a. [A mod. word, formed irregularly from bathos, on the assumed analogy of pathetic, (which is not derived from pathos); cf. also BATHOTIC.] Characterized by bathos; ‘sinking’ rhetorically, or in literary style; absol. The bathetic = BATHOS. (A favorite word of reviewers.)
a. 1834. Coleridge, in Rem. (1836), II. 163. Even Warburton would scarcely have made so deep a plunge into the bathetic.
1866. Lond. Rev., 15 Sept., 289/1. The bathetic of our women novelists.
1879. O’Connor, Beaconsfield, 198. Bold enough to class his bathetic and impotent epic with the productions of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton.
1884. Inquirer, 21 June, 390/1. Verbose when they should have been concise, bathetic when they wanted to be pathetic.
