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    affect grace , and others are graceful by a certain harmony of nature , moving- their limbs properly without endeavouring to do so ; or just as some people give money out of

    ostentation or for fear of being thought stingy , while others do it for the pure delight of giving . Swift might as well have said of these latter , that they were people of penurious ideas , as that all who love cleanliness or

    decorum are people of nasty ones . The next step in logic would be , that a rose was only a rose , because it had an excessive tendency to be a thistle . Poor , admirable , perplexing

    Swift , the master-mind of his age ! He undid his own excuse , when he talked in this manner ; for with all his faults ( some of them accountable only from a perplexed brain ) and with all which renders his

    writings in some respects so revolting , it might have been fancied that he made himself a sort of martyr to certain good intentions , if he had not taken these pains to undo the supposition . And perhaps there

    was something of the kind , after all , in his heroical ventures upon the reader ' s disgust ; though the habits of his contemporaries were not refined in this respect , and are therefore not favourable to the

    conclusion . A thorough treatise on good manners would startle the readers of any generation , our own certainly not excepted ; and partly for this reason , that out

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    of the servility of a too gteat love of money we a * e always confounding fashion with good breeding ; though no two things can in their nature be iiitife different , —fashion going Upon the ground of will and excltisiveness , and good breeding ah that of a subjection of the t ^ ill and universal benevoleribe . A

    fashionable man may indeed be well bred , though it will go hard with him to be so and preserve his thorough fashktttableness . To take an instance out of a hundred : —there cattle

    up a , fashion some time ago of confining the introduction of people at dinner parties to thfe announcement of their names by a servant , on their entrance into the room ; so that unless you came last , everybody elsre

    did not know who you were ; and if you did , you yourself perhaps were not acquainted with the name of a single other guest ! The consequence in a mixed party was obvious . Even the most tragical results might

    have taken place ; and perhaps have so . We were present on one occasion , where some persons of different and warm political opinions were among the company , and it was the merest chance in the world that one of

    them was not insulted by the person sitting next him , the conversation every instant tending to that special point , and some of the hearers sitting on thorns while it was going on . Now good breeding has been justly defined " the art of making those easy with wlioift

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    Galateo , dr a tfmiise 6 n Politeness . IIS&

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 1, 1837, page 359, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1837/page/63/