"Coxcombry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the evening. In short, one does not meet with that abandon in society that is to be met with in Paris; you must measure your words well to shine in a Genevese society. This, however, is a very pardonable sort of coxcombry; and tho' it appear sometimes pedantic, and occasionally laughable, yet it tends to encourage learning and science, and compels the young men to read in order to shine ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... to our situation with marvellous good grace," I managed to say at last, in a tone which made no attempt to conceal my disgust at his coxcombry. "For myself I can see very ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... are discussed with a delicacy of insight which would do credit to a Chesterfield of the present century, sending forth his son into society for the first time. Castiglione goes so far as to condemn the pedantry of far-fetched words and the coxcombry of elaborate costumes, as dangerous forms of affectation. His courtier must speak and write with force and freedom. He need not be a purist in his use of language, but may use such foreign phrases and modern ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole plum cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough, I met a venerable old man, not a mendicant, but thereabouts,—a look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught-charity, I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt's kindness crossed me,—the sum it was to her; the pleasure she had a right to expect that I—not the old ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... 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, actor; pedant, pedagogue, doctrinaire, purist, euphuist, mannerist; grimacier; lump of affectation, precieuse ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... dashing of some distant waterfall—while on every side the eye is arrested by images of grandeur, which dispose the heart to benevolence, towards man, and the soul to adoration towards the Creator. Here is to be heard, neither the impertinent coxcombry, of the European self styled exclusive, nor the unmeaning twaddle of the daughter of false fashion, spoiled by the example of the said exclusive, and almost become a dowager in silliness, before she has attained the first years of ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... oldest of the titled and untitled aristocracy, even though his father were an eminent retired dust contractor, and his mother laundry maid or factory girl. But money alone won't do it, and the pretension, the display, the coxcombry permitted in a peer, must be carefully avoided by a parvenu. Thus Oxford interests classes who care very little for its educational, antiquarian, or architectural resources, as one of the institutions of the country by which any capable man may cut off his plebeian ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... Valmont—superior to scruple, destined and able to get the better of man or woman as he chooses. Unfortunately he has also endeavoured to make him a gentleman; and the compound, as the chemists say, is not "stable." The coxcombry of Lovelace and the priggishness, reversed (though in a less detestable form), of Valmont, are the elements that chiefly remain in evidence, unsupported by the vigorous will of either. I have myself always thought La Petite Comtesse and Julia de Trecoeur ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... us in their own solitude. If ever you felt or found this in a London Street,—if ever it furnished you with one serious thought, or one ray of true and gentle pleasure,—if there is in your heart a true delight in its grim railings and dark casements, and wasteful finery of shops, and feeble coxcombry of club-houses,—it is well: promote the building of more like them. But if they never taught you anything, and never made you happier as you passed beneath them, do not think they have any mysterious goodness nor occult sublimity. Have done with the wretched affectation, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... cut in alabaster, or, perhaps better, struck upon a coin. Every lock and line of the hair has been grouped as it is on a Greek die; and if this not always without some loss of ease and of action, yet this very loss is ennobling, in a period when all is generally sacrificed to the great coxcombry of art, the ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... complaining bitterly of 'the extraordinary concourse of unruly people who robbed him, and treated with savage rudeness his extraordinary services.' Something of a visionary, too, was Sir Balthazar;—yet, with all his vanity as to his own merits—his coxcombry about his proceedings,—a sort of reformer and benefactor also in a small way. At one time we find him advertising that, besides lecturing gratis, he will lend from one shilling to six, gratis, 'to such as are in extreme need, and have ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... families of the old peninsula—his grand-uncle the staff-officer of Washington, and messenger from Yorktown to Congress with the news, "Cornwallis has fallen;" but it was his chivalric sense, and not his piety, which immediately dispelled the last touch of coxcombry, when he felt that ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... before he could answer, one of the loungers, as the group recovered from the gay laugh which their companion's easy coxcombry had excited, said,— ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which has time enough on its hands to make a business of amusement. The euphuism and allied affectations of the earlier generation had a certain grace, as the external clothing of a serious chivalrous sentiment; but it is rapidly passing into a silly coxcombry to be crushed by Puritanism or snuffed out by the worldly cynicism of the new generation. Shakespeare's Henry or Romeo may indulge in wild freaks or abandon themselves to the intense passions of vigorous youth; but they will settle down into good statesmen ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... amusingly exhibited in Costard; whilst examples suited only to the gravest propositions and impersonations, or apostrophes to abstract thoughts impersonated, which are in fact the natural language only of the most vehement agitations of the mind, are adopted by the coxcombry of Armado ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... or found this in a London street; if ever it furnished you with one serious thought, or any ray of true and gentle pleasure; if there is in your heart a true delight in its green railings, and dark casements, and wasteful finery of shops, and feeble coxcombry of club-houses, it is well; promote the building of more like them. But if they never taught you any thing, and never made you happier as you passed beneath them, do not think they have any mysterious goodness of occult sublimity. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... for a moment: then his thorough coxcombry resumed its sway. "You see," said he, with a consummate air of reserve, "you know nothing about the affair at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... street when one entered the gate of the yard, whose appearance exclusively arrested the attention of Roland Graeme. He was of his own age, or a good deal younger, and from his dress and bearing might be of the same rank and calling, having all the air of coxcombry and pretension, which accorded with a handsome, though slight and low figure, and an elegant dress, in part hid by a large purple cloak. As he entered, he cast a glance up towards the windows, and, to his extreme astonishment, under the purple ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... carefully shun the affectation of bombastic diction—it is lamentable to see a preelucidated theme rendered semidiaphonous, by the elimination of simple expression, to make room for the conglomeration of pondrous periods, and to exhibit the phonocamptic coxcombry of some pedant, who mistakes sentences for wagons, and words for the wheels ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... to him; he not only yielded respect to all, but required it towards himself, and really commanded it by his striking propriety of manner. He was, as a dear friend once remarked, a "God-made" gentleman, untainted with the slightest approach to any thing like affectation or coxcombry: indeed he ridiculed the latter with much comic effect: and the words "Dandy Jack," would put him out of conceit with any article of apparel that drew forth the remark. He would answer the taunt with a face of grave rebuke, saying, "Bad Mam, bold Mam; ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... of conversation in all polite circles, and did much to improve the taste and reform the morals of the age. There was nothing which he so severely ridiculed as the show of learning without the reality, coxcombry in conversation, extravagance in dress, female flirts and butterflies, gay and fashionable women, and all false modesty and affectation. But he blamed without bitterness, and reformed without exhortation, while he exalted what was simple, and painted in most beautiful ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... certainly in order to make one's self appear sleepy in company, or occasionally to induce sleep, nothing could be more efficacious than a slight prelection of his poems. So poor Byron, with his fire and emotion—to say nothing of his mouthings and coxcombry—was dethroned, as I prophesied he would be more than twenty years before, on the day of his funeral, though I had little idea that his humiliation would have been brought about by one, whose sole strength consists in setting people to sleep. Well, all things ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... please take notice that I have said nothing of the sort," Briscoe stiffly rejoined. "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 ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock |
