sit still, or, at least, they
must work their limbs or features.

Talking of one's own ails and grievances.--Bad enough, but not so bad
as insulting the person you talk with by remarking on his ill-looks, or
appealing to notice any of his personal peculiarities.

Apologizing.--A very desperate habit,--one that is rarely cured. Apology
is only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten, the first thing
a man's companion knows of his shortcoming is from his apology. It is
mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your small failures of so
much consequence that you must make a talk about them.

Good dressing, quiet ways, low tones of voice, lips that can wait, and
eyes that do not wander,--shyness of personalities, except in certain
intimate communions,--to be light in hand in conversation, to have
ideas, but to be able to make talk, if necessary, without them,--to
belong to the company you are in, and not to yourself,--to have nothing
in your dress or furniture so fine that you cannot afford to spoil it
and get another like it, yet to preserve the harmonies, throughout
your person and--dwelling: I should say that this was a fair capital of
manners to begin with.

Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an
overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our
generic humanity. It is just here that the very highest society asserts
its superior breeding. Among truly elegant people of the highest ton,
you will find more real equality in social intercourse than in a country
village. As nuns drop their birth-names and become Sister Margaret and
Sister Mary, so high-bred people drop their personal distinctions
and become brothers and sisters of conversational charity. Nor are
fashionable people without their heroism. I believe there are men who
have shown as much self-devotion in carrying a lone wall-flower down to
the supper-table as ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized
his name. There are Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing
can hold back from their errands of mercy. They find out the red-handed,
gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his
corner, and distill their soft words upon him like dew upon the green
herb. They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary apparition saddens
the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-room. I have known one
of these angels ask, of her own accord, that a desolate middle-aged man,
whom