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He seldom appeared at races, and never hunted; though he was profound master of the calculations in the first, and was, as regarded the second, allowed to be one of the most perfect masters of horsemanship in his time. So, in his chess, while he chose even sedulously what became him most, he avoided the appearance of coxcombry, by a disregard to minutiae.
To my astonishment the interpreter stood boldly upright, and began to contemplate his irresistible face and figure in a glass, and arrange with cool coxcombry his darling tuft of hair; which done, he approached us with a mild swagger, and proceeded to address me with a freedom which I found it expedient to snub.
"But I think and I do say that it is a preposterous instance of coxcombry to subject such a woman as Mrs. Royston because of a generous moment of self-reproach for a cruel and selfish deed to the imputation of inviting advances from a man who coyly plans evasion and flight and she scarcely two years a widow." "Time cuts no ice in the matter," Bayne forced himself to continue the discussion.
Had this been done in any other way than the consummately simple, delicate, and unobtrusive one which he has adopted, the whole would have been insufferable egotism, disgusting coxcombry, or oppressive dulness. Nor does he ever go out of his natural character.
Moreover, his perpetual struggle with men and things leave them no time for the coxcombry of fashionable genius, which makes haste to gather in the harvests of a fugitive season, and whose vanity and self-love are as petty and exacting as a custom-house which levies tithes on all that comes in its way.
"There are changes in wit as in fashion," said Sir William Temple, and he proceeds to instance a nobleman who was the greatest wit of the court of Charles I., and the greatest dullard in that of Charles II.* But Heavens! how awful are the revolutions of coxcombry! what a change from Beau Fielding the Beauty, to Beau Fielding the Oddity! * The Earl of Norwich.
He wondered if it hadn't been a sort of coxcombry in him to think there was any danger to her in free and frequent intercourse with him! As for the danger to himself, that it was cowardly to think about. He wished he had acted differently, and felt unreasonably troubled at having let the girl drift beyond his knowledge.
Not so much, as it is commonly put, in regard to the amount of consideration given, but in the conception of the thing considered. A man emasculated by coxcombry may spend more time upon the arrangement of his clothes than any woman, but even then there is no fetichism in his idea of them they are still only a covering he uses for a time.
All good critics have agreed that his letters are not surpassed, perhaps not surpassable. He has more freedom than Gray; he has none of the coxcombry of Walpole and Byron; and there is no fifth name that can be put even into competition with him.
A national coxcombry that pretends to an independence of human sensations, and makes a motto of our dandiacal courage, is more perilous to the armies of the nation than that of a few heroes.
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