rd of men are, therefore, the
speculatively well bred monks of all religions and all professions.

7. Good-breeding, like charity, not only covers a multitude of faults,
but, to a certain degree, supplies the want of some virtues. In the
common intercourse of life, it nets good-nature, and often does what
good-nature will not always do; it keeps both wits and fools within
those bounds of decency, which the former are too apt to transgress, and
which the latter never know. Courts are unquestionably the seats of
good-breeding and must necessarily be so; otherwise they would be the
seats of violence and desolation. There all the passions are in their
highest state of fermentation.

8. All pursue what but few can obtain, and many seek what but one can
enjoy. Good-breeding alone restrains their excesses. There, if enemies
did not embrace they would stab. There, smiles are often put on to
conceal tears. There, mutual services are professed, while mutual
injuries are intended; and there, the guile of the serpent stimulates
the gentleness of the dove: all this, it is true, at the expense of
sincerity; but upon the whole, to the advantage of social intercourse in
general.

9. I would not be misapprehended, and supposed to recommend
good-breeding, thus prophaned and prostituted to the purposes of guilt
and perfidy; but I think I may justly infer from it, to what a degree
the accomplishment of good-breeding must adorn and enforce virtue and
truth, when it can thus soften the outrages and deformity of vice and
falsehood. I am sorry to be obliged to confess, that my native country
is not perhaps the seat of the most perfect good-breeding, though I
really believe, that it yields to none in hearty and sincere civility,
as far as civility is (and to a certain degree it is) an inferior moral
duty of doing as one would be done by.

10. If _France_ exceeds us in that particular, the incomparable author
of _L'Esprit des Loix_ accounts for it very impartially, and I believe
very truly. "If my countrymen," says he, "are the best bred people in
the world, it is only because they are the vainest." It is certain that
their good-breeding and attention, by flattering the vanity and
self-love of others, repay their own with interest. It is a general
commerce, usefully carried on by a barter of attentions, and often
without one grain of solid merit, by way of medium, to make up the
balance.

11. It were to be wished that good-breeding were in