C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Fop—Foppery
Foppery is the egotism of clothes.
A dandy is a clothes-wearing man.
Their methods various, but alike their aim; the sloven and the fopling are the same.
A fop takes great pains to hang out a sign, by his dress, of what he has within.
Ambiguous things that ape goats in their visage, women in their shape.
A coxcomb is ugly all over with affectation of a fine gentleman.
Nature has sometimes made a fool; but a coxcomb is always of a man’s own making.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.