se, that "No gentleman can be permitted
to come to the public table without his coat;" and in the same country,
in the pews of the churches, little placards plead with the worshipper
against the fury of expectoration. Charles Dickens self-sacrificingly
undertook the reformation of our American manners in unspeakable
particulars. I think the lesson was not quite lost; that it held bad
manners up, so that the churls could see the deformity. Unhappily, the
book had its own deformities. It ought not to need to print in a reading
room a caution to strangers not to speak loud; nor to persons who look
over fine engravings, that they should be handled like cobwebs and
butterflies' wings; nor to persons who look at marble statues, that they
shall not smite them with canes. But, even in the perfect civilization
of this city, such cautions are not quite needless in the Athenaeum and
City Library.

Manners are factitious, and grow out of circumstances as well as out of
character. If you look at the pictures of patricians and of peasants, of
different periods and countries, you will see how well they match the
same classes in our towns. The modern aristocrat not only is well drawn
in Titian's Venetian doges, and in Roman coins and statues, but also in
the pictures which Commodore Perry brought home of dignitaries in Japan.
Broad lands and great interests not only arrive to such heads as can
manage them, but form manners of power. A keen eye, too, will see nice
gradations of rank, or see in the manners the degree of homage the party
is wont to receive. A prince who is accustomed every day to be courted
and deferred to by the highest grandees, acquires a corresponding
expectation, and a becoming mode of receiving and replying to this
homage.

There are always exceptional people and modes. English grandees affect
to be farmers. Claverhouse is a fop, and, under the finish of dress, and
levity of behavior, hides the terror of his war. But Nature and Destiny
are honest, and never fail to leave their mark, to hang out a sign for
each and for every quality. It is much to conquer one's face, and
perhaps the ambitious youth thinks he has got the whole secret when he
has learned that disengaged manners are commanding. Don't be deceived by
a facile exterior. Tender men sometimes have strong wills. We had, in
Massachusetts, an old statesman, who had sat all his life in courts and
in chairs of state, without overcoming an extreme irritability of