ers is not a short course but a long course of
study, a work of patience on both sides, of gentle and most insistent
handling on one side and of long endurance on the other. There are a
very few exquisite natures with whom the grace of manners seems to be
inborn. They are not very vigorous, not physically robust; their own
sensitiveness serves as a private tutor or monitor to tell them at the
right moment what others feel, and what they should say or do. They have
a great gift, but they lay down their price for it, and suffer for
others as well as in themselves more than their share. But in general,
the average boy and girl needs a "daily exercise" which in most cases
amounts to "nagging," and in the best hands is only saved from nagging
by its absence of peevishness, and the patience with which it reminds
and urges and teases into perfect observance. The teasing thing, and yet
the most necessary one, is the constant check upon the preoccupying
interests of children, so that in presence of their elders they can
never completely let themselves go, but have to be attentive to every
service of consideration or mark of respect that occasion calls for. It
is very wearisome, but when it has been acquired through laborious
years--there it is, like a special sense superadded to the ordinary
endowments of nature, giving presence of mind and self-possession,
arming the whole being against surprise or awkwardness or indiscretion,
and controlling what has so long appeared to exercise control over
it--the conditions of social intercourse.

How shall we persuade the children of to-day that manners and
conventions have not come to an end as part of the old regime which
appears to them an elaborate unreality V It is exceedingly difficult to
do so, at school especially, as in many cases their whole family
consents to regard them as extinct, and only when startled at the
over-growth of their girls' unmannerly roughness and self-assertion they
send them to school "to have their manners attended to"; but then it is
too late. The only way to form manners is to teach them from the
beginning as a part of religion, as indeed they are. Devotion to Our
Lady will give to the manners both of boys and girls something which
stamps them as Christian and Catholic, something above the world's
level. And, as has been so often pointed out, the Church's ritual is the
court ceremonial of the most perfect manners, in which every least
detail has its signifi