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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Fop—Foppery

Foppery is the egotism of clothes.

Victor Hugo.

A dandy is a clothes-wearing man.

Carlyle.

  • Nature made every fop to plague his brother,
  • Just as one beauty mortifies another.
  • Pope.

    Their methods various, but alike their aim; the sloven and the fopling are the same.

    Young.

    A fop takes great pains to hang out a sign, by his dress, of what he has within.

    Richardson.

    Ambiguous things that ape goats in their visage, women in their shape.

    Byron.

    A coxcomb is ugly all over with affectation of a fine gentleman.

    Dr. Johnson.

    Nature has sometimes made a fool; but a coxcomb is always of a man’s own making.

    Addison.

  • So gentle, yet so brisk, so wondrous sweet,
  • So fit to prattle at a lady’s feet.
  • Churchill.

    Foppery, being the chronic condition of women, is not so much noticed as it is when it breaks out on the person of the male bird.

    Balzac.

    Foppery is never cured; it is the bad stamina of the mind, which, like those of the body, are never rectified; once a coxcomb always a coxcomb.

    Johnson.

    A beau is one who arranges his curled locks gracefully, who ever smells of balm, and cinnamon; who hums the songs of the Nile, and Cadiz; who throws his sleek arms into various attitudes; who idles away the whole day among the chairs of the ladies, and is ever whispering into some one’s ear; who reads little billets-doux from this quarter and that, and writes them in return; who avoids ruffling his dress by contact with his neighbors sleeve, who knows with whom everybody is in love; who flutters from feast to feast, who can recount exactly the pedigree of Hirpinus. What do you tell me? is this a beau, Cotilus? Then a beau, Cotilus, is a very trifling thing.

    Martial.

    A fop who admires his person in a glass soon enters into a resolution of making his fortune by it, not questioning that every woman who falls in his way will do him as much justice as himself.

    Thomas Hughes.

  • In form so delicate, so soft his skin,
  • So fair in feature, and so smooth his chin,
  • Quite to unman him nothing wants but this;
  • Put him in coats, and he’s a very miss.
  • Horace.

  • A six-foot suckling, mincing in its gait,
  • Affected, peevish, prim and delicate;
  • Fearful it seemed, tho’ of athletic make,
  • Lest brutal breezes should so roughly shake
  • Its tender form, and savage motion spread
  • O’er its pale cheeks, the horrid manly red.
  • Churchill.

    The all importance of clothes has sprung up in the intellect of the dandy without effort, like an instinct of genius; he is inspired with clothes, a poet of clothes.

    Carlyle.