"Foppery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... has a very fine figure, and a good though I don't think a handsome face. He is tall, and very upright, and his appearance and address are at once manly and fashionable, without the smallest tincture of foppery or modish graces. In short, I like him vastly, and think him every way worthy his ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... 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 ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... evidence of the line or the mallet, but the operation of eternal influences, the presence of an Almighty hand. Another perfection connected with its ease of outline is, its severity of character: there is no foppery about it; not the slightest effort at any kind of ornament, but what nature chooses to bestow; it wears all its decorations wildly, covering its nakedness, not with what the peasant may plant, but with what the winds may bring. There is no gay color or neatness about ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... This literary foppery was one of the few things in which he was consistent. Royalist or Girondist, Jacobin or Imperialist, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and not yet immersed itself in casuistical poems, devoted itself excitedly to trifles, such as lemon-coloured kid gloves and fame. But a man still above all things perfectly young and natural, professing that foppery which follows the fashions, and not that sillier and more demoralising foppery which defies them. Just as he walked in coolly and yet impulsively into a private drawing-room and offered to play, so he walked at this time into the huge and crowded salon of ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... the bust of the Emperor Constantine Pogonatus (so called from the ample beard the monarch wore), is an example of male foppery. This emperor came to the throne A.D. 668, and died in 685. It will be perceived that two brooches fasten his outer garment, one upon each shoulder. That upon the right one is highly enriched, but the original, as really worn by the emperor, was most probably ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... would please thee? No, nothing! Little! For her very smile Shrinks to a pretty twisting of the muscles - Be that, which makes her smile, supposed unworthy Of all the charms in ambush on her lips? No, not her very smile—I've seen sweet smiles Spent on conceit, on foppery, on slander, On flatterers, on wicked wooers spent, And did they charm me then? then wake the wish To flutter out a life beneath their sunshine? Indeed not—Yet I'm angry with the man Who alone gave this higher value to her. How this, and why? Do I deserve ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... is Nance," said I aloud, "and you, curse you, are the cause of all my troubles"—this to my new hat. My foppery had cost me dear. What would the Prince say to my failure? What would Margaret say? There would once more be questionings in her eyes, and the shadow of ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... afraid this great lubber the world will prove a cockney] That is, affectation and foppery will ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... men less guilty of this pernicious folly, who, in imitation of a gaudiness and foppery of dress, introduced of late years into our neighbouring kingdom, (as fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters,) cannot find materials in their own country worthy to adorn their bodies of clay, while their minds are naked of every ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... certain flat plate of gold, whereon were graven some celestial figures, supposed good against sunstroke or pains in the head, being applied to the suture: where, that it might the better remain firm, it was sewed to a ribbon to be tied under the chin; a foppery cousin-german to this of which I am speaking. Jaques Pelletier, who lived in my house, had presented this to me for a singular rarity. I had a fancy to make some use of this knack, and therefore privately told the Count, that he might possibly run the ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... though there is a glaring instance at the end of Belarius's speech in Cymbeline (III. iii. 99 ff.), and even in the mature tragedies something of this kind may be traced. Let anyone compare, for example, Edmund's soliloquy in King Lear, I. ii., 'This is the excellent foppery of the world,' with Edgar's in II. iii., and he will be conscious that in the latter the purpose of ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... artistic misdemeanour of some sort. But other novelists have done these things before him, and have been none the less popular, and are actually none the less readable. None, however, has pushed the foppery of style and intellect to such a point as Mr. Meredith. Not infrequently he writes page after page of English as ripe and sound and unaffected as heart could wish; and you can but impute to wantonness and recklessness the splendid impertinences that intrude ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... indeed, which so disfigures the countenance of a young person, or so impresses every feature with an air of demureness, if not altogether of sanctimoniousness and of age. An eyeglass, on the other hand, has a savor of downright foppery and affectation. I have hitherto managed as well as I could without either. But something too much of these merely personal details, which, after all, are of little importance. I will content myself with saying, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... but nicknames, and every nickname is a title. The thing is perfectly harmless in itself, but it marks a sort of foppery in the human character which degrades it. If no mischief had annexed itself to the folly of titles, they would not have been worth a serious and formal destruction. Let us, then, examine the grounds upon which the French constitution has resolved against ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... incommode the Cravat or Periwig: And sometimes the Glove is well manag'd, and the white Hand display'd. Thus, with a thousand other little Motions and Formalities, all in the common Place or Road of Foppery, he takes infinite Pains to shew himself to the Pit and Boxes, a most accomplish'd Ass. This is he, of all human Kind, on whom Love can do no Miracles, and who can no where, and upon no Occasion, quit one Grain of his refin'd Foppery, unless in ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... corners, not noticing the scene before them, nor noticed themselves. A strange equipage, with two horses extravagantly bedizened with rosettes and bouquets, stood at the door; and as I looked, a pale, haggard-looking man, whose foppery in dress contrasted oddly with his care-worn expression, hurried from the shop, and sprung into the carriage. In doing so, a pocket-book fell from his pocket. I took it up, but as I did so, the carriage was already away, and far beyond my power to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... and monkeys—things without either sense or soul, head or heart. The nearness we bear to the sun has purified, while it strengthens, our passions. The icicles of your frozen climate shall as soon hammer hot bars into ploughshares, as shall the foppery and folly of your pretended gallantry make an instant's impression on a ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Austen, wife of a prosperous London solicitor. This lady was handsome, a brilliant talker, a fine musician and an amateur artist of no mean ability. She was much older than Disraeli—she must have been in order to comprehend that the young man's frivolity was pretense, and his foppery affectation. A girl of his own age, whose heart-depths had not been sounded by experience, would have fallen in love with the foppery (or else despised it—which is often the same thing); but Mrs. Austen, mature in years, with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the pernicious scorpion that presided at the birth of this happy, this incomparable child." And so it would, as Shakspeare says, "if my mother's cat had kittened. This," says our sagacious bard, "is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, (after the surfeit of our own behaviour) we make guilt of our disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity; fools, by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, (traitors) by spherical predominance; ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... whose titles are the Earl of Fitz-Pompey and Baron Deprivyseal, or whose names are Lady Aphrodite and Sir Carte Blanche? The descriptions are "high-falutin" beyond all endurance, and there is particularly noticeable a kind of stylistic foppery, which is always hovering between sublimity and ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... holds an eternal truth for the real artist. Mr. James is not the only man whose best-nursed and most valued part has proved to be destructive With a little more strength he might have kept all his delicacies, and have been a man to thank God for. As it is, he is the victim of an intellectual foppery. ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... like a Trojan. It was published by subscription for two guineas; that is, the first part was. His friends were set to work to collect subscribers. Caryll alone got thirty-eight. Pope fully entered into this. He was always alive to the value of his wares, and despised the foppery of those of his literary friends who would not make money out of their books, but would do so out of their country. He ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... existence of the evil to the use of Cigars. The unreflecting servility with which men adopt new and foreign practices, is fully exemplified in the present case; for it is notorious that the practice of cigar-smoking, the modern foppery from Regent-street to Cheapside and Cornhill, was an importation of the Peninsular War; the imitation having been begun by the Spaniards, whose models are what are usually called the savages of America. The dietetic mischief, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... noisy instruments under his mistress' window. A little before this Lady Knowell with a party of friends has visited Sir Patient, who is her next neighbour, and the loud laughter, talking, singing and foppery so enrage the precise old valetudinarian that he resolves to leave London immediately for his country house, a circumstance which would be fatal to his wife's amours. Wittmore and she, however, persuade ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... labours in the service of man. He is "earth's essential king," but his kingship rests upon his carrying out the kingliest of mottoes—"Ich dien." Browning all his life had a hearty contempt for the foppery of "Art for Art," and he never conveyed it with more incisive brilliance than in the sketch of Bordello's "opposite," the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Esq. of Boquhan, was a gentleman of Stirlingshire, who, like many exquisites of our own time, united a natural high spirit and daring character with an affectation of delicacy of address and manners amounting to foppery.* ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... planters of these colonies.—It may be thought polite and fashionable, by many modern fine gentlemen, perhaps, to deride the characters of these persons as enthusiastical, superstitious and republican: But such ridicule is founded in nothing but foppery and affectation, and is grosly injurious and false.——Religious to some degree of enthusiasm, it may be admitted they were; but this can be no peculiar derogation from their character, because it was at that time almost the universal ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... thing more; though appearances are against him, I don't believe Tom Shaw saw you. Miss Trix is equal to that sort of thing, but it is n't like Tom, for with all his foppery he is a good ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... tell you, I hate it in your Sex; and those that fancy themselves possest of that Foppery, are the most impertinently troublesom of all Woman-kind, and will transgress nine Commandments to keep one: and to satisfy your ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... Falkland but matter of contempt, they appeared to be never weary of recounting his praises. Such dignity, such affability, so perpetual an attention to the happiness of others, such delicacy of sentiment and expression! Learned without ostentation, refined without foppery, elegant without effeminacy! Perpetually anxious to prevent his superiority from being painfully felt, it was so much the more certainly felt to be real, and excited congratulation instead of envy ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... is one of the chivalrous days of Spain, while it is devoid of trick is full of thrilling interest, and its style, while it is eminently poetical, neither swells into bombast nor descends to the foppery so common among the verse-makers of our day. There is a stately, old-fashioned tread in the diction, as of a man in armor, who, should he attempt to gather flowers of mere prettiness, would crush them at the first touch of his iron gauntlet, and who, if he seems to move ungracefully ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... and interior disdain of fashion and ceremony, is indeed, not very often to be found: much the greater part of those who pretend to laugh at foppery and formality, secretly wish to have possessed those qualifications which they pretend to despise; and because they find it difficult to wash away the tincture which they have so deeply imbibed, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... to do so, and to run into debt for the polish. When he confessed to having, 'so help him Heaven,' not four francs in the world, he was ordering this vernis de Guiton, at five francs a bottle, from Paris, and calling the provider of it a 'scoundrel,' because he ventured to ask for his money. What foppery, what folly was all this! How truly worthy of the man who built his fame on the reputation of a coat! Terrible indeed was the hardship that followed his extravagance; he was actually compelled to exchange his white for a black cravat. Poor martyr! after such a trial it is impossible ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... he adjourned into another room with Renaldo and his companion, who were not a little surprised to see this minister of Plutus in the shape of a young sprightly beau, trimmed up in all the foppery of the fashion; for they had hitherto always associated with the idea of an usurer old age and rusty apparel. After divers modish congees, he begged to know to what he should attribute the honour of their message; when Ferdinand, who acted the orator, told him, that his friend Count Melvil, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... and his family, whom I had seen but twice since they came to town. They too are going to the Bath next month. Countess Doll of Meath(7) is such an owl that, wherever I visit, people are asking me whether I know such an Irish lady, and her figure and her foppery? I came home early, and have been amusing myself with looking into one of Rymer's volumes of the Records of the Tower, and am mighty easy to think I have no urgent business upon my hands. My third cold is not yet off; I sometimes cough, and am not right with it in ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... included—so much a prey to a sort of foppery of expression and love of animal spirits as to be properly subject to the satire the play provides for them? Are the women more sane in this respect, despite ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... absolutely unique where he says, 'My kindness for a man of letters'; this, it seems, caused him to feel pain at seeing Gray descending to what he, the Doctor (as a one-sided opinion of his own), held to be a fantastic foppery. The question we point at is not this supposed foppery—was it such or not? Milton's having cherished that 'foppery' was a sufficient argument for detesting it. What we fix the reader's eye upon is, the unparalleled arrogance of applying to Gray this extreme language ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... adj.; acting a part &c. v.; pretense &c. (falsehood) 544, (ostentation) 882; boasting &c. 884. charlatanism, quackery, shallow profundity; pretension, airs, pedantry, purism, precisianism, euphuism; teratology &c. (altiloquence) 577. mannerism, simagree, grimace. conceit, foppery, dandyism, man millinery, coxcombry, puppyism. stiffness, formality, buckram; prudery, demureness, coquetry, mock modesty, minauderie, sentimentalism; mauvais honte, false shame. affector, performer, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... if not too much, of the Diary of a Master of the Ceremonies; where the important personages strangely contrast with the frivolity and foppery of their actions. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... settled in life, crosses my mind when I am in a serious mood. That she will marry well, there is little doubt, for she possesses beauty in a rare degree, and has been reared as an English girl should be, not to frivolity and foppery. She was trained by her mother, who save for the mad act she was persuaded into by me, was all goodness and refinement, for the first twelve years of her life, and since then by an admirable governess. No fear that she will be ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the slightest fear of detection in his mind. A gray-haired man with bowed shoulders, and seamed and marred face, who had lost every trace of the fastidiousness, which had verged upon foppery in the handsome and prosperous Roland Sefton, ran no risk of recognition, more especially as Roland Sefton had been reckoned among the dead and buried for many a long year. The lineaments of the dead die with them, however cunningly the artist ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... there were signs of change in various directions as we have seen, and smoking had to a large extent ceased to be fashionable. Pepys has very few allusions to tobacco; Evelyn fewer still. There is little evidence as to whether or not the gallants of the Restoration Court smoked; but considering the foppery of their attire and manners, it seems almost certain that tobacco was not in favour among them. The beaux with their full wigs—they carried combs of ivory or tortoiseshell in their pockets with which they publicly combed their flowing locks—their ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... I could bring my piece upon the stage. This I attempted, and made various applications, which all failed; some because, though I understood Greek, I could not teach merchant's accounts, or spoil paper by flourishes and foppery, which is called writing a fine hand; and others because, as I suppose, persons offered themselves whose airs, or humility, or other usher-like qualifications, that had no relation to learning, pleased their ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... and set off, intending to return to dinner, but with no more important view that appeared than having his hair cut. There was certainly no harm in his travelling sixteen miles twice over on such an errand; but there was an air of foppery and nonsense in it which she could not approve. It did not accord with the rationality of plan, the moderation in expense, or even the unselfish warmth of heart, which she had believed herself to discern in him yesterday. Vanity, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen |
