Bathetic

The fall is indeed the archetypal bathetic motion, a sudden, surprising downward rush degrading the pretensions of posture and man's bipedal pride.

To ask what it is that Don Quixote himself believes is to enter the visionary centre of his story. This curious blend of the sublime and the bathetic does not come again until Kafka, another pupil of Cervantes, would compose stories like "The Hunter Gracchus" and "A Country Doctor".

It is possible that Shillibeer's bathetic end is the reason buses did not become universally known as 'Shillibeers'. Some operators had called their buses Shillibeers.