“THE late Douglass Jerrold likened civility to an air-cushion--possessing no tangible substance, yet serving to ease the jolts we encounter in our journeying through life. To say that a person is civil does not imply that he is agreeable, yet civility is the next step to being agreeable. Some persons pride themselves on being brusque or boorish, and it is well to let such have a wide berth in which to exercise their peculiarities. While wonders may be accomplished in being civil and agreeable, nothing can be gained by incivility. It is the manners that make the man or the woman. The presence of an agreeable person is like a ray of sunshine that warms and halos everything on which it falls, while a disagreeable fellow will chill the pleasantest company ever assembled; and it is one of those mysteries that can never be solved why they are permitted to flourish and have their venomous existence, unless they are to be considered as checks to prevent us from a surfeit of happiness in this world.”
INTELLECTUAL is more frequent than physical short-sightedness, and nothing is more frequent than for the important and the true to escape the vision of the vulgar. It is not a Socrates and his wisdom that are honored with a great following, but a Mahomet and his ignorance that establish a sect that numbers an eighth of the population of the globe. It is not the laws of the profound and magnanimous Lycurgus that have come down to us, but those of the pedant Theodosius and the cruel Justinian. If a truth comes down to us from heaven, it does wisely to first appear in the habiliments of folly in order to guard against being at first taken for an error.
“ALWAYS suspect a man that affects great softness of manner, an unruffled evenness of temper, and an enunciation studied, low, and deliberate. These things are all unnatural, and bespeak a degree of mental discipline into which he that has no purposes of craft or design to answer cannot submit to drill himself. The most successful knaves are usually of this description, as smooth as razors dipped in oil and as sharp. They affect the innocence of the dove, which they have not, in order to hide the cunning of the serpent, which they have.”