The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant / Being a collection of select pieces from our best modern writers, calculated to eradicate vulgar prejudices and rusticity of manners, improve the understanding, rectify the will, purify the passions, direct the minds of youth to the pursuit of proper objects, and to facilitate their reading, writing, and speaking the English language with elegance and propriety

by John Hamilton Moore

Good-Breeding.

1. Complaisance renders a superior amiable, an equal agreeable, and an inferior acceptable. It smoothes distinction, sweetens conversation, and makes every one in the company pleased with himself. It produces good nature and mutual benevolence, encourages the timorous, soothes the turbulent; humanizes the fierce, and distinguishes a society of civilized persons from a confusion of savages. In a word, complaisance is a virtue that blends all orders of men together in a friendly intercourse of words and actions, and is suited to that equality in human nature which every one ought to consider, so far as is consistent with the order and economy of the world.

2. If we could look into the secret anguish and affliction of every man's heart, we should often find, that more of it arises from little imaginary distresses, such as checks, frowns, contradictions, expressions of contempt, and (what Shakspeare reckons among other evils under the sun)

"—The poor man's contumely, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes,"

than from the more real pains and calamities of life. The only method to remove these imaginary distresses as much as possible out of human life, would be the universal practice of such an ingenious complaisance as I have been here describing, which, as it is a virtue, may be defined to be a "constant endeavour to please those whom we converse with, so far as we may do it innocently."

3. Good-breeding necessarily implies civility; but civility does not reciprocally imply good-breeding. The former has its intrinsic weight and value, which the latter always adorns, and often doubles by its workmanship.

To sacrifice one's own self-love to other people's, is a short, but, I believe, a true definition of civility: to do it with ease, propriety and grace, is good-breeding. The one is the result of good-nature; the other of good-sense, joined to experience, observation and attention.

4. A ploughman will be civil, if he is good-natured, but cannot be well bred. A courtier will be well bred though perhaps without good-nature, if he has but good sense. Flattery is the disgrace of good-breeding, as brutality often is of truth and sincerity. Good-breeding is the middle point between those two odious extremes.

Ceremony is the superstition of good-breeding, as well as of religion: but yet, being an out-work to both, should not be absolutely demolished. It is always, to a certain degree, to be complied with, though despised by those who think, because admired and respected by those who do not.