"Coxcomb" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... coxcomb, denotes a low state of mind. The dreamer should endeavor to elevate his mind ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... Mr Stuart Reid's book on Lord Durham, the same Athenaeum (November 3, 1906) observed: 'Mr Reid conclusively disposes of Brougham's malignant slander that the matter of Lord Durham's report on Canada came from a felon (Wakefield) and the style from a coxcomb (Buller). The latter, in his account of the mission, frequently alludes to the report, but not a single phrase hints ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... curious legend which credits Buller with the authorship is traceable to Brougham's spite. Macaulay and Brougham met in a London street. The great Whig historian praised the Report. Brougham belittled it. 'The matter,' he averred, 'came from a felon, the style from a coxcomb, and the Dictator furnished only six letters, D-u-r-h-a-m.' The whole question has been carefully discussed by Stuart J. Reid in his Life and Letters of the First Earl of Durham, and the myth has been given its quietus. Even if direct external evidence were lacking, a ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... archdeacon; 'you never thought yourself old till you listened to the impudent trash of that coxcomb ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... of little import what censure is passed upon a coxcomb who owes his present existence to the above burlesque character given to him by the poet, whose amber has preserved many other grubs and worms: but to classify Boccaccio with such a person, and to excommunicate his very ashes, must of itself ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... the most effeminate futilities. He chose to lay aside his hat and wear a scarlet fez of her embroidering; but by superficial observers this was necessarily liable to be interpreted less as a compliment to Lucy than as a mark of coxcombry. "Guest is a great coxcomb," young Torry observed; "but then he is a privileged person in St. Ogg's—he carries all before him; if another fellow did such things, everybody would say he made ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... tired. So he dined In his own rooms that night. With an unquiet eye He watched his companion depart; nor knew why, Beyond all accountable reason or measure, He felt in his breast such a sovran displeasure. "The fellow's good looking," he murmur'd at last, "And yet not a coxcomb." Some ghost of the past Vex'd him still. "If he love her," he thought, "let him win her." Then he turn'd to the ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... went away dreadfully mortified. The unbeliever paid the bet, but he was deeply vexed, called the other a coxcomb, and a week afterwards killed him ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... would by that means be in better exercise and breath. Do but observe him when he comes back from school, after fifteen or sixteen years that he has been there; there is nothing so unfit for employment; all you shall find he has got, is, that his Latin and Greek have only made him a greater coxcomb than when he went from home. He should bring back his soul replete with good literature, and he brings it only swelled and puffed up with vain and empty shreds and patches of learning; and has really nothing more in him than he ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... I care a straw whether the old place was bought by Tom, Dick, or Harry, but I can't stand his having concealed the fact from me after so much, I may say, confidential conversation about it and our affairs generally. When I meet him again the young coxcomb shall have ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... dissipated, Ursula was angry with herself for having been so foolish, and naturally angry with Clarence for having led her into it, though he was quite without blame in the matter. She looked at him in his corner—he had taken the best corner, without consulting her inclinations—and thought him a vulgar coxcomb, which perhaps he was. But she would not have been so indignant except for that little bit of injured feeling, for which really, after all, he was not ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... of the plumed director to the ambassador of Cappadocia. The imperial ambassador was not in waiting, but they found for Austria a good Judean representation. With great judgment his highness the Grand Duke had sent the most atheistic coxcomb to be found in Florence to represent, at the bar of impiety, the house of apostolic majesty, and the descendants of the pious, though high-minded, Maria Theresa. He was sent to humble the whole race of Austria before those grim assassins, reeking with the blood of the daughter ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... mingled power and pathos, words burning with the unconsuming fire of genius, virtues gathering in ripened beauty upon a brave heart, and moral integrity preeminent over all else—all this could not make a black man the social equal of a white coxcomb, even though his brain were as blank as white paper, and his heart as black as darkness concentrated. May heaven alleviate our ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... trace the tale;—nor the one weakness of his so mighty love; nor the inferiority of his perceptive intellect to that even of the second woman character in the play, the Emilia who dies in wild testimony against his error:—"Oh, murderous coxcomb! What should such a fool Do with ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb. The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life. One was a coxcomb not to die in it. However, the Swede ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... He has just enough brains to be sentimental, jealous, and boundlessly fond of himself. His wives, too, are foolish enough to worship him, until—there is an egg in the nest. That event makes them wise. They understand this strutting coxcomb, and quietly turning their backs on him, leave him to ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... facts in the face. This moustache is an exact copy of the Inca's moustache. Well, does the world occupy itself with the Inca's moustache or does it not? Does it ever occupy itself with anything else? If that is the truth, does its recognition constitute the Inca a coxcomb? Other potentates have moustaches: even beards and moustaches. Does the world occupy itself with those beards and moustaches? Do the hawkers in the streets of every capital on the civilized globe sell ingenious cardboard representations of their faces on which, at ...
— The Inca of Perusalem • George Bernard Shaw
... suppose that he was either a superannuated coxcomb or a driveling dotard. He was a man of sense and feeling, but his passion for Julia had, for the time, changed all his manner and habits.—He saw that she was a young and lovely woman, about to give herself to the arms ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... the newest stranger—the lion of the day, the gorgeous journeyman tailor from Quincy. He was a simpering coxcomb of the first water, and the "loudest" dressed man in the State. He was an inveterate woman-killer. Every week he wrote lushy "poetry" for the Journal, about his newest conquest. His rhymes for my week were headed, "TO MARY IN H—L," meaning to Mary in Hannibal, of course. But ...
— Editorial Wild Oats • Mark Twain
... But if, in consequence of such feeling, he ventures to talk much of himself, of his own habits, his own pursuits, his own feelings, his own achievements, he will very soon be set down as a bore and a conceited coxcomb. A young man naturally feels a strong interest, an interest increased by separation, in his own immediate family. This feeling, with some young men, is so deep, that they shun the mention of any thing closely ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... to offer my sword to Louis XVI., not to involve myself in party intrigues. I therefore decided to "emigrate." Brussels was the headquarters of the most distinguished emigres. There I found my trifling baggage, which had arrived before me. The coxcomb emigres were hateful to me. I was eager to see those like myself, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... fix your begetting on some one), I would answer your scurrilities in Print; but this I disdain, sirrah. Good stout Ash and good strong Cordovan leather are the things fittest to meet your impertinences with;" and so I held out my Foot, and shook my Staff at the titivilitium coxcomb; and he was so civil to me during the rest of the evening as to allow me to ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... characteristical feature of his demeanour. His meditations were not even disturbed by any anxiety about his future subsistence, although the cessation of his employment seemed to render that precarious. For this, however, Lord Bidmore had made provision; for, though a coxcomb where the fine arts were concerned, he was in other particulars a just and honourable man, who felt a sincere pride in having drawn the talents of Cargill from obscurity, and entertained due gratitude for ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... inlaid in the Arcadia are jejune, far-fetch'd and frigid.... [The Arcadia] is to me one of the greatest monuments of the abuse of intellectual power upon record.... [Sidney is] a complete intellectual coxcomb, or nearly so;" and so forth. The lectures were published in 1821. Elsewhere, however, Hazlitt found in Sidney ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... appearance, the levity of their manners, and the contrast of their characters I found to be a general subject of speculation. I endeavored to associate with Miss Wharton, but found it impossible to detach her a moment from the coxcomb who attended her. If she has any idea of a connection with you, why does she continue to associate with another, especially with one of so opposite a description? I am seriously afraid that there is more intimacy between them than there ought ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... and dignity of that passion when felt for a worthy object;—their eye is captivated, the exterior pleases, the heart and mind are not known, and, after six months union, they are surprised to find the beau ideal metamorphosed into a fool or a coxcomb. This is the issue of what are ordinarily called love-matches, because they are considered as such. "Cupid is indeed often blamed for deeds in which he has no share." In the opinion of the wise, the mischief is occasioned by the action of vivid imaginations ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... vulgar manner of the pamphleteers, who were very often the same persons. Lyly himself exhibits both styles in Euphues; and if Pap with a Hatchet and An Almond for a Parrot are rightly attributed to him, still more in these. So also does Gabriel Harvey, Spenser's friend, a curious coxcomb who endeavoured to dissuade Spenser from continuing The Faerie Queene, devoted much time himself and strove to devote other people to the thankless task of composing English hexameters and trimeters, engaged (very much to his discomfiture) in a furious pamphlet ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... their new governor-general came to them a valetudinarian. There seemed to be other and more serious elements of weakness. Charles Greville spoke of him with just a tinge of good-natured contempt as "very good humoured, pleasing and intelligent, but the greatest coxcomb I ever saw, and the vainest dog, though his vanity is not offensive or arrogant";[6] and a writer in the Colonial Gazette, whose words reached Canada {78} almost on the day when the new governor arrived, warned Canadians of the imbecility ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison |
