United States or Norway ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
How intolerable would have been the presumption of his Thrasonical, "I thrashed the Helvetians I subjugated the Germans I utterly routed the Gauls I defeated the painted Britons!"
If Mill taught some of them to reason, Macaulay tempted more of them to declaim: if Mill set an example of patience, tolerance, and fair examination of hostile opinions, Macaulay did much to encourage oracular arrogance, and a rather too thrasonical complacency; if Mill sowed ideas of the great economic, political, and moral bearings of the forces of society, Macaulay trained a taste for superficial particularities, trivial circumstantialities of local colour, and all the paraphernalia of the pseudo-picturesque.
His "thrasonical boast" was sober truth, and he stands above military or literary criticism, a lesson and a model. But he was steeped in all the vices of his age, and his motive was personal ambition. The Republic did not give him sufficient scope, and therefore he would have destroyed it, if he had not been himself destroyed.
His manner is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, and his general behaviour, vain, ridiculous and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, and, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it. Nath. Hol. This is abhominable which he would call abominable; it insinuateth me of insanie; Ne intelligis, domine? to make frantic, lunatic. Nath.
'Thrasonical' is from Thraso, the braggart of Roman comedy.
What Junker-led men could do they have since done to make that thrasonical brag good. But there is no getting over the fact that, in Tommy Atkins's phrase, they had asked for it. Their Junkers, like ours, had drunk to The Day; and they should not have let us choose it after riling us for so many years. And that is why Sir Edward had a great surprise when he at last owned up in Parliament.
"His length of limb and hooked nose were his superficial qualifications to play roaring captains," Pantaloon explained. "His lungs have justified our choice. You should hear him roar. At first we called him Spavento or Epouvapte. But that was unworthy of so great an artist. Not since the superb Mondor amazed the world has so thrasonical a bully been seen upon the stage.
After the laughter which the exposure of the roaring captain invariably produced, it remained for Scaramouche contemptuously to dismiss him in a phrase that varied nightly, according to the inspiration of the moment. This time he chose to give his phrase a political complexion: "Thus, O thrasonical coward, is your emptiness exposed.
He had a deep olive complexion and dark-brown hair and eyes eyes that in certain lights looked almost black. He was a silent man habitually, but given anything to talk about in which he felt any interest and he could talk on for ever. Unlike the ordinary soldier of fortune, he was not in the least thrasonical.
The audience followed with relish the sly intriguings of Scaramouche, delighted in the beauty and freshness of Climene, was moved almost to tears by the hard fate which through four long acts kept her from the hungering arms of the so beautiful Leandre, howled its delight over the ignominy of Pantaloon, the buffooneries of his sprightly lackey Harlequin, and the thrasonical strut and bellowing fierceness of the cowardly Rhodomont.