more blameable?

This principle is also the foundation of most of the laws of good
manners; a kind of lesser morality, calculated for the ease of company
and conversation. Too much or too little ceremony are both blamed, and
everything, which promotes ease, without an indecent familiarity, is
useful and laudable.

Constancy in friendships, attachments, and familiarities, is
commendable, and is requisite to support trust and good correspondence
in society. But in places of general, though casual concourse, where
the pursuit of health and pleasure brings people promiscuously together,
public conveniency has dispensed with this maxim; and custom there
promotes an unreserved conversation for the time, by indulging the
privilege of dropping afterwards every indifferent acquaintance, without
breach of civility or good manners.

Even in societies, which are established on principles the most immoral,
and the most destructive to the interests of the general society, there
are required certain rules, which a species of false honour, as well as
private interest, engages the members to observe. Robbers and pirates,
it has often been remarked, could not maintain their pernicious
confederacy, did they not establish a pew distributive justice among
themselves, and recall those laws of equity, which they have violated
with the rest of mankind.

I hate a drinking companion, says the Greek proverb, who never forgets.
The follies of the last debauch should be buried in eternal oblivion, in
order to give full scope to the follies of the next.

Among nations, where an immoral gallantry, if covered with a thin veil
of mystery, is, in some degree, authorized by custom, there immediately
arise a set of rules, calculated for the conveniency of that attachment.
The famous court or parliament of love in Provence formerly decided all
difficult cases of this nature.

In societies for play, there are laws required for the conduct of the
game; and these laws are different in each game. The foundation, I own,
of such societies is frivolous; and the laws are, in a great measure,
though not altogether, capricious and arbitrary. So far is there a
material difference between them and the rules of justice, fidelity, and
loyalty. The general societies of men are absolutely requisite for the
subsistence of the species; and the public conveniency, which regulates
morals, is inviolably established in the nature of man, and of the
world, in which he liv