A lack of visual brightness

Usage examples of dulness.

Even his narrative must be full of epigrams to avoid the one deadly sin of dulness, and his language must be decorous even at the price of being sometimes emasculated.

He now appeared for the first time as a formal satirist, and the Dunciad, in which he came forward as the champion of Wit, taken in its broad sense, against its natural antithesis, Dulness, is in some respect his masterpiece.

The Dunciad is modelled upon the Mac Flecknoe, in which Dryden celebrates the appointment of Elkanah Shadwell to succeed Flecknoe as monarch of the realms of Dulness, and describes the coronation ceremonies.

At the conclusion the goddess Dulness yawns, and a blight falls upon art, science, and philosophy.

But I diagnosed my dulness in the train just now and found it was largely his fault.

In Wordsworth, in Scott, in Keats and Shelley and Byron, in Tennyson and Browning, in Carlyle and Ruskin, came an age of passionate sincerity of protest against the dulness of prosperity.

But the scientific attitude tends, except in the highest minds, to develop a certain dryness, a scepticism about spiritual and imaginative forces, a dulness of the inner apprehension, a hard quality of judgment.

The artist is so impatient of dulness, so greedy of fineness, in all his relations, that he is apt to subject himself to a wasteful strain in talking to unperceptive and unappreciative persons.

This vast and intolerable medium of dulness, which penetrates our lives like a thick, dark mist, allowing us only to see the object in range of our immediate vision, hostile to all originality, crushingly respectable, that dictates our hours, our occupations, our amusements, our emotions, our religion, is the most ruthless and tyrannical thing in the world.

For Dulness and for the dunces forward movement is inescapably circular, but the poem itself is linear.

In Book 1 Dulness and Cibber both contemplate the works of the dunces, who conclude the book by hailing Cibber as their king.

Settle, echoing the prophecy of Anchises, celebrate the achievement of the empire of Dulness through her subversion of all forms of culture.

Cibber appropriately sleeps in the lap of Dulness, as she sits on her throne before the thronging dunces and acknowledges the contributions made to her power by education, collecting, science, politics, and religion.

The movement of Dulness is necessarily meaningless, and hence her hero is necessarily inactive.

Dulness has been unable to prevent her triumph, though it is ultimately the poet rather than Dulness who triumphs.