example explains things
best, and I will put a pretty strong case. Suppose you and me alone
together; I believe you will allow that I have as good a right to
unlimited freedom in your company, as either you or I can possibly have
in any other; and I am apt to believe too, that you would indulge me in
that freedom as far as anybody would. But, notwithstanding this, do you
imagine that I should think there were no bounds to that freedom? I
assure you, I should not think so; and I take myself to be as much tied
down by a certain degree of good manners to you, as by other degrees of
them to other people. Were I to show you, by a manifest inattention to
what you said to me, that I was thinking of something else the whole
time; were I to yawn extremely, snore, or break wind in your company, I
should think that I behaved myself to you like a beast, and should not
expect that you would care to frequent me. No. The most familiar and
intimate habitudes, connections, and friendships, require a degree of
good-breeding, both to preserve and cement them. If ever a man and his
wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days
together, absolutely lay aside all good-breeding, their intimacy will
soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of
contempt or disgust. The best of us have our bad sides, and it is as
imprudent, as it is ill-bred, to exhibit them. I shall certainly not use
ceremony with you; it would be misplaced between us: but I shall
certainly observe that degree of good-breeding with you, which is, in the
first place, decent, and which I am sure is absolutely necessary to make
us like one another's company long.

I will say no more, now, upon this important subject of good-breeding,
upon which I have already dwelt too long, it may be, for one letter; and
upon which I shall frequently refresh your memory hereafter; but I will
conclude with these axioms:

That the deepest learning, without good-breeding, is unwelcome and
tiresome pedantry, and of use nowhere but in a man's own closet; and
consequently of little or no use at all.

That a man, Who is not perfectly well-bred, is unfit for good company and
unwelcome in it; will consequently dislike it soon, afterward renounce
it; and be reduced to solitude, or, what is worse, low and bad company.

That a man who is not well-bred, is full as unfit for business as for
company.

Make then, my dear child, I conjure you, good-breeding the great