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She did not know that so long as a person has his subject at his finger-ends, simplicity is rather to be commended than otherwise. It is the half-informed who are verbose. She had written simply of the simple life which she knew so well.

And here a word should be said about that prose style of his which had an immense vogue for a time and plainly influenced most of the writers of his own and the following generation, even men so great as Gibbon and the young Ruskin, and women so brilliant as Fanny Burney. Then a reaction came and it was generally denounced as pompous, empty and verbose.

It consists in saying simple things with verbose pomposity. But should there arise a man who combines highly-developed dramatic faculty with great lyric genius, it is quite possible that he may give us the new poetic drama for which our idealists are sighing.

It was, after his usual style, verbose, involved, and obscure, sprinkled with quotations from Scripture to refresh the piety of the saints, and seasoned with an affectation of modesty to disarm the enmity of the republicans. He described the state of the nation at the close of the last parliament.

We had a long and intensely uninteresting conversation about the maladies to which chickens are subject. He was verbose and reminiscent. He took me over his farm, pointing out as we went Dorkings with pasts, and Cochin Chinas which he had cured of diseases generally fatal on, as far as I could gather, Christian Science principles.

His page is always luminous, but never blazes in unexpected splendour. It was apparently his principal endeavour to avoid all harshness and severity of diction; he is therefore sometimes verbose in his transitions and connections, and sometimes descends too much to the language of conversation; yet if his language had been less idiomatical it might have lost somewhat of its genuine Anglicism.

It digs a hole in the ground, shaped like a funnel. It covers the surface with fine, light sand. It attracts silly insects and gets them to tumble in. Scherer, Diderot, passim. Morrellet, i. 29. Marmontel, ii. 313. As a writer, the great fault of Diderot is one not common in France. He is verbose.

Undesirable qualities are the diffuse, verbose, redundant, inflated, prolix, ambiguous, feeble, monotonous, loose, slip-shod, dry, flowery, pedantic, pompous, rhetorical, grandiloquent, artificial, formal, ornate, halting, ponderous, ungrammatical, vague, and obscure.

She could cease to be Fanny Burney; it was not so easy to become Samuel Johnson. In Cecilia the change of manner began to appear. But in Cecilia the imitation of Johnson, though not always in the best taste, is sometimes eminently happy; and the passages which are so verbose as to be positively offensive, are few.

He had thoughts too of suppressing Homer's poems: "For why," said he, "may not I do what Plato has done before me, who excluded him from his commonwealth?" He was likewise very near banishing the writings and the busts of Virgil and Livy from all libraries; censuring one of them as "a man of no genius and very little learning;" and the other as "a verbose and careless historian."