"Bathos" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... figures, plurals and 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, ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... been seen 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', 'eph[)e]meral', 'pand[)e]monium', '[)e]r[)e]mite'. ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... 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 redeem him, which was accepted; and when freed he came home to England, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... 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 creature. ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... so little with alcohol, and you don't get QUITE the full sensation of gambling. You do lose just a little something of the proper tremors before a coup, the proper throes during a coup, the proper thrill of joy or anguish after a coup. You're bound to, you know," he added, purposely making this bathos when he saw me smiling at the heights ...
— James Pethel • Max Beerbohm
... themselves. At moments when inspiration is running low, and a gap has to be filled up, the shorter line needs less padding, and can be more rapidly run over when it is weak. Whereas a feeble heroic couplet becomes ponderous and sinks more quickly into bathos—as in the following ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the bathos of a poor speech from Colonel Nolan, and then the division. Everybody has the numbers now—34 majority—34 in spite of Saunders and Bolton, of absent Wallace, and unpaired Mr. Wilson. We cheer, counter cheer; we rise and wave our hats; and then quickly, quietly, even with a subdued ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... the absurd irrelevant particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence, and bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder of their combination. A talker of a different calibre, though belonging to the same school, is Burly.[9] Burly is a man of a great presence; he commands ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... doth to heaven upraise, Let Sam to dive into what Byron calls The hell of waters. For the sake of praise, He wooed the bathos down great waterfalls; The dizzy precipice, which the eye appals Of travelers for pleasure, Samuel found Pleasant as are to women lighted halls, Crammed full of fools and fiddles; to the sound Of the eternal roar, he timed ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... her, the tinker's wife, who alone was near, having just wished Heaven to send a judgment on her husband, was busy putting out his smoking smallclothes. It is a way that women and wives have, and they never see the bathos of it. ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... 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 is indeed difficult to account ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... even appreciating the bathos. 'It is no laughing matter, she said; 'it is so uncivil, when he is so kind. I can't imagine ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the slight bathos involved, had its effect; for it appealed to that dread of the sleep world which is common to all savages: but the conjuror was ready to outbid the prophetess, and had begun a fresh oration, when Amyas turned the tide of war. Bursting into ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... 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 as a ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... enjoyed a vogue among collectors that lasted into the 20th century. In about 1860, however, he was driven from the market by the rise of a cheaper medium, chromolithography, which was responsible in the next few decades for a universal outpouring of popular bathos. This was picture printing in color geared for the ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... allowing the speaker to say anything he wished to say on any subject and still not violate the unities. I heard Tilton give this lecture twice, and it was given from start to finish in exactly the same way. It contained much learning—had flights of eloquence, bursts of bathos, puffs of pathos, but not a smile in the whole hour and a half. It was faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection—no more. It was so perfect that some people thought it great. The man was an actor and had what is called platform presence. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... in 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 ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... 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 stealthy persuasion, ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... all right," she assured him hastily, stung by a keen sense that her catastrophe had fallen headlong from impending tragedy to bathos. "Please bestow all your sympathy on Mr ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... remark, an extraordinary journey he had made; he had started from chivalry and 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 once ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... in defense of coffee was the first to be illustrated; and for all its air of pretentious grandeur and occasional bathos, it was not a bad rhyming advertisement for the persecuted drink. It was printed for Paul Greenwood and sold "at the sign of the coffee mill and tobacco-roll in Cloath-fair near West-Smithfield, who selleth the best Arabian coffee powder and chocolate in cake or roll, after ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... descension; incursion, raid, foray; derivation, lineage, extraction, parentage, birth; declivity, slope, decline; dismounting; bathos; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... man revolts against it, morally, intellectually and organically. Every law of nature in man is against it. Pain and suffering are its protest. To say that it is as natural as birth is to be guilty of pure bathos; even the worm crushed and quivering denies the sentiment. Schwann, the author of the cellular theory, says: "I really do not ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... 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!— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... which works its destruction? Who that beholds the gilded vessel gliding in gallant trim—"youth at the prow, and pleasure at the helm;" ever at that instant thought of—barnacles? The imagination is disgusted by the anti-climax; and of all species of the bathos, the sinking from visionary happiness to sober reality is that from which human nature is most averse. The wings of the imagination, accustomed to ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... of introducing 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 falls from his ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... little moment And he passed along the road, adds the Philosopher It was as if she had been eyeing a golden door shut fast My engagement to Mr. Pericles is that I am not to write Man who beats his wife my first question is, 'Do he take his tea?' Oh! beastly bathos On a wild April morning Once my love? said he. Not now?—does it mean, not now? So it is when you play at Life! When you will not go straight To know that you are in England, breathing the same air with me We are, in short, a civilized people ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... of the world, shut up within the circuit of a little island of the Mediterranean, and dwindled to the condition of an humble and degraded pensioner on the bounty of those he has most injured. How miserably, how meanly, has he closed his inflated career! What a sample of the bathos will his history present! He should have perished on the swords of his enemies, under the walls ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... undisputed belle of Fairhaven,—had that very afternoon married a promising young doctor; and I was draining the cup of my misery to the last delicious drop, and was of course inspired thereby to the perpetration of such melancholy bathos as only a care-free youth of ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... next week over the ridiculous bathos of those twenty loud-sounding ballads, little guessed the misery and disgust they ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... its smoky splendour. Satan in shining armour must be a thousand feet high; he is sadly out of scale. So, too, in the quarrel of Michael and Satan over the sleeping Adam and Eve. Blake is here recalled in the rhythms of the monstrous figures. Bathos is in the design of Lucifer swimming in deepest hell upon waves of fire and filth; yet the lugubrious arches of the caverns in the perspective reveal Blake's fantasy, so quick to respond to external stimuli. Martin saw the earth as in an apocalyptic ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... to feel, scarce less keenly, the dire descent to bathos in "So killed themselves." It was almost the show-example, he would tell you, of ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... creative statesmen. But it can never be reached without seeing things as they really are; and it is to this, therefore, and to no machinery in the world, that culture sticks fondly. It insists that men should not mistake, as they are prone to mistake, their natural taste for the bathos for a relish for the sublime; and if statesmen, either [lvi] with their tongue in their cheek or through a generous impulsiveness, tell them their natural taste for the bathos is a relish for the sublime, there is the more need for culture to tell them the contrary. It is delusion ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... collection of fairy tales, and miscalled the Arabian Nights, is unique as a study of anthropology. It is a marvellous picture of Oriental life; its shiftings are those of the kaleidoscope. Its alternation of pathos and bathos—of the boldest poetry (the diction of Job) with the baldest prose (the Egyptian of to-day) and finally, its contrast of the highest and purest morality with the orgies of Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter, take away the reader's breath. I determined to render every word with the ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... of George Strangwidge' many times lapses into bathos, but as in a way it answers the other ballad, I will ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... conjunction, regardless of breath, or sense, or the most ordinary laws of grammar. The second sentence of his first prose work contains about four hundred words, and is broken in the course of them like a wounded snake. In his very highest flights he will suddenly drop to grotesque and bathos; and there is no more difficult task (haud inexpertus loquor) than the selection from Milton of any passage of length which shall not contain faults of which a modern schoolboy or gutter-journalist would be ashamed. Nor is the matter made much better ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... 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 pages? Bless me, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... the bloomin' winder above 'is bed 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
... kings and chiefs, then these pleasant fancies may be compared with that ancient theory mentioned by Plutarch, that hell is in the air and elysium in the moon, and again with the mediaeval conception of the moon as the seat of hell, a thought elaborated in profoundest bathos ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... The bathos of the word made me laugh louder. Carlotta, aware that a joke was in the air, joined in my mirth, and her laughter ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Tom,—so here goes! Here goes, for a swim on the stream of old Time, On those buoyant supporters, the bladders of rhyme. If our weight breaks them down, and we sink in the flood, We are smothered, at least, in respectable mud, Where the divers of Bathos lie drowned in a heap, And Southey's last Pan has pillowed his sleep; That Felo de se who, half drunk with his Malmsey, Walked out of his depth and was lost in a calm sea, 10 Singing "Glory to God" in a spick and span stanza, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... betray'd me. Let him write farce; but let him not presume To jumble fun and opera, grave and comic, In one vile mess—then call the mixture Shakspeare. No more of him: my hopes are all evanish'd, For "Hexham's battle," slew him: "The Iron Chest" Sunk him to Shadwell's bathos; and "John Bull" Drove off in ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... their mouths open like young birds preparing to be fed by older birds. They represented Harmony in all its forms. There were other attempts at the classical in the decoration of the room; but Lady Everard herself had reduced this idea to bathos by huge quantities of signed photographs in silver frames, by large waste-paper baskets, lined with blue satin and trimmed with pink rosettes, by fans which were pockets, stuffed cats which were paperweights, oranges ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... struggling to get some paper, or to get hold of some boy or girl. But as the scene is in London in the nineteenth century, and not in Naples in the fifteenth century, we cannot see who is in real danger, or why, or of what. And with all this, Dickens was not incapable of bathos, or tragedy suddenly exploding in farce. The end of Krook by spontaneous combustion is such a case; but a worse case is the death of Dora, Copperfield's baby wife, along with that of the lap-dog, Jip. This is one of those unforgotten, unpardonable, egregious blunders in art, in feeling, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... This stroke of bathos brought about good-humor again, and soon our whole attention was absorbed in that magical music which to this hour electrifies me more than that of any other opera excepting "Norma." "Bad taste this," ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... He went through it all; he rose to eloquence in describing our departure from Forstadt. This scene ended, he seemed conscious of a bathos. It was in a dull, rather apologetic tone ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... 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 ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... lingered for a few years more of weary life on foreign soil, and dropped into an unhonoured grave. To him English history is indebted for a heroic scene, and Ralegh for a glorious close to his splendid but checkered career. The mind shudders at the thought of the bathos into which a little remorse in that contemptible villain would ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... was announced, made his appearance. A multitude had collected to witness the feat; the day was unusually cold, and Sam was intoxicated. The river was low, and the falls near him on either side were bare. Sam threw himself off, and the waters (to quote the bathos of a New York newspaper) "received him in their cold embrace. The tide bubbled as the life left the body, and then the stillness of death, indeed, sat upon the bosom of the waters." His body was found past the spring at the mouth of the river, seven miles below where he made his fatal leap. It had ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... does not perish, for he himself has never excited our sympathies [362]. He is punished through his son and wife—they dead, our interest ceases in him, and to add his death to theirs and to that of Antigone would be bathos. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the unheavenly nature of invective, of something of a lurking conceit in the making an eclipse out of a blush, and in the positive bathos, and I fear almost indecent irrelevancy of the introduction of Beatrice at all on such an occasion, much more under the feeble aspect of one young lady blushing for another,—this scene altogether ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... clerical society—meaning thereby the sphere of divinities (mostly female) that doth hedge a curate of a parish—without being sensible of the eligibility of Penny Readings for a place in Mystic London? When the Silly Season is at its very bathos; when the monster gooseberries have gone to seed and the showers of frogs ceased to fall; after the matrimonial efforts of Margate or Scarborough, and before the more decided business of the Christmas Decorations, then ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... 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 ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... partook intensely of that soul's nature. Nor is it difficult to perceive the tendency of this abandon-to elevate immeasurably all the energies of mind-but, again, so to mingle the greatest possible fire, force, delicacy, and all good things, with the lowest possible bathos, baldness, and imbecility, as to render it not a matter of doubt that the average results of mind in such a school will be found inferior to those results in one ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "Bathos attends all high words," he said, as she paused, chiefly to see whether he was awake, and not like her dumb ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sufficiently learned in the divine lore to separate the gold from the dross. What was good and productive he was ready to recognize and assimilate; leaving the opium pomps and splendors of the discourse, and all the Oriental imagery with which the speaker decorated his bathos, to those who could find profit therein. It is still more curious and sorrowful to see this great Coleridge, endowed with such high gifts, of so various learning, and possessing so marvellous and plastic a power over ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... there are too many virgins! Did you ever hear the like? Then, after Napoleon's campaigns, the lines are full of sonorous brass and flaming cannon-balls, rolling along from page to page. Modeste tells me that all that bathos is put in by the translator, and that I ought to read the book in English. But I certainly sha'n't learn English to read Lord Byron when I didn't learn it to teach Exupere. I much prefer the novels of Ducray-Dumenil to all these English romances. I'm too good ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... you please; but every man's first declaration of love is bathos—the zenith of his passion connoting perhaps the nadir of his intelligence. Anyhow the declaration was ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... (Anec. p. 173) says that Johnson spoke of Browne as 'of all conversers the most delightful with whom he ever was in company.' Pope's bathos, in his ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the small hours. One excited orator, in closing a debate, dropped into poetry, and remarked that a certain catastrophe came "like a bolt from the blue"; a daily journal of vast circulation described the event as coming "like a bolt from the flue"—which was a very sad instance of bathos. The amazing thing is that such blunders should be so rare ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... at best but a mixture of a little good with much evil and a little pleasure with much pain; the beautiful is linked with the revolting, the trivial with the solemn, bathos with pathos, the commonplace ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... Mr. Stephens can make the force of bathos go a little further. The passage continues ("a pause" intervening, to allow breathing ime, after the splitting pace with which Love has been riding ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various |
