"Foppish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a gentleman, invariably courteous and refined. He is careful in his attire, but not foppish. He is chivalrous in his attitude toward woman, and as politely kind to the wrinkled old woman who scrubs his office floor as to the aristocratic belle who bows to him from ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... be a brother of the stern Bienville, this the man upon whom my governor's fortunes now so largely depended? His foppish manner impressed me very disagreeably, and, in no pleasant frame of mind, I stalked along by his side listening to the senseless gossip of the court. We soon passed out of the gardens into the great hall, and reached his ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... gestures without the rapture of his inspiration. Would-be followers of Mill fancied themselves to be logical when they were only hopelessly unsympathetic and unimaginative; and would-be followers of some other writers can be effeminate and foppish without being subtle or graceful. Macaulay's thoroughness of work has, perhaps, been less contagious than we could wish. Something of the modern raising of the standard of accuracy in historical inquiry may be set down to his influence. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... read of his Excellency as the "Iron Fist," or the "Heavy Heel," and I rather expected to see a heavy, domineering man. Instead, a slender, stealthy man in the uniform of a General rose from behind a tapestry topped table, revealing, as he did, a slight stoop in his back, perhaps a trifle foppish. He held out ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... particular tone of his voice and the cant terms he used, we should think he had figured among the Kentucky horse-traders, or made stump speeches in Arkansas. His dress was inclined to the gaudy. He wore a flashy brown-colored frock-coat with the collar laid very far back, a foppish white vest exposing his shirt-bosom nearly down to the waistbands of his pants, which were of gray stripes. But the more fanciful portions of his dress were a large and costly fob-chain, which hung very low and supported an immense seal containing a glistening stone, ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... explained that in the city they were worn, and that silk was cool, but while he talked he was possessed by a kind of fury. For the first time the delicate garments, the luxurious toilet articles packed in his bag, seemed foppish, unnecessary, things for a woman. With all of them, he could not compete with this fair young god, who used a rough towel and a tin basin on ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... girl was already plunging into the crowd, in the wake of her mother, the maids, and the porters. Ashton hastened after, in a vain attempt to overtake her. Crowds part easier before a pretty, smiling, fashionably dressed girl than before a foppish young man ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... he seems to mean, a direct perception of beauty in character applied to the regulation of conduct. Virtue corresponds to an instinctive and so far ultimate appreciation of beauty of character. Mackintosh insists upon this intrinsic charm of virtue in the language which struck Mill as simply foppish affectation. The pleasure of 'benevolence' itself, says Mackintosh, is infinitely superior to the pleasures to which it may lead. Could it become 'lasting and intense,' it would convert the heart into a heaven.[577] To love virtue, you ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... courteous to all—in short, better behaved. Up to this time I had been, perhaps, careless in dress and rather affected it. Great heavy boots, loose collar, and general roughness of attire were then peculiar to the West and in our circle considered manly. Anything that could be labeled foppish was looked upon with contempt. I remember the first gentleman I ever saw in the service of the railway company who wore kid gloves. He was the object of derision among us who aspired to be manly men. I was a great deal the better in all these respects ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... everybody ought to be as much hardened to those vexations as himself. He was angry with Boswell for complaining of a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust on the road, or the smell of the kitchen. These were, in his phrase, "foppish lamentations," which people ought to be ashamed to utter in a world so full of sin and sorrow. Goldsmith crying because The Good-natured Man had failed, inspired him with no pity. Though his own health was not good, he detested and despised ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... the pleasaunce he countered Mistress Tiffany, and saw at a distance, standing by the laurels, a foppish, many-colored, portly personage negligently twirling a long staff. Halfman guessed the name, grinned, and went on his business. Tiffany burst wellnigh breathless into ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Xenophon, conducting back from an inhospitable and hostile country, and through unknown paths, his ten thousand Greeks; or Caesar, riding up and down the banks of the Rubicon, sad enough belike when alone, but at the head of his men cheerful, joyous, well dressed, rather foppish, in fact, his face shining with good humor as with oil. Again, Nelson, in the worst of dangers, was as cheerful as the day. He had even a rough but quiet humor in him just as he carried his coxswain ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... thou wouldst, and even that thou wouldst not," answered De Marsay, with a laugh. He had recovered his foppish ease, as he took the resolve to let himself go to the climax of his good fortune, looking neither before nor after. Perhaps he counted, moreover, on his power and his capacity of a man used to adventures, to dominate this girl a few hours later and ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... magisterial air, Of solemn aspect, filled the chair; And, with the port of human race, Wore wisdom written on his face. He from the flippant world retired, And in a barn himself admired; And, like an ancient sage, concealed The follies foppish life revealed. He pondered o'er black-lettered pages Of old philosophers and sages— Of Xenophon, and of the feat Of the ten thousand in retreat; Pondered o'er Plutarch and o'er Plato, On Scipio, Socrates, and Cato. But what most roused the ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... back, marking his commas and semicolons with flapping of his elbows, and all but doubling his body at his periods. Mr. Romfrey had enough of it half-way down the column; his head went sharply to left and right. Cecil's peculiar foppish slicing down of his hand pictured him protesting that there was more and finer of the inimitable stuff to follow. The end of the scene exhibited the paper on the turf, and Colonel Halkett's hand on Cecil's shoulder, Mr. Romfrey nodding some sort of acquiescence over the muzzle of his gun, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... humiliation. If he had been an altogether commonplace man—pompous, underbred, ridiculous in any way—the situation would have been a shade less tragic. But he came too near her ideal. This was the kind of man she had dreamed of, and she had accepted in his stead the first frivolous, foppish youth whom chance had presented to her, under a borrowed name. Her own instinct, her own imagination, had told her the kind of man Brian of the Abbey must needs be, and, in her sordid craving for wealth and social status, she had allowed herself to be ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Willis, all natty and jaunty and gay, Who says his best things in so foppish a way, With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o'erlaying 'em, That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying 'em; Over-ornament ruins both poem and prose, Just conceive of a Muse with a ring in her nose! His prose had a natural ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... very spare, middle-aged man, with a slight stoop in his shoulders, with a thin, flushed face, sharp features, weak, blue eyes, and scanty red hair and whiskers, dressed with foppish precision. He looked something like a fool; but as little like the confederate of robbers and murderers as it was ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... asleep in the tent of the Queen, with Thaddeus watching her. After a quaint little chorus ("Silence, silence, the Lady Moon") sung by the gypsies, they depart in quest of plunder, headed by Devilshoof, and soon find their victim in the person of the foppish and half-drunken Florestein, who is returning from a revel. He is speedily relieved of his jewelry, among which is a medallion, which is carried off by Devilshoof. As the gypsies disappear, Arline wakes and relates her dream to Thaddeus in a joyous song ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... the roomy dining-room of the Hotel Metropole at Brighton. Maude and Frank were seated at the favourite small round table near the window, where they always lunched. Their immediate view was a snowy-white tablecloth with a shining centre dish of foppish little cutlets, each with a wisp of ornamental paper, and a surrounding bank of mashed potatoes. Beyond, from the very base of the window, as it seemed, there stretched the huge expanse of the deep blue sea, its soothing ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... ended even then. Other twitchings took him on other parts of the body, and he tore off his armour and his foppish clothes, and always where the bare flesh showed, there had the horrid plague written its white mark; and in the end, being able to endure no more, the man fell to the pavement and lay ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... habitually loud and his accent somewhat foppish, having a little of the "Guardsman" ...
— The Man from Home • Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson
... visitors were present and his master was particularly amiable, was equivalent to an honorable public notice. He took Mr. Belcher's cast-off clothes, and had them reduced in their dimensions for his own wearing, and was thus always able to be nearly as well dressed and foppish as the man for whom they were originally made. He was as insolent to others as he was obsequious to his master—a flunky ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... with wealth and learning. The bourgeoisie wanted power and privilege commensurate with their place in business and administration. It seemed unbearable that a foppish noble whose only claims to respect were a moldy castle and a worm-eaten patent of nobility should everywhere take precedence over men of means and brains. Why should the highest social distinctions, the richest sinecures, and the posts of greatest honor in the army and at court ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... sternly across the table at Miss Sylvia Reynolds, and Miss Sylvia Reynolds looked in a deprecatory manner back at Colonel Reynolds, V.C.; while the dog in question—a foppish pug—happening to meet the colonel's eye in transit, crawled unostentatiously under the sideboard, and began to wrestle with ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... happiness, so delightfully surrounded, face to face with dear old Oscar, so good, so confiding, so much in love with this little cherub in a Louis XV dress, who carried grace and naivete to so strange a pitch, I had been struck by the too well combed and foppish head of the cousin in the white waistcoat. This head had attracted my attention like the stain on the ceiling of which I spoke just now, like the Countess's black tooth, and despite myself I did not take my ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... paint and scent and ear-rings—as foppish attire and fantastical phrases do become an honest lover," said Phoebe, indignantly. "Dost think that Mary Burton prizes these weary labyrinthine sentences—all hay and wool, like the monstrous swelling of trunk hose? Far better can I read in Master Lilly's ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... see our river-terrace on my sister's visiting-day, when De Malfort is lolling on the marble balustrade, singing one of your favourite chansons to the guitar which he touches so exquisitely, and when Hyacinth's fine lady friends and foppish admirers are sitting about in the sunshine! Thou wouldst confess that even Renard's garden ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... the pleasantest and most valuable associations of my after-life, as it included almost the whole society of gifted young men at that time called "Young England." Here I may allude to the extraordinary change I now observed in the manners and morals of Englishmen generally: the foppish love of dress was in a great measure abandoned, and all intellectual pursuits were caught up with avidity, and even ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... knowledge of a people. Moussorgsky was buoyed by the great force of the Russian charity, the Russian humility, the Russian pity. It was that great religious feeling that possessed the man who had been a foppish guardsman content to amuse ladies by strumming them snatches of "Il Trovatore" and "La Traviata" on the piano, and gave him his profound sense of reality, his knowledge of how simple and sad a thing human life is after all, and made ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... clash of interests. Together they faced the fire of jokes and stood off the crowd; Pierre frowning and belligerent, Jean smiling and scornful. Practically, they bossed the camp. They were the only men who always shaved on Sunday morning. This was regarded as foppish. ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... contest between machinery and art in the region of ordinary material consumption, it is not suggested that social progress will, or ought to, expel machinery from most of the industries it controls, or to prevent its application to industries which it has not yet reached. The luxury and foppish refinement of a small section of "fashionable" society, unnaturally relieved of the wholesome necessity of work, cannot be taken as an indication of the ways in which individuality or quality of consumption ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... white vest pattern, or perhaps you would prefer velvet?" queried a foppish little fellow. And Theodore, who was sharper at that style of talk than any of them, and was rapidly losing his embarrassment, replied in a tone of great ...
— Three People • Pansy
... heavy and tired of fun and noise; Leaves dress to the five-and-twenties and love to the silly boys; No foppish tricks at forty, no pinching of waists and toes, But high-low shoes and flannels and good thick ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... make use of copper? I could wish your superiority in the art you profess to be preserved in stuff more durable than canvas." Sir Joshua urged the difficulty of procuring a plate large enough for historical subjects. "What foppish obstacles are these!" exclaims on a sudden Dr. Johnson. "Here is Thrale has a thousand tun of copper; you may paint it all round if you will, I suppose; it will serve him to brew in afterwards. Will it not, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... put on all his good clothes, even to his gray spats. I had to argue a long time to get them on him. He said they looked foppish, but I just got the button-hook and put them on him while he was arguing, and asked him who thought of this picnic anyway! and he just laughed and said he guessed he had ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... he had done for England, how he had stood for her interests in the Commons, and won victories for her in foreign courts, and had penetrated and frustrated the designs of her enemies, gave him a splendid position in the esteem of English patriots. They even looked kindly upon his foibles, his foppish attire, his fondness for the turf, and his frivolous gayety, which shone undaunted when the national gloom was blackest. When he died there was a general belief that England had lost a son who had spared nothing in laboring for her aggrandizement, ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... features were convulsed into a spasm of vindictive hatred, which had set his dead face in a terribly fiendish expression. He had evidently been in his bed when the alarm had broken out, for he wore a foppish, embroidered nightshirt, and his bare feet projected from his trousers. His head was horribly injured, and the whole room bore witness to the savage ferocity of the blow which had struck him down. Beside him lay the heavy poker, bent ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... the extravagantly short-waisted satin coat, wide-lapelled waistcoat, and tight-fitting striped breeches, set off his massive figure to perfection, and in repose one might have admired so fine a specimen of English manhood, until the foppish ways, the affected movements, the perpetual inane laugh, brought one's admiration of Sir Percy ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... accented on the last syllable, when they end with a single consonant, preceded by a single vowel, or by a vowel after qu, double their final letter before a suffix beginning with a vowel: as, rob ed robbed; fop ish foppish; squat er squatter; ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... 15 or 16 year old twin sons have come to stay for the summer holidays in a Cornish fishing village. The two boys are very different. Arthur, or Taff, is very foppish and afraid of getting wet, hurt, or in any way inconvenienced. The other boy, Richard, or Dick, is the exact opposite, always running hither and thither, always wanting to get involved in anything that is going, ready to make friends with all and sundry, while ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... nobles, and had partaken freely and promiscuously in the pleasures and frolics by which they had endeavoured to sweeten adversity. He was led in this way to let distinction and ceremony fall to the ground as useless and foppish, and could not even on premeditation, it is said, act for a moment the part of a King either at parliament or council, either in words or gesture. When he attended the House of Lords, he would descend from the throne ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... was fashionable to despise fashion. It was etiquette to pay no regard to etiquette. The haughty Austrian noble prided himself in dressing as he pleased, and looked with contempt upon the studied attitudes and foppish attire of the French. The Parisian courtier, on the other hand, rejoicing in his ruffles, and ribbons, and practiced movements, despised the boorish manners, as he deemed ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... looking down. His eyes had been attracted by the fancy buckle shoes of Herr Carovius. He was repelled by the man's foppish socks with the yellow stripes which were made more conspicuous by the fact that his trousers were too high. He had a feeling of unmitigated mental nausea, too, when he noticed how Carovius lifted first one foot and then the other ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... her inclination, joined the luncheon-party, where foremost of all to have her little attentions was a rather foppish young stockbroker named Girdlestone, who had been up there shooting the previous year, and had on that occasion flirted with ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... side. This grand personage was followed by an attendant, also mounted upon a mule, while several men on foot accompanied them, one of whom carried his lance and shield. Upon near approach he immediately dismounted and advanced toward us, bowing in a most foppish manner, while his attendant followed him on foot with an enormous violin, which he immediately handed to him. This fiddle was very peculiar in shape, being a square, with an exceedingly long neck extending from ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... hair was of a soft chestnut, and curled slightly at the ends. His lips were thin, and his complexion sallow. His dress, in every article, was of the finest material, but arranged with a decidedly foppish taste; and, somehow or other, his whole appearance reminded one of those large bills, stuck up in depots, with "Beware ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... of which I mean to compose my hobgoblin repast." Later in the same year Lewis came to Edinburgh and was introduced to Scott, who found him an odd contrast to the grewsome horrors of his books, being a cheerful, foppish, round-faced little man, a follower of fashion and an assiduous tuft-hunter. "Mat had queerish eyes," writes his protege: "they projected like those of some insects, and were flattish on the orbit. His person was extremely small and boyish—he ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... in Archie Maine's quarters often told him that he was rather a good-looking young fellow; that is to say, he gave promise of growing into a well-featured, manly youth without any foppish, effeminate, so-called handsomeness. But nature had been very kind to him, and, honestly, he scarcely knew anything about his own appearance; for when he looked in his glass for reasons connected with cleanliness— putting his hair straight, smoothing over his curliness, and playing ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... as she often was when condemnation was called for: and however amusing a companion the dramatist may have been, he was not a man to respect, for he had not only the common vices of his age, but added to them a foppish vanity, toadyism, and fine gentlemanism (to coin a most necessary word), which we scarcely expect to meet with in a man who sets up for ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... shown in such expressions as 'a pretty Romeo of seventeen, that looks as charming as sweet sixteen, gallused up in tight unmentionables,' and in artless confessions that he—J. T. Wiswall—belongs to a class above the snob, but still to one 'whose conversation stalks as on stilts,' and which is foppish, effeminate, and ostentatious. The conclusion is, of course, the worship of 'aristocracy,' a worship of which, as J.T. Wiswall infers from his own shallow reading and flimsy experience, exists 'in every heart.' The wants of the rich, their 'toys and gauds,' 'were ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... stupid man, this pale-eyed clerk who sold the quaint red and yellow cottons of the common people side by side with the heavy linens that furnished forth the tables of the rich. But hatred gave him wits. Gave him speed, too. He was only thirty feet behind Peter Niburg when that foppish gentleman reached the corner. ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... figure of a youthful horseman flashed before the grille. It was Clarence Brant! Mary Rogers had always seen him, in the loyalty of friendship, with Susy's prepossessed eyes, yet she fancied that morning that he had never looked so handsome before. Even the foppish fripperies of his riding-dress and silver trappings seemed as much the natural expression of conquering youth as the invincible morning sunshine. Perhaps it might have been a reaction against Susy's caprice or some latent susceptibility of her own; ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... a wrong impression about her," Priscilla said, speaking with a slight effort. "It is only the idle, foppish men about town she ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... brother, had formed Joe's acquaintance earlier than Mabel and in a less pleasant way. He was a rather foppish young man who cultivated a mustache that the girls called "darling," and affected what he fondly believed to be an ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... and gloomily surveyed the conviviality on board the plaything crafts. Remarks which they exchanged with one another were framed to indicate a sort of lofty scorn for these frolickers of the sea. The coasting skippers, most of whom wore hard hats, as if they did not want to be confounded with those foppish yacht captains, patrolled their quarter-decks and spat disdainfully over ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... Rome, a decisive change takes place. The Christs have been taking on various different characters, all of them more or less realistically conveyed. One Christus is very elegant, combed and brushed and foppish on his cross, as Gabriele D'Annunzio's son posing as a martyred saint. The martyrdom of this Christ is according to the most polite convention. The elegance is very important, and very Austrian. One might almost imagine the young man had taken up this striking ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... this monstrous matricide taking pleasure in the smaller elegancies of life. From first to last he was the stern and beetle-browed marauder, who would have despised the frippery of Sixteen-String Jack as vehemently as his sudden appearance would have frightened the foppish ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... must have worth," said the Judge, "from the recommendation of my friend B. This vanity, and these foppish habits of his, we shall soon know how to get rid of; the man himself is unquestionably good; and, dear Elise, be kind to him, and manage so that he shall ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... hand, treated the officers and men under his command with a species of haughtiness and disdain. He seemed to regard them as very far beneath him, and to take pleasure in making them feel his vast superiority. He was vain and foppish in his dress, expended great sums in the adornment of his person, decorating his robes and vestments, and even his shoes, with gold and precious stones. In fact, he caused the manufacture of a garment to be commenced which he intended should outvie ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... commercial caution steered him wide of the moral women in his employ, but the other kind, and especially the innocent or the inexperienced, had cause to know and to fear him. In appearance he was slender and foppish; he affected a pronounced waist-line in his coats, his eyes were large and dark and brilliant, his mouth was sensual. He never raised his voice, he never appeared to see plain women; such girls as accepted his attentions ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... rigour for once in his foppish life, and descended, after night had fallen, to a tavern in a poor street behind the Duomo, hoping that there, among the dregs of wine, he might find ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... was staring at him with the grave stare of a baby, was haunted by some fancy that escaped definition. He looked at the grey, carefully curled hair, yellow white visage, and slim, somewhat foppish figure. These were not unnatural, though perhaps a shade prononce, like the outfit of a figure behind the footlights. The nameless interest lay in something else, in the very framework of the face; Brown ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... flushed a poppy red and his white hand went to his sword hilt. There was courage in the foppish substance, and he would clearly have rejoiced to try his chance ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... said to have been a very foppish Cockney, was perfectly right in what he said, and therein manifested a knowledge of the English mind and character, and likewise of the modern English language, to which his catechist, who, it seems, was a distinguished member of the Scottish bar, could lay no pretensions. The ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... trombones proclaimed, in unconquerable tones, Tannhaeuser's abjuration of sensual life, and at that moment the tall, spare figure of Mr. Hermann Goetze, the manager, appeared in the doorway leading to the stalls. He was with his apparitor and satellite, Mr. Wheeler, a foppish little man, who seemed pleased at being in confidential conversation with his great chief. Catching sight of Evelyn in the box just above his eyes, he smiled and bowed obsequiously. A sudden thought seemed to strike him, and Evelyn said to herself, "He's coming to talk with me about the Brangaene. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... ornamental fringe to their gaudy religion, and Rome is the general storeshop of Europe. The arts owe much to Popery, and Popery owes much of its universality to the arts. The French have attained to a sort of foppish magnificence in art; in Holland, selfishness is the ruling passion, and in England vanity is united with selfishness. Portrait-painting, therefore, has succeeded, and ever will succeed better in England than in any other country, ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... the waste of money; but it vexed me to think that he was imposing on my husband, taking advantage of friendship. His bearing was not that of an ascetic, nor even of a person of moderate means, but foppish all over. Love of comfort seemed to ... any number of such reflections come back to me today, ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... places was touched with frost. Already had the snow begun to fall and the branches of the trees were covered with rime like rabbit-skin. Already on frosty days the robin redbreast hopped about on the snow-heaps like a foppish Polish nobleman, and picked out grains of corn; and children, with huge sticks, played hockey upon the ice; while their fathers lay quietly on the stove, issuing forth at intervals with lighted pipes in their lips, to growl, in regular fashion, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... 's so foppish that he will have them made tight enough to display the goodness of his thighs," rejoined Gibbs, who, being dry, was enjoying the plight of the rest. "Make yourselves smart, gentlemen, there are ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... above control, should think that no censure is to attend them when dead, it would be new encouragement to them to play the fool and act the tyrant. When they are so kind as to specify their crimes under their own hands, it would be foppish delicacy indeed to suppress them. I hope you will proceed, Sir, and with the same impartiality. It was justice due to Charles to publish the extravagancies of his enemies too. The comparison can never be fairly made, but when we see the evidence on both sides. I have done so in the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... top. Besides there was so much dirt on his face that you would never have known him. An old tattered cloak over his hunter's garb completed his make-up. The others were no less ragged and unkempt, even the foppish Will Scarlet being so badly run down at the heel that the court ladies would hardly have ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... with thoughts of him and his love. Whereas, my Alfred's adoring platitudes would disgust me with the sunset, with the world, and with myself, for permitting him to haunt my presence and hang upon my smile—foppish barnacle that he is! If you knew how I ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... satisfied with the success of our experiment, Mr. Medlin," Mr. Bale said, next day. "Bob has turned out exactly what I hoped he would—a fine young fellow, and a gentleman. He has excellent manners, and yet there is nothing foppish, or affected ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... was a Roman Catholic, none the less earnest because he had a merry way with him. On a certain Friday he was seen to be fasting by a very foppish barrister, who thought a great ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... gracefully flourished his lace handkerchief. He was accustomed to being appealed to in all matters pertaining to etiquette, to the toilet, to the latest cut in coats, and the procedure in duels. Good-natured, foppish, and idle, he felt quite happy and in his element thus to be made chief organiser of the tragic farce, about to be enacted on the parquet ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... self-conscious; maniere; artificial; overwrought, overdone, overacted; euphuist &c 577. stiff, starch, formal, prim, smug, demure, tire a quatre epingles, quakerish, puritanical, prudish, pragmatical, priggish, conceited, coxcomical, foppish, dandified; finical, finikin; mincing, simpering, namby-pamby, sentimental. Phr. conceit in weakest ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Montfanon heard the young man utter a similar phrase and in such an accent. The image returned to him, by way of contrast, of Dorsenne, alert and foppish, the dandy of literature, so gayly a scoffer and a sophist, to whom antique and venerable Rome was only a city of pleasure, a cosmopolis more paradoxical than Florence, Nice, Biarritz, St. Moritz, than such and such other cities of international winter and summer. ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... of us that were gathered under Messer Folco's roof were habited in our best bravery of velvets and soft stuffs and furs and such gold trinkets and jewels as it were in our power to display, and so looked very frivolous and foppish and at ease, Messer Simone dei Bardi came among us clad as a soldier-citizen of a great Republic should be clad in time of danger to his nation. His huge bulk was built about in steel, a great sword swung ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... should sometimes be employed to hide a defect, and sometimes to heighten a beauty; but never to conceal, much less to distort, the charms to which they are subsidiary. The love of Petrarch, on the contrary, arrays itself like a foppish savage, whose nose is bored with a golden ring, whose skin is painted with grotesque forms and dazzling colours, and whose ears are drawn down his shoulders by the weight of jewels. It is a rule, without any exception, in all kinds of composition, that the principal ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... foppish air. He recognised that Vane, poverty stricken scribbler though he might be, was a gentleman. He bowed and turned towards the man who, with Jarvis, had interposed in the early stages of the altercation. This man was Rofflash. He had dragged ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... not their censure that pretend it is foppish and affected for any person to praise himself: yet let it be as silly as they please, if they will but allow it needful: and indeed what is more befitting than that Folly should be the trumpet of her own praise, ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... every time had seemed to be repelled by her commanding look, or else by the enigmatical smile of her husband. Finally, however, proudly conquering all diffidence, he boldly faced both, and with foppish confidence made, in a tenderly gallant tone, the following speech: "Senora!—list to me!—I swear—by the roses of both the kingdoms of Castile, by the Aragonese hyacinths and the pomegranate blossoms of Andalusia! by the sun which illumines all Spain, with its flowers, onions, pea-soups, forests, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... glaciers; had vast provinces of snow-drifts, and many flourishing colonies among the floating icebergs. Absolute in his rule as Predestination in metaphysics, did he command all his people to give up the ghost, it would be held treason to die last. Very precise and foppish in his imperial tastes was this monarch. Disgusted with the want of uniformity in the stature of his subjects, he was said to nourish thoughts of killing off all those below his prescribed standard—six feet, long measure. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... affected towards us, the greater will be our self-exaltation," No, she had never given him cause for self-exaltation, though occasionally it seemed as if she preferred his talk to that of even the high-born, foppish youths sent by their sires to sit at ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... whisper that "my uncle had come." I dressed rapidly, and, washing after a fashion, flew out of my bedroom without saying my prayers. In the vestibule I came upon a tall, solid gentleman with fashionable whiskers and a foppish-looking overcoat. Half dead with devout awe, I went up to him and, remembering the ceremonial mother had impressed upon me, I scraped my foot before him, made a very low bow, and craned forward to ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... with Bergami whiskers, red vest, and foppish manners, was replaced by a sinister-looking individual, whose very appearance was enough ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... language of a larger world from which she had been excluded. To this world belonged the beautiful limbs she gazed on,—a very different world from that which had produced the rheumatic deformities and useless mayhem of her husband, or the provincially foppish garments of the deputy. Sitting in the hayloft together, where she had mounted for greater security, they forgot themselves in his monologue of cheap vaporing, broken only by her assenting smiles and her half-checked sighs. ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Sighs, Crying, nor Prayers, Their subtile Whinings, nor Treacherous Tears, That shall one kind Return for ever gain, But when t' oblige us they've done all they can, We'll laugh, deride, and scorn the Foppish Sex, And wrank Invention for new ways to vex, Till they to shun us, prompted by Despair, Or Drown themselves, or ...
— The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses From Women • Various
... sent for M. Camille Penurot on the following morning, he found a striking alteration in him. That foppish gentleman no longer showed the dejection of the day before, his dark eyes were bright and full of confidence. By daylight, Heideck saw that his captive was a good-looking man about thirty years of age, more like a Spaniard ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... being a pretty fellow, wears corsets to diminish his bulk, uses cosmetics, as he told Mrs. Gore, to smooth and soften a skin growing somewhat wrinkled and rigid with age, dresses in a style which would be thought foppish in a much younger man. You must imagine such a man standing before the gravest tribunal in the land, and engaged in causes of the deepest moment; but still apparently thinking how he can declaim like a practised rhetorician in the London Cockpit, which he used to frequent. Yet you must, at the ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... have pursued him into my warren, that is, my cellar, my enclosed cellar, where you had no business to be. And the Court told Ralph no matter 'que le feisant leva hors de le garrein, vostre faucon luy pursuy en le garrein.' So there's good sound English law, and none of your foppish outlandishries in Latin," finished the Baron, vastly delighted at being able to display the little learning that he had. For you see, very few gentlemen in those benighted days knew how to speak the beautiful language of the ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... pleasure as a grisette takes in a melodrama where innocence and virtue triumph. Charles, brought up by a charming mother, improved, and trained by a woman of fashion, had the elegant, dainty, foppish movements of a coxcomb. The compassionate sympathy and tenderness of a young girl possess a power that is actually magnetic; so that Charles, finding himself the object of the attentions of his aunt and cousin, could not escape the influence ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... Captain, halting his company and riding forward. He was a thin and foppish young gentleman in a flaxen wig, and spoke with a high sense of authority, having but recently sacrificed the pleasures of his coffee-house and a fine view of St. James's Park to seek even in the cannon's mouth a bubble reputation that ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... A foppish physician once reminded Johnson of his having been in company with him on a former occasion; 'I do not remember it, Sir.' The physician still insisted; adding that he that day wore so fine a coat that it ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... one of those sceptics who are often met with in the world. A man of weak mind, pretentious and foppish, incapable of thinking and reflecting for himself, ignorant into the bargain, and without any kind of knowledge upon any subject, he meets his hapless father with all sorts of difficulties against morality, religion and Christianity in particular, ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... him from the start. The fellow was almost foppish;—could anybody who wore such good clothes have also good motives and good principles? Abner disdained him too as a public speaker;—what could a man hope to accomplish by a few quiet colloquial remarks delivered in his ordinary voice? The man who expected to get attention should claim it by the ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... was engrossed in its contents for nearly an hour, and when he had finished he replaced it in his pocket. Then he sauntered to the telegrapher's station in the corner of the hotel office and wrote upon a blank with swift decision a telegram which seemed a trifle at variance with the almost foppish elegance of ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... travelling expenses." All the while he drew me out on literature. On the Long Island Sound steamer he bade me notice a young gentleman (whom I was destined to know in after years), a man with curly hair and very foppish air, accompanied by a page "in an eruption of buttons," and told me that it was N. P. Willis. And so revelling in romance and travel, with mince-pie and turkey for my daily food, my pocket stuffed with money, in the most refined and elegant literary society (at least it was there on deck), ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... horses, there was nothing about the appearance of Mr. Plaisted to suggest the jockey: he was what would have been termed in a later day a fair specimen of the genus dude. He was of medium height, and was decidedly foppish in his manner, and with his elaborate neck-ties and perfumed curls, he was, in his own estimation at least, quite irresistible. His hands and feet were unusually small for a man. The latter he was very proud of, always encasing them in ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... the prince will admit into it no editions but what are beautiful and pleasing to the eye, and there are, nevertheless, numbers of excellent books that are but indifferently printed, this finikin (sic) and foppish taste makes many disagreeable chasms in this collection. The books are pompously bound in Turkey leather; and two of the most famous book-binders of Paris were expressly sent for to do this work. Bonneval pleasantly told me, that there were ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics. Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, barroom, official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity—everywhere the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe—everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon'd, muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood decreasing or deceas'd, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or rather ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... lambkins! bound, And frisk and frolic o'er the fairy ground. Secure, for me, thou pretty little fawn! 180 Lick Sylvia's hand, and crop the flowery lawn; Uncensured let the gentle breezes rove Through the green umbrage of the enchanted grove: Secure, for me, let foppish Nature smile, And play the coxcomb in the 'Desert Isle.' The stage I chose—a subject fair and free— 'Tis yours—'tis mine—'tis public property. All common exhibitions open lie, For praise or censure, to the common eye. Hence are a thousand hackney writers fed; 190 Hence ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... Mademoiselle de Chevreuse saying in his presence, to please me and to sting him, that she could not imagine how it was possible to bear a silly fellow, "Pardon me, mademoiselle," replied I, "we suffer fops sometimes very patiently for the sake of their extravagances." This man was notoriously foppish and extravagant. My answer pleased, and we soon got rid of him at the Palace of Chevreuse. But he thought to have despatched me, for he hired one Grandmaison, a ruffian, to assassinate me, who apprised ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... an eccentric Irish clergyman, who diverted himself by weaving romances and constructing tragedies. He loved to mingle with the gay and frivolous; he affected foppish attire, and prided himself on his exceptional skill in dancing. His indulgence in literary work was probably but another expression of his longing to escape from the strait and narrow way prescribed for a Protestant clergyman. Wild anecdotes are told of his idiosyncrasies.[58] ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... month after we began our intimacy with this "government boarding-house" that our number was increased by a gentleman of cultivated manners and foppish costume. He was, perhaps, a little too much over-dressed with chains, trinkets, and perfumed locks, to be perfectly comme il faut, yet there was an intellectual power about his forehead and eyes, and a bewitching smile on his lips, that insinuated themselves into my heart the moment ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... answered, and declined with coldness the chair which he pushed forward. At another time his foppish dress might have moved her to smiles, or his feebleness and vapid oaths to pity. This morning she needed her pity for herself, and was in no smiling mood. Her world had crashed around her; she would sit and weep among the ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... discovered that this precious gossiping young man, with his rings and ribbons, was no other than a government spy, on the look-out for malcontents. Certainly his disguise was good, for I never should have imagined it from his foppish exterior ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... stood up, booted and ready to descend, there came a gentle tap at my door, and, in answer to my "Enter," there stood before me a very dainty and foppish figure. I stared hard at the effeminate face and the long fair locks of my visitor, thinking that I had become ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... Behind the slight, foppish figure, the eye of his mind saw suddenly—not the sunlight and colour of Jaipur, but a stretch of grey-green sea, tawny cliffs, and sandy shore ... St Rupert's! Of course, unmistakable: the sullen ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the box, and directions where to find the other pistol in a tree in St. James's Park, which Lord Bolingbroke's messenger found accordingly; but who sent the present is not yet known. The Duke of Hamilton avoided the quarrel as much as possible, according to the foppish rules of honour in practice. What signified your writing angry to Filby? I hope you said nothing of hearing anything from me. Heigh! do oo write by sandlelight! nauti, nauti, nauti dallar, a hundred times, fol doing so. O, fais, ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... wore a ring with a star-sapphire, which made him incongruous, showy and foppish, and that was a thing not easy of forgiveness in the West. Certainly the West would not have tolerated him as far as it did, had it not been for three things: the extraordinary good nature which made him giggle; the fact that on more ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... opinion, from the position of the lips and tongue, that it was modelled from a cast taken after death. It is a beefy, commonplace countenance, heavy, dull, and vacant, rendered trivial and conceited by foppish mustaches curled up beneath the nostrils. It bears little resemblance to the familiar Droeshout portrait engraved for the first edition of the plays, and still less to the so-called Stratford portrait exhibited ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... ignominy a true patriot must bear because he dares to defy his poor country's oppressors." Here Fra Diavolo scowled; he was getting into form. "But to His Majesty in our own Mexican capital, to His Glorious Resplendent Most Christian, Most Catholic, priest-ridden, bloodthirsty, foppish, imbecile decree-making fool of a canting majesty—to this Austrian archduke who drove forth the incarnation of popular sovereignty by the brutal hand of the foreign invader—to him I will yet make it known that the love of liberty, that the loyalty to Liberal Reforms, to the Constitution, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... he said, smiling, with his delightfully foppish air, "it always charms me to meet you, for you are always sparkling, brilliant, full of wit; which reminds me of the good old days with Stuart! You have only one fault, my boy, you think yourself a philosopher. Don't do that, I beg, Surry!—But ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... but slight exercise of fancy to see inside the stuffy little theatre of Bath, on that memorable summer afternoon, when "Sir Courtly Nice"[A] is produced, with Cibber in the foppish title-role and the fair unknown as Leonora, "Belguard's sister, in love with Farewell." Her fat, peaceful, and phlegmatic Majesty, Anne Stuart, is in the royal box, perhaps (although she is far from being a playgoer), and with her retinue may be seen her dearest ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... image by means of a cast from the face itself, did they get the true portrait in place of their previous efforts to secure generalised beauty.[18] In fact, their canon was so stringent that it would permit an Apollo Belvedere to be presented by foppish, well-groomed adolescence, with plenty of vanity but with little strength, and altogether without the sign-manual of godhead or victory. Despite shortcomings, Donatello seldom made the mistake of merging the subject ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... a chair and lowered himself into it. Evidently, the foppish Balt Haer had no illusions about the spot his father had got the family corporation into. And the younger man ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... bearing a harp, and beside him a richly dressed officer who bore rolls of music. This strange creature took the harp from the hands of the attendant, and advanced to the front of the stage, whence he bowed and smiled to the cheering audience." This is some foppish singer from Athens," thought Policles to himself, but at the same time he understood that only a great master of song could receive such a reception from a Greek audience. This was evidently some wonderful performer whose reputation had preceded him. Policles settled ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... letter in the street, it would be in the newspaper next day, and nobody would think its publication an outrage. The editor objected to my hair, as not curling sufficiently. He admitted an eye; but objected again to dress, as being somewhat foppish, 'and indeed perhaps rather flash.' 'But such,' he benevolently adds, 'are the differences between American and English taste—rendered more apparent, perhaps, by all the other gentlemen present being dressed ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... mother, think of all the sorrow that might come to them from such a letter as yours addressed to a poet of whom you know nothing personally. All writers are not angels; they have many defects. Some are frivolous, heedless, foppish, ambitious, dissipated; and, believe me, no matter how imposing innocence may be, how chivalrous a poet is, you will meet with many a degenerate troubadour in Paris ready to cultivate your affection only to betray it. By such a man your letter would be interpreted otherwise than ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... sought his acquaintance the very first week of the term,—that rather foppish young man who got off the cars at Hillsborough the day of their first coming. He was from Buffalo, and, although twenty-two years of age, was preparing to enter college. His tales of the big city and his frank good-fellowship made him ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... waxwings most readily acquired this delightful Southern habit of taking life easy. In fact the waxwings are inclined to be lazy, except when they are nesting; they are the most deliberate creatures one can find, but very foppish and neat in their dress. Never will you find a particle of dust on their silky plumage, and the pretty red dots on their wings and tails look always as bright as if kept in a bandbox. They have, indeed, just reason to be ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... shining eye, and at his cautious way of carrying on the conversation, and making himself informed upon the subject; 'but I know she does. She was very young when she made the engagement - if it may be called one, I am not even sure of that - and has repented of it, perhaps. Perhaps - it seems a foppish thing to say, but upon my soul I don't mean it in that light - she may have fallen in love with me, as I have fallen in love ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... a man,—a true, honest, brave, noble man,—not that perfumed, unprincipled, vain, foppish automaton, who adorns a corner of the diplomatic apartment where attaches of the American embassy 'most do congregate'! Gerard Granville is unworthy of any woman's affection, for maugre the indisputable fact that he is betrothed to a fond, trusting girl, now in the United States, he had ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... here, after I'd been on the ranch only a month." It was the same young woman in the not too foppish garb of a cowboy. In wide-brimmed hat, flannel shirt, woolly chaps, quirt in hand, she bestrode a horse that ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... "Don't tell our foppish friend below, or he'll rend our ears with his howls. But you, my young friend, it's rather rough on you. ...
— Facing the World • Horatio Alger
... duly swarm prodigious wights, And strange variety of sights, As ladies lewd, and foppish knights, Priests, poets, pimps, and parasites; Which now we'll spare, and only mention The hungry bard that writes for pension; Old Squib (who's sometimes here, I'm told), That oft has with his prince made bold, Called the late king a saunt'ring cully, To magnify the ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... course, are generalisations. These are the mere translation of the social facts we have hypotheticated into the language of costume. There will be a great variety of costume and no compulsions. The doubles of people who are naturally foppish on earth will be foppish in Utopia, and people who have no natural taste on earth will have inartistic equivalents. Everyone will not be quiet in tone, or harmonious, or beautiful. Occasionally, as I go through the streets to my work, I shall turn round to glance again at some ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... wagons on to the rendezvous before crack of day. Of the two, young Woodhull, planter and man of means, mentioned by Molly's mother as open suitor, himself at first sight had not seemed so ill a figure, either. Tall, sinewy, well clad for the place and day, even more foppish than Banion in boot and glove, he would have passed well among the damsels of any courthouse day. The saddle and bridle of his mount also were a trace to the elegant, and the horse itself, a classy chestnut that showed Blue ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... Thaddeus had left the hall with Devilshoof on the day of Arline's arrest, and she had not seen him since. Gorgeously dressed in a ball gown, she was in a beautiful room in her father's house. Her father entered with Florestein and begged her to think kindly of her silly foppish cousin. ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... intellectual, and determined; his expression kindly and compassionate. The razor never touches his face, but his brown beard is always neatly trimmed, for the young Commandant-General is particular in regard to his personal appearance in a manly way, though in no respect foppish. He is now, and always has been, an excellent athlete, a good rifle shot, and a first-class horseman; not given at any time to indoor pastimes over much, though fond of a quiet game of whist. He was born in Natal, of Dutch parents, and married ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... reported to Colonel Gray for duty he appeared the ideal soldier. Tall, erect, handsome, he was an expert and graceful horseman. He rode a superb and spirited bay charger which took fences and ditches like a deer. Though not foppish, he was scrupulous to a degree about his dress. His clothes fitted, and not a speck of dust could be found on his person, his horse, or his equipments. The details of drill fell largely to him—Colonel Gray attending to the general executive management. ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... these children all this enormous labor to shrink at her journey's end from the slight additional labor of going to the polls to vote whether those little ones shall have schools or rumshops? The thought is an absurdity. A few fine ladies in cities will fear to spoil their silk dresses, as a few foppish gentlemen now fear for their broadcloth. But the mass of intelligent American women will vote, as do ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... true friends of men. The Spartan, surely, would not think that he received only his body from his mother. The sage, had he lived in that community, could not have thought the souls of "vain and foppish men will be degraded after death to the forms of women; and, if they do not then make great efforts to retrieve ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... shame me before Sir Percy," murmured the young girl, casting shy glances at the elegant cavalier before her, vainly trying to find in the indolent, foppish personality of this society butterfly, some trace of the daring man of action, the bold adventurer who had snatched her and her lover from out the very tumbril that bore them both ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... to make himself heavy and calm in his chair, and to keep his eyes expressionless. Graff stalked in—a man of thirty-five, dapper, eye-glassed, with a foppish mustache. ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... fashion, he eyed the washstand, feeling a strong inclination to go and wash his hands with a certain powder soap which he saw in a glass jar. Like all lazy fellows who live upon their wives or children, he had foppish tastes. Although he wore patched trousers, he liked to inundate himself with aromatic oil. He spent hours with his barber, who talked politics, and brushed his hair for him between their discussions. So, at last, the temptation became ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... in your hands," Hector said. "I wish for a handsome dress, and yet one which shall in no way be foppish, but shall be suitable to my station. I am Baron de la Villar, colonel of ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... she can't have too much money. There's twelve thousand pound, Tom. 'Tis true she is excessively foppish and affected; but in my conscience I believe the baggage loves me: for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers anybody else to rail at me. Then, as I told you, there's twelve thousand pound. Hum! Why, faith, upon second thoughts, she does not appear ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... once to strike the eye of any one entering through the Porta del Popolo, and there dwells perhaps the most whimsical oddity in all Rome,—an old bachelor with every fault that belongs to that class of persons—avaricious, vain, anxious to appear young, amorous, foppish. He is tall, as thin as a switch, wears a gay Spanish costume, a sandy wig, a conical hat, leather gauntlets, ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... contrast otherwise, however, the two presented. The man next the aisle was well past sixty, rotund of abdomen, rubicund of countenance, beetle-browed. He was elaborately well-groomed, almost foppish in attire, and wore the obvious stamp of worldly success, the air of one accustomed to giving orders and seeing them obeyed ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... By these enactments, foppish modes of dressing the hair was discountenanced or forbidden, not less than the use of gaudy clothes and bright arms. Some of these regulations have a quaint air to readers of this generation; and as indications of manners in past ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson |
