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Updated: May 26, 2025
I repeat to nobody, except my intimates, and that when I am pressed; nor any where, and before any body. This pleases coxcombs, who never consider whether they do this to no purpose, or at an unseasonable time. But you, says he, delight to hurt people, and this you do out of a mischievous disposition. From what source do you throw this calumny upon me?
"Bulwer and Disraeli are literary coxcombs," he said, "who ought not to be encouraged, and who are trying to undermine wholesome English literature." "O father," I ventured to observe on one occasion, "'Vivian Grey' is splendid.
At forty-five the game was not altogether up; and in a large theatre, not too much lighted, and with the artifices of a dramatic toilet, he might still be able successfully to reassume those characters of coxcombs and muscadins, in which he was once so celebrated. Luxury had perhaps a little too much enlarged his waist, but diet and rehearsals would set all right.
Or, "Well, if you are sure Lady Mary loves you " I could have broken his head a thousand times. "Bad luck to you, Doctor," I cried. "Don't you know such croaking would spoil the peace of any true lover? Is ever any worthy man able not to be anxious in such matters? 'Tis only foppery coxcombs who have great confidence, and they are usually misled, thank the Lord!
"Was she educated abroad?" "Bless you! no: she is altogether American in training." "Isn't she rather peculiar?" ventured Maurice. "If by peculiar you mean the sweetest girl in the world, she is that," replied the old man enthusiastically. "Is she generally liked?" "Not by dandies and coxcombs: my little girl over there adores her. But let me introduce you." "Willingly," ejaculated the other.
These are often imitated by coxcombs, who have no learning at all; but who have got some names and some scraps of ancient authors by heart, which they improperly and impertinently retail in all companies, in hopes of passing for scholars. If, therefore, you would avoid the accusation of pedantry on one hand, or the suspicion of ignorance on the other, abstain from learned ostentation.
Hence men of letters, and women of letters, form a caste by themselves much to their own disadvantage, and still more to the injury of those to the improvement of whom they might imperceptibly contribute; hence the statesman, or the lawyer, or the writer, generally keeps aloof from the great world, which he leaves to idle young men and aged coxcombs; or, if he enters it, takes care to abstain from those topics on which his conversation would be most natural, instructing, and entertaining.
We grant that the love of praise is in some instances a ridiculous, and in others a mischievous passion; that to it we owe the breed of coquettes and coxcombs, and, a more serious evil, the noxious race of heroes and conquerors. We too are ready, when it appears in the shape of vanity, to smile at it as a foible, or in that of false glory, to condemn it as a crime.
The vanity of Nero was astonishing, but so was that of most of his successors. The Roman emperors were the sublimest coxcombs in history. In men born to stations which are beyond ambition, all aspirations run to seed. Plut. in Sympos. It does not appear that at Elis there were any of the actual contests in music and song which made the character of the Pythian games.
Sir Fopling was said to be drawn for one Hewit, a beau of those times, who, it seems, was such a creature as the poet ridiculed, but who, perhaps, like many other coxcombs, would never have been remembered, but for this circumstance, which transmits his memory to posterity.
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