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the other; and what he does not consider beneath his dignity, we, the well-pleased recipients of his confidence, are not called upon to consider in such a light. All the vague reputation in which his name has been wafted abroad, will be vindicated by his own honest outspoken tale. He is not a heroic personage, but he is the most lighthearted and dauntless of adventurers -the most amusing of companions. Dipping at random into his stores, it is quite uncertain whether you may light upon a broad modern joke or a quaint Oriental legend of primeval antiquity. His peals of comfortable complacent laughterthe laughter of a man fully satisfied with himself, and enjoying his own jests are interrupted by wild chants of the desert, and pathetic Hebrew lamentations, pealed forth in a voice that has made itself heard among the clamours of savage tribes, and caused the halls of the Propaganda to ring again. Altogether the book, which is not free from vulgarities,

or even a suspicion of tediousness, in the latter part especially, has a fascination quite irresistible. We know neither priest nor traveller of modern times worthy to compare with this son of Levi and the desert

this wandering cross-bearer—this Grand Dervish of Christendom. It would be hard to light upon another Wolff;-to look for such exceptional irregular personages would be foolish, and to find them undesirable. Nevertheless, there is in his mission a precedent which we would gladly see followed. A man of higher strain might make that sublime which Wolff has made interesting and exciting; and we cannot doubt that the flash of this passing visitor through regions of obscurity will throw farther reflections than anybody dreams of-reflections in all probability more original, and therefore more lasting, than those which are likely to arise round the permanent glimmer of some single sta tionary taper planted alone in the wilderness.

ON MANNERS.

THE moralists of the last century were in the habit of giving a prominence and importance to the subject of manners, which we do not meet with now. Manners must, indeed, be an interesting and momentous question at all times; but we do not find the duty of good manners, and the practical value of attractive ones, pressed upon us now in the same way—or, at least, not by the same class of teachers. If we want to see what writers have said on the subject we naturally look back; indeed, the numerous biographies and collections of letters of worthies of the last century, recently published, and all of which turn our minds to this topic, necessarily lead us to do so. Our novelists, it is true, give illustrations of what manners should and should not be, and our satirists devote their wit and powers to detect and expose what is faulty and vulgar in the manners of our own day; but for a grave treatise, a clear, apt, and full discussion, on what constitutes good manners, from what source and causes they spring, we turn to the measured, graceful, sonorous sentences, wherein our literary fathers expressed their opinions and conclusions on society. It is now, perhaps, more completely taken for granted that people know how to behave themselves; we are seldom disturbed by the solecisms and breaches of the social code which once obtruded themselves into every circle; nor have we affectation in at all the same degree. We have probably made some way in general refinement. A fine manner cannot now set itself off by contrast, nor need people become affected (that is, assume a manner) to escape being vulgar. Before they had settled into a certain uniform propriety, manners were unquestionably more in men's minds. The terms "fine gentlemen," "elegant manners," "genteel," even "gentlemanly," if

applied not to mind but to external polish, we all reject as old-fashioned, as belonging to the past, to a different, and, as we think, less advanced stage than our own. If people want to express the same ideas now, they take refuge in slang, and are unwilling to treat them as grave questions involving a moral, or as though their own manners were influenced by direct thought, and were not the happy result of merit or fortunate circumstances. But, a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, manners were an acknowledged topic, with a fitting vocabulary; they were made an avowed point in education, with distinct rules, and were an admitted question in the case of each individual. We suspect that a good manner of that period would appear to us extremely artificial, an elaborate performance, the result of conscious care, seeming to invite observation, and therefore a fit subject for criticism, praise, and censure. We still know it to be important; but no moral authority amongst the ladies of our own day would venture, with Mrs Delany, to rank a good manner next to religion and morality. Assuming good manners to follow naturally on a good education, there would be a fear lest nature and simplicity must suffer by pressing them on the learner as an accomplishment in itself; but this fear was never predominant at the time of which we speak, when a fastidious taste was perhaps constantly offended by a prevailing coarseness, and graceful action and a polished address were charming from contrast, and very fit to be put forward for example and imitation. Thus, Addison, after giving various pictures of incivility and awkwardness, writes: "A man fully instructed in this art (of good manners) may assume a thousand shapes, and please in all; he may do a thousand actions that shall

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become none other but himself; -not that the things themselves are different, but the way of doing them." And Johnson, sixty years later, describes, with a sort of envy which does not obscure his admiration, a manner of perfect address. It has a touch of patronage and condescension which would not be acceptable to our ideas, but we believe it a truthful picture of a good manner, when manner was treated as one of the fine arts. "I remarked with what justice of distribution he divided his talk to a wide circle; with what address he offered to every man an occasion of indulging some favourite topic, or displaying some particular attainment; the judgment with which he regulated his inquiries after the absent; and .. I soon discovered that he possessed some science of graciousness and attraction which books had not taught; that he had the power of obliging those whom he did not benefit; that he diffused upon his cursory behaviour and most trifling actions, a gloss of softness and delicacy by which every one was dazzled; and that, by some occult method of captivation, he animated the timorous, softened the supercilious, and opened the reserved. I could not but repine at the inelegance of my own manners, which left me no hopes but not to offend, and at the inefficacy of rustic benevolence, which gained no friends but by real service."

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One distinction suggested by this portrait lies at the very portal of our subject there is all the difference between good manners and what the writer means to describe as a good manner. Good manners are, in homely phrase, the art of always knowing how to behave ourselves. A good manner sets its possessor off, on all occasions, to the best advantage. The one is a habit, the other a power; the one is decorum, the other grace; the one secures us from committing ourselves, the other confers distinction; by the one we escape giving

pain, the other imparts positive pleasure; the one guarantees us from censure and contempt, the other excites respect and admiration; by the one we pass muster in any company, the other enables its possessor to take the lead in it; the one can be taught and acquired, the other is a gift of nature, fostered by favouring circumstances the one is simply a reflection of cultivated society, and has no individuality, the other is the object of conscious imitation, and has its disciples and followers. It is a mere duty to aim at good manners; it is the folly and sin of affectation to strive after a good manner, when, not content with simple propriety, it sets itself by false assumptions to attract and to engross attention. Thus simple good manners bring no risk or danger with them, but a good manner is too often a snare and a temptation. While drawing these broad distinctions, we are quite aware that in very few instances can they be seen in their full separateness. The emphatically good manner we would be understood to mean, is a very rare accomplishment; while all wellmannered persons have an individuality, which distinguishes their demeanour, in things indifferent, from that of the other well-mannered persons about them. Everybody in a certain sense has a manner of his own; but it is not patent, not a power, not recognised or influential in society, like what we would point at, or that suggested by our quotation from Dr Johnson.

No doubt good manners develop and slide into a good manner, under fortunate auspices; for it needs, and, indeed, must have, a sphere. The woman, for instance, has good manners while she is one of many in her father's house; transplanted into a sphere of her own, with room to expand, her most insignificant action assumes a certain personality; her manners develop into a manner of her own, distinctive, amiable," full of numberless nameless graces;" and henceforth she takes

a place, and acts a part in society, for which no one before had guessed her capabilities. A person must in fact be of importance in his own set, and thus have a sort of field, to have a right to that distinction we are endeavouring to define. We doubt whether any one seeking, in his own circle or experience, for a manner as a term of commendation, will apply it to any one except in a position of independence and relative consequence-a position in which favours may be conferred, and the person has reason to know himself in a condition to be sought after, and to oblige others. It only comes naturally to such a one; and when there is not this root and source to justify and warrant it, it is sure to be affected, and offensive as such. But perhaps such reflections ought to make us tolerant of affectation, when it results from a desire to take a place, to be something. There are many people who have aspirations which they have no legitimate means of satisfying; and to have a place, a field, in which a man may air and show himself, and work out his ideal, is one of these, and a very frequent one. Our aspirant has not strength of mind to bide his time, or to give up altogether; and so he puts on a sickly growth of airs, peculiarities, eccentricities, which nothing leads up to or accounts for. His ideal collapses for want of external nourishment and credit, and in sole return for his pains he is brought into injurious comparisons with the real thing; and the world contrasts him with this or that great man, to the manner born, so unaffected, so natural, whose grand air, or ease, or condescension, or self-reliance, or graciousness, sits with such careless grace upon him.

It must be owned that credit for manners in rich and great people, like that for merit and good works, is earned often at a mighty small cost. Very few people distinguished for rank and position are affected, because they have what others aim to possess: an affected king, or

queen, or potentate of any kind, would be a monster; whereas ordinary good-nature, with the selfrespect which their position almost necessarily inspires, joined to the atmosphere of good-breeding by which rank and station are surrounded, give them every facility for a certain grand or graceful form of manner. We would say, that for a man whom fortune favours, of gentle blood, pulled down by no inferior and low connections, wellbred himself, and living amongst well-bred people, and in a position to be sought after rather than to seek; who has nothing to ask from the world but respect and esteem, or from his friends but love,-to such a man good manners are inevitable, unless there is some lurking coarseness, weakness, or baseness, to counteract all these natural tendencies to civility and refinement; and that if he is equal to his position, he will have a deportment distinguishing him from others by its dignity and graciousness. And much more may this be said of a woman equally favoured by fortune, who has never known the temptations of sensitiveness to be ashamed of associates and connections; who has never endured the society of the ill-nurtured and the awkward, whether rustic, cockney, or simply vulgar; or who has, in good time, found herself emancipated from these depressing causes; who can choose her friends; who is queen in her drawing-room, and can carry out her own ideas of society-arrange, direct, organise, be an authority in her own congenial circle; whose notice is favour; whose conversation is valued; whose taste is deferred to; who can bestow a hundred slight favours; whose smile is watched for and remembered; whose frown is serious, and carries a weight of disapproval;-round such a woman, if she is of a genial temperament, and cares to be loved, will naturally gather an entourage of nameless charms to set her off. Whatever is peculiar in her must

surely, almost necessarily, round itself into a distinctive grace, so that her actions should be all pleasingly characteristic. Not tempted by the disturbances which distract others, not depressed by the subduing causes which keep down so many, she will have the courage to be herself, and the harmony which results from sweetness and forcethat force which confidence in herself creates, and without which there can be no kind of real grace. But there are not many persons so exalted by fortune, and who, logically speaking, cannot help having a good manner-and very happy, no doubt, it is that there are not, for the position we have endeavoured to picture is a temptation to whoever holds it, and somewhat too complacent a height for fallen humanity. Exemption from the minor cares and crosses of life, if any such could be found, would, in no real and Christian sense, be a blessing.

We would protest against the too common charge of insincerity brought against a charming manner, which has first flattered and delighted, and, in the result and upon reflection, has been pronounced hollow and meaning nothing. A charming manner means to please, and has no ulterior end in view. It is expecting too much to require people, because they are pleasant while we are with them, to think of us and act towards us in absence with more consistent consideration and regard than our less attractive acquaintance; especially as this very charm and pleasantness necessarily implies a mind present to each passing scene, and able to occupy itself with every new claim to its attention. Let us remember that we ourselves should not have been so agreeably entertained had our attractive acquaintance suffered his thoughts, while in our company, to run on absent friends-the habit of some conscientious minds, deficient in tact and sympathy, through which they contrive to give to each friend, by turns, the notion that

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others are preferred to himself. A little reflection will induce more modest and reasonable expectations. He has been acting on the Premier's golden rule, that in society every one should endeavour to make himself as agreeable as possible; and the true art of doing so, we are told on high authority, is to appear well-pleased with those you are engaged with." After all, it is a great thing that those with whom we are thrown should wish to please us, even by the little unconscious, instinctive ruse of seeming to be pleased. For that all these arts, where they delight us, are unconscious, we fully believe, and yet they cannot be otherwise described; as, where our authority speaks of the true art of being agreeable in company, and then corrects himself in a parenthesis-" and yet there can be no such thing as art in it"— so quick, subtle, and undefinable, are the influences which direct thought and expression, and which yet must be traced up to the direct agency of the will at last.

We have said that there are not many who are compelled by circumstances to have a good manner; let us consider what condition of mind best supplies the place of external advantages, and goes farthest to secure a good manner, and the respect and consideration that arises from it. We believe it will be found that people will be valued a good deal at the rate they set on themselves—we do not mean what persons aim at, desire for themselves; but what their actions show they rate themselves at. Many people will take infinite pains to win from others a favourable judg ment, which they do not show themselves to share in. They have a

craving for a high stand in their fellow-creatures' estimation, and yet cannot bring themselves to prove by their actions that they believe it their due. They hope to win the respect of others, and yet betray a want of self-respect. They let it be seen that their standard is the opinion of others, not self-approval.

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