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Updated: May 4, 2025
It is true that, as a schoolboy, a certain pompousness in the style of his letters home suggested to the more clear- sighted among his relatives the possibility that young Thomas might grow up into a prig; but, after all, what else could be expected from a child who, at the age of three, had been presented by his father, as a reward for proficiency in his studies, with the twenty-four volumes of Smollett's History of England?
He was able to cope vigorously with the gigantic programs he set for himself. At moments, no doubt, as in the C-minor Symphony and so many of his piano-sonatas, one is repelled by a certain indefinable pompousness and self-righteousness and exasperated by the obviousness and dullness and heaviness of his art.
John's kind heart had melted somewhat towards Sir Timothy, when the poor gentleman had sought him in his chambers on the previous day, and appealed to him for help in his extremity. He was sorry for his cousin, in spite of the pompousness and arrogance with which Sir Timothy unconsciously did his best to alienate even those whom he most desired to attract.
But there was in general nothing Oriental about him, no assumption of barbaric pompousness, no extravagance of bearing. His prevailing deportment was calm, grave, and deliciously courteous. If you had met him, no matter how or where, you would probably have been pleased with him.
He says of himself with something of pompousness, "I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came." *Edmund Smith. Pope's keenest desire was to be a poet, and few poets have rushed so quickly into fame. He received few of the buffets which young authors have as a rule to bear.
At last the horses were all seen; everybody shook hands with the Colonel and thanked him, the General with great pompousness, and Miss Braxton with a smile, and a hope that she might see him during the meeting; and the old barouche went lumbering away down the road, until it presently buried itself, like a monstrous cuttlefish, in a cloud of its own making.
The depth of his conviction, his passionate love for all that he deemed lofty and true, his fiery energy, his poetic imaginativeness, his theatrical airs and rhetoric, his haughty self-assumption, his pompousness and extravagance, were not more puzzling to his contemporaries than the confidence with which he appealed to the higher sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which he turned from a corruption which had till then been the great engine of politics, the undoubting faith which he felt in himself, in the grandeur of his aims, and in his power to carry them out.
With these doubts he went to consult the sergeant Gomez, who, as a youth, had wanted to be a curate. Without deigning to look at the corporal the sergeant blew out a mouthful of smoke and answered with great pompousness, "In ancient times it was pronounced Filipi instead of Felipe.
Whenever, on the other hand, we see in wise and good men any vanity, boasting, pompousness of any kind, we call it a weakness in them, and are sorry to see them lowering themselves by the least want of divine modesty. Now, this great grace and noble virtue should surely be in our Lord, from whom all graces and virtues come; and I think we need not look far through the gospels to find it.
The contempt of the people for the boy-soldiers at whose head he had marched into Madrid, combined with disdain for his own pompousness and with fury at his subsequent cruelty, goes far to account for much that was disastrous to French prestige and to France in the sequel.
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