[39] When he published _Le Cocu_, it was set about that a pudibund lady had asked her book-seller for "Le Dernier de M. Paul de Kock." And this circumlocution became for a time popular, as a new name for the poor creature on the ornaments of whose head our Elizabethans joked so untiringly. [40] A short essay, or at least a "middle" article, might be written on this way of regarding a prophet in his own country, coupling Beranger with Paul de Kock. Of course the former is by much a _major_ prophet in verse than Paul is in prose. But the attitude of the superior French person to both is, in different degrees, the same. (Thackeray in the article referred to below, p. 62 _note_, while declaring Paul to be _the_ French writer whose works are best known in England, says that his educated countrymen think him _pitoyable_.--_Works_, Oxford edition, vol. ii p. 533.) [41] A gibe at the Vicomte d'Arlincourt's very popular novel, to be noticed below. I have not, I confess, identified the passage: but it may be in one of the plays. [42] It would _not_ be fair to compare the two as makers of literature. In that respect Theodore Hook is Paul's Plutarchian parallel, though he has more literature and less life. [43] Charity, outrunning knowledge, may plead "Irony perhaps?" Unfortunately there is no chance of it. [44] I really do not know who was (see a little below). Parny in his absurd _Goddam!_ (1804) has something of it. [45] And _he_ knew something of it through Addison. [46] The straight hair is particularly curious, for, as everybody who knows portraits of the early nineteenth century at all is aware, Englishmen of the time preferred brushed back and rather "tousled" locks. In Maclise's famous "Fraserians" there is hardly a straight-combed head among all the twenty or thirty. At the same time it is fair to say that our own book-illustrators and caricaturists, for some strange reason, did a good deal to authorise the libels. Cruikshank was no doubt a wonderful draughtsman, but I never saw (and I thank God for it) anything like many, if not most, of his faces. "Phiz" and Cattermole in (for example) their illustrations to _The Old Curiosity Shop_ and _Barnaby Rudge_ sometimes out-Cruikshank Cruikshank in this respect. [47] Paul's ideas of money are still very modest. An income of 6000 francs (L240) represents ease if not affluence; with double the amount you can "aspire to a duchess," and even the dispendious Irish-French Viscount Edward de Sommerston in _La Fille aux Trois Jupons_ (_v. inf._) starts on his career with scarcely more than three thousand a year. [48] Paul's scholarship was very rudimentary, as is shown in not a few scraps of ungrammatical Latin: he never, I think, ventures on Greek. But whether he was the first to _estropier_ the not ugly form "_Cleodora_," I know not. Perhaps he muddled it with "Clotilde."