entertainment in the chastising of these obvious affectations. It hardly
seems the proper work for an author like him who wrote the Treatise on
the Sublime. But it is tempting, even now, to give contemporary
instances of skill in the Art of Sinking--modern cases of bombast,
triviality, false rhetoric. “Speaking generally, it would seem that
bombast is one of the hardest things to avoid in writing,” says an
author who himself avoids it so well. Bombast is the voice of sham
passion, the shadow of an insincere attitude. “Even the wretched phantom
who still bore the imperial title stooped to pay this ignominious
blackmail,” cries bombast in Macaulay’s _Lord Clive_. The picture of a
phantom who is not only a phantom but wretched, stooping to pay
blackmail which is not only blackmail but ignominious, may divert the
reader and remind him that the faults of the past are the faults of the
present. Again, “The desolate islands along the sea-coast, overgrown by
noxious vegetation, and swarming with deer and tigers”--do, what does
any one suppose, perform what forlorn part in the economy of the world?
Why, they “supply the cultivated districts with abundance of salt.” It
is as comic as--

“And thou Dalhousie, thou great God of War,
Lieutenant-Colonel to the Earl of Mar.”

Bombast “transcends the Sublime,” and falls on the other side. Our
author gives more examples of puerility. “Slips of this sort are made by
those who, aiming at brilliancy, polish, and especially attractiveness,
are landed in paltriness and silly affectation.” Some modern instances
we had chosen; the field of choice is large and richly fertile in those
blossoms. But the reader may be left to twine a garland of them for
himself; to select from contemporaries were invidious, and might provoke
retaliation. When our author censures Timaeus for saying that Alexander