he
semicircles at the bottom of the nails; the edges of the nails should
never be cut down below the ends of the fingers; nor should they be
suffered to grow longer than the fingers.

17. When the nails are cut down to the quick, it is a shrewd sign that
the man is a mechanic, to whom long nails would be troublesome, or that
he gets his bread by fiddling; and if they are longer than his fingers
ends, and encircled with a black rim, it foretells he has been
laboriously and meanly employed, and too fatigued to clean himself: a
good apology for want of cleanliness in a mechanic, but the greatest
disgrace that can attend a gentleman.

18. These things may appear too significant to be mentioned; but when it
is considered that a thousand little nameless things, which every one
feels but no one can describe, conspire to form that _whole_ of
pleasing, I hope you will not call them trifling. Besides a clean shirt
and a clean person are as necessary to health, as not to offend other
people. It is a maxim with me, which I have lived to see verified, that
he who is negligent at twenty years of age, will be a sloven at forty,
and intolerable at fifty.

_Dress_.

19. Neatness of person I observed was as necessary as cleanliness; of
course some attention must be paid to your dress.

Such is the absurdity of the times, that to pass well with the world, we
must adopt some of its customs, be they ridiculous or not.

20. In the first place, to neglect one's dress is to affront all the
female part of our acquaintance. The women in particular pay an
attention to their dress; to neglect, therefore, your's, will displease
them, as it would be tacitly taxing them with vanity, and declaring that
you thought them not worth the respect which every body else does. And,
as I have mentioned before, as it is the women who stamp a young man's
credit in the fashionable world, if you do not make yourself agreeable
to the women, you will assuredly lose ground among the men.

21. Dress, as trifling as it may appear to a man of understanding,
prepossesses on the first appearance, which is frequently decisive; and
indeed we may form some opinion of a man's sense and character from his
dress. Any exceeding of the fashion, or any affectation in dress
whatever, argues a weakness of understanding, and nine times out of ten
it will be found so.

22. There are few young fellows but what display some character or other
in this shape. Some would be thou