This Adonis in loveliness was a corpulent man of fifty.

The line is a pointed piece of comic deflation. By invoking “Adonis,” the classical emblem of male beauty, Hunt sets up an expectation of youthful, idealized attractiveness—then punctures it with the blunt reality of “a corpulent man of fifty.” The humor depends on the collision between romanticized reputation (or self-presentation) and physical fact. It also hints at Hunt’s broader satiric habit: exposing vanity, fashionable affectation, or inflated praise by returning the reader to concrete observation. The phrasing suggests a portrait of someone celebrated—or posing—as a paragon of loveliness, whose actual appearance makes the epithet absurd.