atient 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.

5. The most perfect degree of good-breeding, as I have already hinted,
is only to be acquired by great knowledge of the world, and keeping the
best company. It is not the object of mere speculation, and cannot be
exactly defined, as it consists in a fitness, a propriety of words,
actions, and even looks, adapted to the infinite variety and
combinations of persons, places, and things. It is a mode, not a
substance; for what is good-breeding at St. _James's_, would pass for
foppery or banter in a remote village; and the homespun civility of that
village would be considered as brutality at court.

6. A cloistered pedant may form true notions of civility; but if amidst
the cobwebs of his cell he pretends to spin a speculative system of
good-breeding, he will not be less absurd than his predecessor, who
judiciously undertook to instruct _Hannibal_, in the art of war. The
most ridiculous and most aukwa