On one occasion, he was speaking in the House of Commons and said " as black as ", to be interrupted by an opponent with " your shoe-strings ! " Whitelock replied " Sir, I remember when there were more shoe-strings and fewer coxcombs in this assembly ! " On another occasion, in 1714, Whitelock began a speech in the Commons with a reference to the Elector of Hanover : " If he ever comes to the throne, which I hope he never will . . . " This was met with angry shouts from the Whigs and by demands for him to take his words back.
42.
Some of her widely anthologized poems include " Constantinople " and " Epistle from Mrs . Yonge to her Husband . " " Constantinople, " written January 1718, is a beautiful poem in heroic couplets describing Britain and Turkey through human history, and representing the state of mind " of knaves, coxcombs, the mob, and party zealous all characteristic of the London of her time . " . " Epistle from Mrs . Yonge to her Husband, " written 1724, stages a letter from Mrs . Yonge to her libertine husband and exposes the social double standard which led to the shaming and distress of Mrs . Yonge after her divorce.
43.
In his Dedication to The Virtuoso, Shadwell claimed that he had created four entirely new humours characters, by which he meant the titular virtuoso Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, Sir Formal Trifle ( described in the cast list as the Orator, a florid coxcomb ), Sir Samuel Hearty ( a brisk, amorous, adventurous, unfortunate coxcomb; one that by the help of humorous, nonsensical bywords takes himself to be a wit ), and Sir Nicholas s uncle Snarl ( an old, pettish fellow, a great admirer of the last age and a declaimer against the vices of this, and privately very vicious himself . ) Though some critics believe that Sir Nicholas is an inconsistent character, of the four, his is the character with the most significant literary legacy.
44.
Summing up while alluding to the politically motivated attacks that prevented Hunt's fuller acceptance as a major literary figure in his time, Hazlitt draws a comparison with certain gentleman-poets of an earlier age, integrating this with what he has noted of Hunt's personal vanity : " We have said that Lord Byron is a sublime coxcomb : why should we not say that Mr . Hunt is a delightful one ? . . . He is the only poet or literary man we ever knew who puts us in mind of Carew; or who united rare intellectual acquirements with outward grace and natural gentility . . . . A wit and a poet, Mr . Hunt is also distinguished by fineness of tact and sterling sense : he has only been a visionary in humanity, the fool of virtue ."
45.
Still, the larger literary world largely dismissed her work . " The Cambridge History of English and American Literature ", for example, wrote : " If we had nothing of Jean Ingelow s but the most remarkable poem entitled Divided, it would be permissible to suppose the loss [ of her ], in fact or in might-have-been, of a poetess of almost the highest rank . . . . Jean Ingelow wrote some other good things, but nothing at all equalling this; while she also wrote too much and too long . " Some of this criticism has overtones of dismissiveness of her as a female writer : " Unless a man is an extraordinary coxcomb, a person of private means, or both, he seldom has the time and opportunity of committing, or the wish to commit, bad or indifferent verse for a long series of years; but it is otherwise with woman ."
