I feel as the frog in the fable might have felt, if, after successfully inflating himself to the much-envied dimensions of the ox, he had suddenly found himself reduced to his proper proportions.

The conclusion therefore amounts to no more than this, that you cannot alter fundamentally the distribution of wealth between labor and capital by merely inflating the currency, or otherwise juggling with the price-level.

His letters, though suffering like those of some other distinguished authors from being translated, are full of touches of fiery eloquence, mixed with bombast and the wildest and most monstrously inflated self-pretension.

Here they were met by Master Osborne, obviously inflated with some important matter.

This process is to be continued, steadily inflating and expelling the air from the lungs, till, with a sort of tremulous leap, Nature takes up the process, and the infant begins to gasp, and finally to cry, at first low and faint, but with every gulp of air increasing in length and strength of volume, when it is to be removed from the water, and instantly wrapped (all but the face and mouth) in a flannel.

He was terribly inflated with his success, and was clearly determined to take London by storm.

If you hadn't known the man, you couldn't have believed a human beingone of the million crawling units on the earthcould be so absurdly inflated with self-importance.

Indeed, I am often comparing his rather touchingly inflated naïveté as of a small young person walking on tiptoe while he is talking of elevated things, at the time when he felt himself the author of that unwritten romance, with his present epigrammatic curtness and affectation of power kept strictly in reserve.