expatiation

• “If you expect to feel any emotion or any interest you will not experience it in the long details of a war, the subject of which is very dry and the expressions bombastic, but if you would have bold ideas, an eloquent expatiation on sublime and philosophical courage, Lucan is the only one among the ancients in whom you will meet with it.”

  A Philosophical Dictionary

• “He merely cites one passage — no more, no less — and declares the book dead, without even casual expatiation.”

  Joe Queenan: Incurious Harbinger of Death : Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits

• “So I recall this: the story of the violin music being told and Granddad plunging into the midst of the tale with an expatiation on Paganini.”

  A Traitor to Memory

• “He went from there to an expatiation of what the presence of yet another Starbucks this one on Gloucester Road not far from Braemar Mansions has done to the atmosphere of his neighbourhood.”

  A Traitor to Memory

• “Since July 1, 1898, expatiation on the cowardice and lack of skill of the Spanish soldier has ceased to be a profitable literary occupation.”

  The Colored Regulars in the United States Army

• “For such subjects the romance, with its almost unlimited powers of expatiation, is the proper vehicle, but they are unfitted for music; they necessitate wearisome explanations of complicated motives altogether foreign to the direct emotional character of musical drama.”

  Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde"; an essay on the Wagnerian drama

• “This notion is to be tracked after widely, and in intimate recesses; more hopefully, therefore, according to a planned campaign than a merely wild chance expatiation.”

  Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844

• “He saves his climax, in other words, from the burden of deliberate expatiation, which at first sight it would seem bound to incur; he leaves nothing for it to accomplish but just the necessary touch, the movement that declares and fulfils the intention of the book.”

  The Craft of Fiction

• “His brother-in-law paused in the middle of an expatiation on the business opportunities of the neighborhood.”

  Chapter 44

• “This brought out a witticism to the effect that such recognition would savor less of gallantry if more than a page or two, in so large a volume, had been reserved for expatiation upon the tuneful sisterhood.”

  0 Introduction. Stedman, Edmund Clarence, ed. 1900. An American Anthology, 1787-1900

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