BEN JOHNSON, Sejanus, act v.
A writer who has no natural elevation of mind deviates readily into bombast: he strains above his natural powers; and the violent effort carries him beyond the bounds of propriety.
Guildford. Give way, and let the gushing torrent come;
Behold the tears we bring to swell the deluge,
Till the flood rise upon the guilty world,
And make the ruin common.
Lady Jane Gray, act iv. near the end.
Another species of false sublime is still more faulty than bombast: and that is, to force elevation by introducing imaginary beings without preserving any propriety in their actions; as if it were lawful to ascribe every extravagance and inconsistency to beings of the poet's creation. No writers are more licentious in that article than Johnson and Dryden.
Methinks I see Death and the Furies waiting
What we will do, and all the heaven at leisure
For the great spectacle. Draw then your swords:
And if our destiny envy our virtue
The honour of the day, yet let us care
To sell ourselves at such a price, as may
Undo the world to buy us, and make Fate,
While she tempts ours, to fear her own estate.
Catiline, act v.
—————The Furies stood on hills
Circling the place, and trembled to see men
Do more than they: whilst Piety left the field,
Griev'd for that side, that in so bad a cause
They knew not what a crime their valour was.
The sun stood still, and was, behind the cloud
The battle made, seen sweating to drive up
His frightened horse, whom still the noise drove back-
wards. Ibid, act v.
Osmyn. While we indulge our common happiness,
He is forgot by whom we all possess,
The brave Almanzor, to whose arms we owe
All that we did, and all that we shall do;
Who like a tempest that outrides the wind,
Made a just battle ere the bodies join'd.
Abdalla. His victories we scarce could keep in view,
Or polish 'em so fast as he rough drew.
Abdemelech. Fate after him below with pain did move,
And Victory could scarce keep pace above.
Death did at length so many slain forget,
And lost the tale, and took 'em by the great.
Conquest of Granada, act ii. at beginning.
An actor on the stage may be guilty of bombast as well as an author in his closet: a certain manner of acting, which is grand when supported by dignity in the sentiment and force in the expression, is ridiculous where the sentiment is mean and the expression flat.
GRANDGOR is used in Scotland for the pox. In the Philosophical Transactions, No 469. sect. 5. we have a proclamation of King James IV. of Scotland, ordering all who had this disease, or who had attended others under it, forthwith to repair to an island (Inchkeith) in the frith of Forth. If the grandgor was the pox, and this distemper came into Europe at the siege of Naples in 1495, it must have made a very quick progress to cause such an alarm at Edinburgh in 1497.