Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 13, 2025
And while both England and America have become greatly liberalised in the interval; while shore pomp in high places has come to be regarded by the more intelligent masses of men as belonging to the absurd, ridiculous, and mock-heroic; while that most truly august of all the majesties of earth, the President of the United States, may be seen entering his residence with his umbrella under his arm, and no brass band or military guard at his heels, and unostentatiously taking his seat by the side of the meanest citizen in a public conveyance; while this is the case, there still lingers in American men-of-war all the stilted etiquette and childish parade of the old-fashioned Spanish court of Madrid.
I fancy, also, that I must by this time have read the Odyssey, for the "Battle of the Frogs and Mice" was in the second volume, and it took me so much that I paid it the tribute of a bald imitation in a mock-heroic epic of a cat fight, studied from the cat fights in our back yard, with the wonted invocation to the Muse, and the machinery of partisan gods and goddesses.
In commenting on their failure, an Athenaeum critic has explained the pre-established fitness of the ottava rima the first six lines of which are a dance, and the concluding couplet a "breakdown" for the mock-heroic.
"Of course he doesn't, Sol," said Miss Euphemia. "I could have told you that. He didn't even know ME!" The voice and mock-heroic attitude of the speaker was enough to relieve the general embarrassment with a laugh.
He wrote for his own age, and in temper and intellectual and spiritual outlook, such as it was, he exactly reflected and interpreted it. In the forging of condensed, pointed, and sparkling maxims of life and criticism he has no equal, and in painting a portrait Dryden alone is his rival; while in the Rape of the Lock he has produced the best mock-heroic poem in existence.
Because of his simplicity, absence of fussiness, avoidance of the mock-heroic, of the inflated "grand manner," critics have pressed too heavily upon this same simplicity. There is nothing as subtle as his simplicity, for it is a simplicity that conceals subtlety. No matter the time of day or season of the year you visit Velasquez, you never find him off his guard.
'Lord Auchinleck, he quaintly adds, 'took the trouble himself to give him a regular course of instruction in law, a circumstance of singular benefit, and of which Mr Boswell has ever expressed a strong and grateful sense. But his sense was not such as to restrain him from a mock-heroic correspondence with Andrew Erskine, brother of the Earl of Kellie.
"A bluff old man-at-arms ought to be forgiven for pausing in his wild career to kiss a pretty lass at the wayside!" he growled. His mock-heroic attitude toward his exploits kept her laughing, until she said, quite soberly: "Please don't think I'm so awfully frivolous, for I really am not.
Coeur-de-Lion, a new and more elaborate attempt in the mock-heroic or comico-didactic vein, had been on hand for some time, the scope of it greatly deepening and expanding itself since it first took hold of him; and now, soon after the Naples journey, it rose into shape on the wider plan; shaken up probably by this new excitement, and indebted to Calabria, Palermo and the Mediterranean scenes for much of the vesture it had.
On comparing a few passages with the original, I perceive that he fails alike in representing the dignity of Cervantes in the mock-heroic, and the familiarity of his lighter manner. These are faults that might have been easily avoided by many a writer of much less natural abilities than Smollett, who wanted both the leisure and the command of style that were requisite for such an undertaking.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking