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"'If you've got to get rid of your excess verbiage, says I, 'why not go out on the river bank and speak a piece? It seems to me there was an old spell-binder named Cantharides that used to go and disincorporate himself of his windy numbers along the seashore. "'No, says Andy, 'I must have an audience.
Of commonplaces about the palaces fruitful of verbiage in Addison and Gray, who says with perfect truth, "I should make you sick of marble were I to tell you how it is lavished here," Smollett is sparing enough, though he evidently regards the inherited inclination of Genoese noblemen to build beyond their means as an amiable weakness.
So enamored was he of the grace and excellence of law-reporters' French, that he regarded it as a delightful study for a man of fashion, and maintained that no barrister would do justice to the law and the interests of his clients who did not season his sentences with Norman verbiage.
The popularity of Bulwer Lytton in the forecastles of Southern-going ships is a wonderful and bizarre phenomenon. What ideas do his polished and so curiously insincere sentences awaken in the simple minds of the big children who people those dark and wandering places of the earth? What meaning can their rough, inexperienced souls find in the elegant verbiage of his pages?
But we may be sure of this, that when we see nothing but grossness and barbarism, or insipidity and verbiage, in a writer that is the god of a nation's idolatry, it is we and not they who want true taste and feeling. The controversy about Pope and the opposite school in our own poetry comes to much the same thing.
Dave sat, with a knowing air, listening to the legal phraseology as though he had been used to marriage contracts from infancy. He was pleased with the notion of being betrothed in this awful diplomatic fashion. It accorded with his feelings to think that he was worth ten thousand dollars and the exhaustive verbiage of this formidable cawntrack.
But a whole poem of that quality Burns cannot make; the rest, in the Farewell to Nancy, is verbiage. We arrive best at the real estimate of Burns, I think, by conceiving his work as having truth of matter and truth of manner, but not the accent or the poetic virtue of the highest masters. His genuine criticism of life, when the sheer poet in him speaks, is ironic; it is not
All metaphysical verbiage, says Fitzjames, whether Coleridge's or Ward's, is an attempt to convert ignorance into superior kind of knowledge, by 'shaking up hard words in a bag. Since all our knowledge is relative to our faculties, it is all liable to error.
As soon as the two knights champion had reached each his appointed station in front of the scaffolding, the Marshal bade the speaker read the challenge, which, unrolling the parchment, he began to do in a loud, clear voice, so that all might hear. It was a quaint document, wrapped up in the tangled heraldic verbiage of the time.
Yet most writers envelop the thought or the fact in so much verbiage, complicate it with so many episodes, beat it out thin, by so much iteration and reiteration, that the student must needs learn the art of skipping, in self-defense. To one in zealous pursuit of knowledge, to read most books through is paying them too extravagant a compliment.
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