaching system of deception. He bodied forth the emotional moralist seeking escape from the ferocity of the creed in which his youth had been nurtured, rather than the ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... 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 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; ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... 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
... distant days. But Volusius' Annals shall perish at Padua itself, and shall often furnish loose wrappings for mackerel. The short writings of my comrade are gladsome to my heart; let the populace rejoice in bombastic Antimachus. ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... of the German Chancellor is all about—some peace proposals, I suppose—which are sure to prove bombastic and unacceptable. It seems to us out here as though the war must go on forever. Like a boy's dream of the far-off freedom of manhood, the day appears when we shall step out into the old liberty of owning our own lives. ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... There really was no way whatever of 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 characters began to find that two could play at the game. ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... only generally saying, that they conducted themselves to his satisfaction. He called the enemy a corvette, not specifying whether she was a brig or ship corvette; and the whole was written in such a bombastic style, that any one would have imagined that he had fought a vessel of superior force. He stated, at the end, that as soon as he repaired damages, he wore round, but that the enemy declined further ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... present recall what my recitation was, but it was probably Catiline's Defense or some other of the turgid declamatory pieces of classic literature with which all our readers were filled. It was bombastic stuff, but my blind, boyish belief in it gave it dignity. As I went on my voice cleared. The window sashes regained their outlines. I saw every form before me, and the look of surprise and pleasure on the smiling face of my principal ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... genuine passion. The tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up on Shakspere, but to see how great an artist Racine was, in his own somewhat narrow way, one has but to compare his Phedre, or Iphigenie, with Dryden's ranting tragedy of Tyrannic Love. These bombastic heroic plays were made the subject of a capital burlesque, the Rehearsal, by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, acted in 1671 at the King's Theater. The indebtedness of {169} the English stage to the French did not stop with a general ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... said to have entirely abandoned one "manner" for another, or for any length of time to have risen above or sunk below a certain level of excellence. Andre, extolled by her latest critics as "a delicious eclogue of the fields," was contemporary with the bombastic, false Byronism of Jacques; the feeble narrative of La Mare au Diable with the passion-introspection of Lucrezia Floriani. The ever-popular Consuelo immediately succeeded the feeble Compagnon du Tour de France. La Marquise, written in the first year of her ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... of the crowd that the vigilance committee could do no less. The mass of the mob demanded fiercely the death of the prisoners, and it was evident that many of the committee took side with the people. I shall never forget how horror-struck I was (bombastic as it now sounds) at hearing no less a personage than the Whig candidate for representative say that the condemned had better fly for their lives, for the "Avenger of Blood" was on their tracks! I am happy to say that said very worthy but sanguinary individual, the Avenger of Blood, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... contempt on the Herculean labors 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, came ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... as the Grand Duke Augustus. And look, too, at the same table, within a few feet, Simpson, of you and of me—Selingman, Selingman who represents the real Germany; not the war party alone, intoxicated with the clash of arms, filled with bombastic desires for German triumphs on sea and land, ever ready to spout in flowery and grandiloquent phrases the glory of Germany and the Heaven-sent genius of her leaders. I tell you, Simpson, Selingman is a more dangerous man than that. He sits with folded arms, in realms of ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Vorwaerts, speak, I think, for the central masses of German life far more truly than any official utterances do. They speak in a voice a little gross, very sensible, blunt, with a kind of heavy humour. That German voice one may not like, but one must needs respect it. It is, at any rate, not bombastic. It is essentially honest. When the imperial eagle comes home with half its feathers out like a crow that has met a bear; when the surviving aristocratic officers reappear with a vastly diminished swagger in the biergartens, I believe that the hitherto acquiescent ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... with blood; try the experiment!" Mr. Chestnut of South Carolina wished to "unfurl the Palmetto flag, fling it to the breeze ... and ring the clarion notes of defiance in the ears of an insolent foe." Such bombastic but confident language, of which a great quantity was uttered in this winter of 1860-61, may exasperate or intimidate according to the present temper of the opponent whose ear it assaults; for a while the North was more in condition to be awestruck than to be angered. ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... a mongrel mass of eight to ten thousand militia. In all our marching through Georgia, he has not forced us to use any thing but a skirmish-line, though at several points he had erected fortifications and tried to alarm us by bombastic threats. In Savannah he has taken refuge in a line constructed behind swamps and overflowed rice-fields, extending from a point on the Savannah River about three miles above the city, around by a branch of the Little Ogeechee, which stream is impassable from its salt-marshes and boggy ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... coffers of 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. Plots and ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... era in the Norwegian lyric. Among Bjoernson's predecessors there are but two lyrists of the first order, viz., Wergeland and Welhaven. The former was magnificently profuse and chaotic, abounding in verve and daring imagery, but withal high-sounding, declamatory, and, at his worst, bombastic. There is a reminiscence in him of Klopstock's inflated rhetoric; and a certain dithyrambic ecstasy—a strained, high-keyed aria-style which sometimes breaks into falsetto. His great rival, Welhaven, was soberer, clearer, more gravely melodious. He sang in beautiful, tempered ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... tame to those who are not satisfied with proportion in form and harmony in tint; it will certainly not seem so to those who are more fortunately gifted. Indeed, compared either with Wilson's welter of words, now bombastic, now gushing, now horse-playful, or with the endless and heartbreaking antitheses of what Brougham ill-naturedly but truly called "Tom's snip-snap," it is infinitely preferable. The conclusion of the essay on Theodore Hook is not easily surpassable as an example ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... 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 announcing the line of conduct he ought to follow. The abbe was afraid of betraying ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... liberal sacrifices are made by black men for the safety of the Empire, INCLUDING BRITISH SOUTH AFRICA, one is constrained to ask: Where are those loud-mouthed pen-men who, possessed of more pretension than foresight, wrote bombastic articles in the Transvaal Press before the war, threatening that "South Africa will cut the painter", and "paddle her own canoe", if men and women in Europe made themselves a nuisance by advocating ideas of justice in favour of the blacks? General ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... aware how readily the patriotic instinct, 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 ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... knowledge, and in time became himself the author of several essays in prose and verse, by no means discreditable to his talents. Being naturally gifted with an exuberant imagination, his descriptions partake of the inflated and bombastic; but we have reason to know, that the information which he gives is deduced from authentic sources, without the usual exaggeration proverbially ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... 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 ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... them how he despised verbal subtleties, the external badges of a sect or creed, and insisted that the great end of science is to learn how to live and how to die. The style of Seneca is too elaborate to please. It is affected, often florid, and bombastic; there is too much sparkle and glitter, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... about as much friendship as there exists usually between a dog and a cat. Similarly between the former and the Naval cruisers there was considerable jealousy, and every display of that pompous, bombastic exhibition of character which was such a feature of the life of the eighteenth century, and the first years of ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... who had 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 ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... Presto" was deserved by others besides Luca Giordano, and Venice was 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 ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... wealth that lay heaped up made me shudder with joy, what to take first, where to cease. Among other things, he also showed me the scores of several symphonies, of which many had never been heard, while others had been tried, but put back, on the score of their being too difficult and bombastic." One of these symphonies, that in C major, the largest and grandest in conception, Schumann chose and sent to Leipzig, where it was soon afterward produced under Mendelssohn's direction at one of the Ge-wandhaus ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... for Lancia, Quinones' gatherings, and, above all, the jokes of his colleague Valero; so he left the Gallician regions and came back to live with the Lancians. Valero, having become President of the Chamber, became every day more bombastic, noisy, and lisping. He was sitting on the left of the distinguished host. Facing him was Moro, the unattainable ideal of all the marriageable girls, whose indefatigable head easily stood twelve ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... strange notion Ben must have formed of a determined, remorseless, all-daring, fool-hardiness, to have represented it in such a mouthing Tamburlane, and bombastic tongue-bully ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... Democratic politician and at one time the candidate of his party for Governor. He was not a very learned lawyer, but was quick- witted and picked up a good deal from the arguments of counsel. Aided by a natural shrewdness and sense, he got along pretty well. He had a gift of rather bombastic speech. His exuberant eloquence was of a style more resembling that prevalent in some other parts of the country than the more sober and severe fashion of New England. Just before he came to the Bench he was counsel in a real estate case in Springfield where Mr. Chapman, afterward Chief Justice ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... there a couple like themselves, in street attire. It was her first New York meal that was not read off a badly thumbed menu and eaten off thick-lipped china. A stringed orchestra played the Duo of Parsifal and Kundry, which was enough to set the blood rocking in her veins and some of its bombastic maternal passion to ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... 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
... 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
... first week of the new year I shall 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 ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... with wide, startled eyes. "Oh-h! Do you remember? He said that he had been amused by one of the four essays. His lips twitched, and he tried not to laugh. Amused at the 'high-flown eloquence.' That was the expression—wasn't it? High-flown eloquence! That means rubbish, of course—bombastic, stupid, exaggerated rubbish! Girls, that was mine! I feel it—I know it! Susan, you know it, too. You wouldn't say that it was good, even when I asked you straight out. You were too honest to say 'Yes.' Oh! I am not angry. You needn't look so miserable. It was true, and down at the very, ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... not altogether through vainglory he spoke. He was not a bombastic sort. I think he voiced the intent of the army to ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... privacy of life. His powerful sense never deserted him, and from the first he recognised that his Edinburgh popularity was but an ovation and the affair of a day. He wrote a few letters in a high-flown, bombastic vein of gratitude; but in practice he suffered no man to intrude upon his self-respect. On the other hand, he never turned his back, even for a moment, on his old associates; and he was always ready to sacrifice an acquaintance to a friend, although the acquaintance were ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and "The Seasons" does not contain a single new image of external nature, he proceeds to call the once well-known verses of Dryden in the "Indian Emperor," descriptive of the hush of night, "vague, bombastic, and senseless," and Pope's celebrated translation of the moonlight scene in the "Iliad," altogether "absurd,"—and then, without ever once dreaming of any necessity of showing them to be so, or even, if ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... great empire. Their society was more like that of a den of outlaws upon a doubtful frontier,—of a lewd tavern for the revels and debauches of banditti, assassins, bravoes, smugglers, and their more desperate paramours, mixed with bombastic players, the refuse and rejected offal of strolling theatres, puffing out ill-sorted verses about virtue, mixed with the licentious and blasphemous songs proper to the brutal and hardened course ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 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 ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... not take revenge 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 ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... one voice they decided in the negative, since they had only four hundred men available for landing, while the French garrison was no doubt much stronger, having had ample time to call the inhabitants to its aid. Church, therefore, after trying the virtue of a bombastic summons to surrender, and destroying a few houses, sailed back to Boston. It was a miserable retaliation for a barbarous outrage; as the guilty were out of reach, the invaders turned their ire on ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... was inclined to laugh at such bombastic assertion. Little, indeed, did I dream that within twelve months his prophecy would be fulfilled, and that the ex-horse-stealer, whose secretary I had become, would actually rule Russia through the lethargic weakling who sat upon the throne as ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... 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 ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... the courage of her opinions. I 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 painter, and with an eye for certain poetical ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... anything in common but the kiddies. That means no more hunts at Blackburn Heath unless someone careless like Philip absorbs the estate. Mrs. Philip was a Pennsylvania girl. N'est ce pas? That accounts for her effulgent spontaneity. Isn't it a shame for me to wax bombastic over a girl who, if she were just a little brighter, might be called half witted. She's the girl with the massive mother, who suffers from dislocated adjectives. They say when she was married her prayer book was missing, so she carried a cake of ivory soap ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... Professor Sillig, with the view of urging him to intervene on behalf of my poem. We thereupon went through it together. Its well-constructed and well-rhymed verses, written in stanzas of eight lines, determined him to revise the whole of it carefully. Much of its imagery was bombastic, and far beyond the conception of a boy of my age. I recollect that in one part I had drawn extensively from the monologue in Addison's Cato, spoken by Cato just before his suicide. I had met with this ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... 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
... was Governor-General, a bombastic memorandum, addressed "To all the Princes and Chiefs and People of ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... feature of the case—does not therefore seem an offence in any sense to our Philistine, but a most delightful restorative in the barren wilderness of everyday German. He still, however, considers all really productive things to be offensive. The wholly bombastic, distorted, and threadbare syntax of the modern standard author—yea, even his ludicrous neologisms—are not only tolerated, but placed to his credit as the spicy element in his works. But woe to the stylist with character, who seeks as earnestly and perseveringly to avoid the ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... A few competent reviewers who are primarily something else—Harvey, Aikin, Untermeyer and company. A few youngsters on the newspapers, struggling against the business office. And then a leap to the Victorians, the crepe-clad pundits, the bombastic word-mongers of the campus school—H. W. Boynton, W. C. Brownell, Paul Elmer More, William Lyon Phelps, Frederick Taber Cooper et al. Here, undoubtedly, we have learning of a sort. More, it appears, once taught Sanskrit ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... food for laughter to all Asiatics, and the Greeks would have joined in it. In the golden Middle Age the practice developed into a regular and methodical service of women; it imposed deeds of heroism, cours d'amour, bombastic Troubadour songs, etc.; although it is to be observed that these last buffooneries, which had an intellectual side, were chiefly at home in France; whereas amongst the material sluggish Germans, the knights ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... there was silence. Then an old chief—the same who had officiated at the feast described in a former chapter—rose, and standing forth into the middle of the room, made a long and grave oration, in which, besides a great deal that was bombastic, much that was irrelevant, and more that was utterly fabulous and nonsensical, he recounted the sorrows of himself and his tribe, concluding with a request that the great chief would take these things ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... sufficiently womanly and charming, and her steady, practical views on things, utterly 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 ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... a proclamation to the people of Ireland, couched in bombastic language, and stating that the hour of deliverance was at hand. A foreign fleet was about to descend on our northern coasts. Any day now the signal might be given for Ireland to rise. All was ready, and trusty leaders would accompany the friendly fleet. A strong blow well struck would ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... Thomson's Seasons (1745). His poetry has small intrinsic value, but it is symptomatic of the change which came over German literature at the beginning of the 18th century. He was one of the first German poets to substitute for the bombastic imitations of Marini, to which he himself had begun by contributing, a clear and simple diction. He was also a pioneer in directing the attention of his countrymen to the new poetry of nature which originated ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... extending over the eventful years of 1830-35 'King William's style,' says the uncourtly biographer, "abounds to overflowing in what is called in England Parliamentary circumlocution, in which, instead of direct, simple expressions, bombastic paraphrases are always chosen, which become in the end intolerably prolix and dull, and are enough to drive a foreigner to despair." The style is indeed august; but the real penman is not the King, whose strong point was not ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... was incomparable. His style must be praised with some reservation. It was in general forcible, pure, and polished; but it was sometimes, though not often, turgid, and, on one or two occasions, even bombastic. Perhaps the fondness of Hastings for Persian literature may have tended to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... wrote to her frequently, no longer verses, but, which was much worse, prose, and that whole pages at a time. Thus, as the political Pleiad of the day said, the first king in the world was seen descending from his horse with an ardor beyond compare, and on the crown of his hat scrawling bombastic phrases, which M. de Saint-Aignan, aide-de-camp in perpetuity, carried to La Valliere at the risk of foundering his horses. During this time, deer and pheasants were left to the free enjoyment of their nature, hunted ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... 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 mind of ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... 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 ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... the poet. "A thousand times no! The great poet praised the verses you allude to simply to cover his depreciation of my 'Captive Queen,' which is among my best efforts, but too much in his own style. How Germany can worship his bombastic —— but ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Haydn, Herschel, and about ready to introduce Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Heine, Balzac, Beethoven, and Cuvier; when Turner was painting, Watt building the steam-engine, Napoleon in command of the French armies, and Nelson of the British fleet; but this bombastic babble of ours harmed nobody then, and only serves to show what a number of intellectual serfs must have been members of that particular House ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the play, after wading through the slime of the "Epistle," is to find amusing proof of the high-flown and at times bombastic expression which elicited such admiration from audiences of the old regime. (Do not laugh at it, reader; you tolerate an equal amount of absurdity in modern melodrama). The very first lines are charmingly suggestive of the starched and stately ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... insolence with which their enemy had then triumphed over them. They now triumphed in their turn. The Dutch struck medals. The Spaniards sang Te Deums. Many poems, serious and sportive, appeared, of which one only has lived. Prior burlesqued, with admirable spirit and pleasantry, the bombastic verses in which Boileau had celebrated the first taking of Namur. The two odes, printed side by side, were read with delight in London; and the critics at Will's pronounced that, in wit as in arms, England had ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... It sounds 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 balance the rival parties in England, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... a job, have you," spoke Bart, forced to smile at the bombastic business air assumed by ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... with similar bombastic and extravagant expressions which were the subject of international comment for many years. Other countries besides Germany have maintained great armies, but their maintenance has been but an incidental part of the general business of the nation and there was ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... 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 are, indeed, out of nature, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 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
... extravagance, bombastic straining for effect, are destructive of beauty, whether in color, form, motion, language, or thought;—in color, they would be called glaring; in form, inelegant; in motion, ungraceful; in language, coarse; in thought, undisciplined; in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Corinthian column. We may be very interesting rascals though we do not poke our walking-canes into the face of majesty, or go out on a fool's errand against the Queen's lieges with Mr. John Frost." The author's style is described as very unsatisfactory, though full of pretension. He is "very bombastic, very inexact, and strangely independent in the current of his thoughts and in the arrangement of his words." But the Times admits nevertheless the interesting quality of the work, and in its own better language gives ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... saw that the widow had become a little calmer, he said resolutely, and with superbly bombastic manner, "I am sure you laugh, madame, at all the despairing efforts that I make to prevent my poor stolen heart from flying quickly to your feet. It is that which has brought me here; I could not but follow, in spite of myself; yes, madame, in spite of myself. I ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... among equals. What an inconsistency! The splendour and show that accompanied him everywhere, the pageantry and courtly pomp that surrounded him, and the decorations of the stars and ribands of the Legion of Honour, which he distributed with bombastic speeches among troops—to whom those political impositions and social cajoleries were novelties—made such an impression upon them, that had a bridge been then fixed between Calais and Dover, brave as your countrymen are, I should have trembled for the liberty and independence of your country. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... he 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 son-of-a-'bitch and ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... 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 emotion, rose higher and higher and then rested on the name "Toussaint L'Ouverture," ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... 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, and, O Pomona! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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 Panza. The master lives in the clouds; Sancho ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... year after it appeared, in a work called St. Godwin: A Tale of the 16th, 17th and 18th Century, by "Count Reginald de St. Leon," which gives a scathing survey of the plot, with all its improbabilities exposed. The bombastic style of St. Leon is imitated and only slightly exaggerated, and the author ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... abashed and hostile; most of them ridicule what they have to say. The press has been practically unanimous every morning in making fun of the piece and the author. If I enter a reading room I cannot pick up a paper without seeing: "Absurd as 'Hernani'; silly, false, bombastic, pretentious, extravagant and nonsensical as 'Hernani'." If I venture into the corridors of the theatre while the performance is in progress I see spectators issue from their boxes and slam the doors indignantly. Mlle. Mars plays her part honestly and ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... invariably regret the things I do on the spur of the moment. That disclaimer of mine was a case in point. I am ashamed every time I think of my bursting out before an unconcerned public with that bombastic pow-wow about burning publishers' letters, and all that sort of imbecility, and about my not being an imitator, etc. Who would find out that I am a natural fool if I kept always cool and never let nature ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... probably, to discover in 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
... 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 ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... comical examples of the misapplication of language have been published to weariness, and the bombastic compositions of educated Indian students held up to ridicule, the fault does not lie with the pupil but with ourselves, who are ultimately responsible for the subjects which are set him to learn. So long as he is made to read books in antiquated English, he will naturally suppose that the ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... Himself more merciful to those of our clergy who take so little interest in the religious instruction of our youth; who make little or no exertions to establish Catholic schools, where we could have our children properly educated; who, when they condescend to instruct them, do so in bombastic language, in scholastic terms which the poor children cannot understand, taking no pains to give their instructions in plain words, and in a ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... 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 ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher
... All bombastic expressions, all systematic views should be discarded, and attention paid only to facts, in order to discover the fine intellectual figure of Lord Byron so completely lost sight of ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... It was agreeable to observe, that he was free from the discontent and fretfulness which too often molest old age. He in the summer of that year walked to Rotherhithe, where he dined, and walked home in the evening. He died on the 31st of December, 1791. BOSWELL. The version of Maphsus's 'bombastic' additional Canto is advertised in the Gent. Mag. 1758, p. 233. The engraver of Mr. Ellis's portrait in the first ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... In this manner the bombastic fellow continued to entertain me all through dinner, and by a common error of drunkards, because he had been extremely talkative himself, leaped to the conclusion that he had chanced on very genial company. He told me his name, his address; he begged we should meet again; finally he ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The "Santisima Trinidad," The old "Redoubtable's" hard sides, and ours, Will take the touse of this bombastic blow. Your grapnels and your boarding-hatchets—ready! We'll dash our eagle on the English deck, And swear ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... 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
... Socialism recognized more and more its own calling as the bombastic representative of ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... 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
... the bombastic nonsense in which Prussia is going to indulge—we shall take good care that nothing comes of it. Prussia has no longer a Frederick the Great at her head, but the ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... 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
... that each form of art should produce 'not every sort of pleasure but its proper pleasure'; and the sober language in which Aristotle, instead of speaking about the sequence of events in a tragedy being 'inevitable', as we bombastic moderns do, merely recommends that they should be 'either necessary or probable' and 'appear to happen because of ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... Director of the Academie. He knew the vanity of M. de Noyon, and determined to divert the public at his expense. He had many friends in power, and judged that his pleasantry would be overlooked, and even approved. He composed, therefore, a confused and bombastic discourse in the style of M. de Noyon, full of pompous phrases, turning the prelate into ridicule, while they seemed to praise him. After finishing this work, he was afraid lest it should be thought out of all measure, and, to reassure himself, carried it ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Pianoforte, i.e., the four Sonatas, the concert piece in F minor and the originally conceived Invitation to the Dance, often played in the orchestral version of Berlioz which is so much better than the inflated, bombastic one by Weingartner. Weber is classed as one of the founders of the "brilliant school" of pianoforte playing which, chiefly through the genius of Franz Liszt, has done so much to enlarge the sonorous and coloristic possibilities of the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... an ordinary friend, and felt the delightful agitation, followed by bitter mortification, of his intercourse with Madame de Castries, we must remember that from time to time he received a flowery epistle from Russia, written in the turgid and rather bombastic style peculiar to ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... 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 of Age none is more ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... Tamburlaine, Milton in Lucifer, of Paradise Lost, Goethe in Faust, Byron in Manfred, Shelley in Prometheus Unbound. The Greek Titan is resigned, uncomplaining, knowing himself to be a victim of Fate, which may not be opposed; Marlowe's Titan is bombastic and violent; Milton's is ambitious, proud, revengeful; Goethe's is cultured and philosophical; Byron's is gloomy, rebellious, theatrical. So all these poets portray each his own bent of mind, and something also of the temper of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the revolution of 1868 before Perry came. We saw the Shogun, under the bombastic title of Tycoon, in spite of the remonstrance of the Emperor and his court, conclude a treaty with Perry at Kanagawa in 1854. Here at last was found a pretext for the Imperialists to raise arms against the Shogun. ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga |
