For the epigram about phosphorus was bombast, since it can be declaimed with equal truth that without oxygen, without carbon, without nitrogen, without any of the food elements that go to make up the chemical composition of brain matter, no thought is possible.

In the former, nothing was so luminous, so striking, so abundant; in private, it was forced, unnatural, and bombast.'

Nero's boasting is pitched in just the right key; bombast and eloquence are equally mixt.

He is many times flat, insipid: his comic wit degenerating into clenches; his serious swelling, into bombast.

From the stage spectacle he developed the drama of human life; and instead of the doggerel and bombast of our first plays he gives us the poetry of Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night's Dream.

Ridiculousness N. ridiculousness &c adj.; comicality, oddity &c adj.; extravagance, drollery. farce, comedy; burlesque &c (ridicule) 856; buffoonery &c (fun) 840; frippery; doggerel verses; absurdity &c 497; bombast &c (unmeaning) 517; anticlimax, bathos; eccentricity, monstrosity &c (unconformity) 83; laughingstock &c 857.

[Slang]; highfalutin, highfaluting^; hot air, spread-eagleism [U.S.]; brag, braggardism^; bravado, bunkum, buncombe; jactitation^, jactancy^; bounce; venditation^, vaporing, rodomontade, bombast, fine talking, tall talk, magniloquence, teratology^, heroics; Chauvinism; exaggeration &c 549. vanity &c 880; vox et praeterea nihil [Lat.]; much cry and little wool, brutum fulmen [Lat.].

They take so much pleasure in bombast, and write in such a high-flown, bloated, affected, hyperbolical and acrobatic style that their prototype is Ancient Pistol, whom his friend Falstaff once impatiently told to say what he had to say like a man of this world.

You may also puzzle and bewilder your opponent by mere bombast; and the trick is possible, because a man generally supposes that there must be some meaning in words: Gewöhnlich glaubt der Mensch, wenn er nur

Then to end up, after tramping the streets with other gaping idlers till late at night, he would make his way back, with weary limbs and aching ribs, his head whirling confusedly with bombast and loud talk, through the sleeping city to the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

The bombast and the bullying, the self-pity and the cruelty, and, most of all, the instinctive claim, typical of Germany to-day, to prescribe one law for themselves but something quite different for the rest of the world, run through all these quotations, even the earliest.

Such an address doubtless savors of bombast to many Americans, but in the history of political and military oratory in their own land they can find an endless number of speeches that, in that particular quality, rival if they do not surpass it.

"Bombast is when high sounding words are used without meaning, or upon a trifling occasion.

Kirkham borrowed this doctrine of "Tonics, Subtonics, and Atonies," from Rush: and dressed it up in his own worse bombast.

Tamburlaine was a crude, violent piece, full of exaggeration and bombast, but with passages here and there of splendid declamation, justifying Ben Jonson's phrase, "Marlowe's mighty line."

But to Shakespeare, Dryden objects, that his comic sometimes degenerates into clenches, and his serious into bombast; to Jonson, the sullen and saturnine character of his genius, his borrowing from the ancients, and the insipidity of his latter plays.

It abounds in bombast, but is not deficient in specimens of the sublime and of the tender.

If the spectators were occasionally stunned with bombast, or hurried and confused by the accumulation of action and intrigue, they escaped the languor of a creeping dialogue, and the taedium of a barren plot, of which the termination is descried full three acts before it can be attained.

" Such were the strains once preferred to the magnificent verses of Dryden; whose very worst bombast is sublimity compared to them.

It is true, the character of Moral borders upon extravagance; but a certain licence has been always given to theatrical tyrants, and we excuse bombast in him more readily than in Almanzor.

The delirium of the Terror haunts most of the revolutionary historians, and the choicest examples in all literature of bombast, folly, emptiness, political immorality, inhumanity, formal repudiation of common sense and judgment, are to be found in the rhapsodies which men of letters, some of them men of eminence, call histories of the Revolution, or lives of this or that actor in it.

His fifth defect is the employment of thoughts and images too great for the subject; an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal.

Why not allow his magnificent enterprises and good fortune, and confess his defects; instead of being bombast in his praises, and at the same time discover that the amplification is insincere?

I do not know whether the "Arabian Nights" are of Oriental origin or not: I should think not, because I never saw any other Oriental composition that was not bombast without genius, and figurative without nature; like an Indian screen, where you see little men on the foreground, and larger men hunting tigers above in the air, which they take for perspective.

There, Farce is Comedy; bombast called strong; Soft words, with nothing in them, make a song.