The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [332]
5. Cheerful without noisiness, frank without indiscretion, and able to keep confidences;
6. To know the proper time and place for whatever you say or do, and to do it with an air of condition;
7. All this is not so soon nor so easily learned as people imagine, but requires observation and time.
8. The world is an immense folio, which demands attention to be read and understood as it ought;
9. You have not yet read above four or five pages of it, my son, and you will have barely enough time to dip now and then into other less important books.
10. I would have you not only adopt, but rival, the best manners and usages of the place you are at, be they what they will;
11. That is the versatility of manners which is so useful in the course of the world.
12. Choose your models well, then rival them in their own way.
13. Make yourself master of good and thoughtful observance;
14. And to such a degree, dear son, as to make your hosts commend and welcome you;
15. And when thereafter you shall be at other places, do the same thing there, conforming to the manners and usage of the place.
16. One would desire to please, wherever one is; and nothing is more innocently flattering than an approbation and emulation of the people one converses with.
17. But be always gentle, in the sense of the gentleman. This is not so easily described as felt.
18. It is the compound result of different things: a quiet friendliness, a flexibility, but not a servility of manners;
19. An air of agreeableness in the countenance, gesture and expression,
20. Equally whether you concur or differ with the person you converse with.
21. Observe those carefully who have that good manner in others that pleases;
22. And your own good sense will soon enable you to discover the different ingredients of which it is composed.
23. You must be more particularly attentive to this whenever you are obliged to refuse what is asked of you, or to say what in itself cannot be very agreeable to those to whom you say it.
24. It is then the necessary gilding of a disagreeable pill. Amiability consists in a thousand of these little things aggregately.
25. It is the appropriateness of manner which I have so often recommended to you.
Epistle 17
1. As you have not much time to read, you should employ it in reading what is the most necessary,
2. And that is, modern historical, geographical, chronological, sociological and political knowledge of the world,
3. The science and investigations of the learned as reported to the public, and the debates of literature and philosophy.
4. Many who are reckoned good scholars, though they know pretty accurately the history and culture of Athens and Rome,
5. Are totally ignorant of the same in any one country now in the world, even of their own.
6. Keep up your classical learning, which will be an ornament to you while young, and a comfort to you when old.
7. But even more keep up the useful knowledge which is the modern knowledge.
8. It is that which must qualify you both for work and for life, and it is to that, therefore, that you should principally direct your attention.
Epistle 18
1. The consciousness of merit makes a man of sense more modest, though more firm.
2. You will have noticed, my son, that a man who shows off his own merit is a coxcomb, and a man who does not know his own merit is a fool.
3. A man of sense knows it, exerts it, avails himself of it, but never boasts of it;
4. And always seems rather to undervalue than overvalue it, though in truth, he sets the right value upon it.
5. A man who is really diffident, timid and bashful, be his merit what it will, never can push himself in the world;
6. His despondency throws him into inaction; and people who are forward, bustling or petulant will always get the better of him.
7. The manner makes the whole difference. What would be impudence in one, is only a proper and decent assurance in another.
8. A man of sense, and of knowledge in the world, will assert his own rights, and pursue his own objects, as steadily and intrepidly