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Nay, so pertinacious was he in his attempts to remove the offence which he conceived Durward to have taken, that he offered to bestow his own company upon him, to contribute to his entertainment until Quentin, internally cursing his formal foppery, found no better way of escape, then pretending a desire of visiting the neighbouring city, and setting off thither at such a round pace as speedily subdued all desire in the gentleman usher to accompany him farther than the drawbridge.
I shall never say in the great round-up that I was weak and I fell. I'll take my gruel expecting it, not fearing it if there is to be any gruel anywhere, or any round-up anywhere!" A figure suddenly appeared coming round the bend of the road before him. It was Rouge Gosselin. Rouge Gosselin was inclined to speak. Some satanic whim or malicious foppery made Charley stare him blankly in the face.
These fellow-scholars of the king "quaint votaries of science" at first, afterwards "affection's men-at-arms" three youthful knights, gallant, amorous, chivalrous, but also a little affected, sporting always a curious foppery of language, are, throughout, the leading figures in the foreground; one of them, in particular, being more carefully depicted than the others, and in himself very noticeable a portrait with somewhat puzzling manner and expression, which at once catches the eye irresistibly and keeps it fixed.
In his dress, not the slightest approach to foppery could be detected; all was faultless elegance. In his dark eyes and on his proud features an observer could read the lofty triumph which he felt; for was not he, an unknown and perhaps penniless adventurer, about to wed the beautiful and accomplished daughter of one of Boston's "merchant princes"?
MARCIUS. As with a man busied about decrees, Condemning some to death and some to exile, Ransoming him or pitying, threatening the other. Coriolanus The captive Abbot's features and manners exhibited a whimsical mixture of offended pride, and deranged foppery and bodily terror. "Why, how now, my masters?" said he, with a voice in which all three emotions were blended. "What order is this among ye?
"Well, then, since we are by ourselves, and can say what we like, explain to me why a man as superior as yourself for you are superior should affect to exaggerate a foppery which cannot be natural. Why spend two hours and a half in adorning yourself, when it is sufficient to spend a quarter of an hour in your bath, to do your hair in two minutes, and to dress! There, tell me your system."
And here I cannot but smile to think how I have paid myself in showing the foppery of this kind of learning, who myself am so manifest an example; for, do I not the same thing throughout almost this whole composition? We are, I conceive, knowing only in present knowledge, and not at all in what is past, or more than is that which is to come.
A fop is not a favorite with his own sex. Indeed, he gets a good deal more abuse from them than is necessary. His is a harmless failing and it soon wears out. Besides, a man who has no foppery at twenty will be a slatternly, dirty-collar, unbrushed-coat man at forty. A little foppishness in a young man is good; it is human.
One likes better in some ways Cato's stult old Roman attitude: who scorned Greek all his life for sheer foppery, while he knew of nothing better written in it than such trash as poetry and philosophy; but at eighty came on a Greek treatise on manure and straightway learned the language that he might read and enjoy something profitable and thoroughly Roman in spirit.
Byronism, romanticism, reminiscences of the French Revolution, of the Dekabrists and the worship of Napoleon; faith in destiny, in one's star, in strength of will; pose and fine phrases and a miserable sense of the emptiness of life; uneasy pangs of petty vanity and genuine strength and daring; generous impulses and defective education, ignorance; aristocratic airs and delight in trivial foppery.... But enough of these general reflections.