Thus they will treat themselves ill when nobody is by; they will descend when it can be done on the sly; they will cut a figure to the world, and be pitiful in private; they will have a fine outside, and let things be shabby and out of keeping underneath; not from parsimony, but from a feeling that anything will do for themselves so long as nobody else is the wiser. That is, there is a constant little secret-the world is not to know the small shifts self is put to, which do not seem to matter while nobody knows. Now, this secret will always betray itself some way or another, and entirely stand in the way of the calm, easy, grand manner. The consciousness that everything about us will stand inspection; that the outside is an index of what is within, imparts ease, grace, and selfpossession; while some touch — however faint, all but imperceptible -of sneaking or bluster will tinge the manner, conscious of something wrong out of sight;-though we admit that naturally sensitive minds will be afflicted with this consciousness much sooner than others. Miss Austin's "Emma" maintained that she could always tell by what conveyance Mr Knightly had come to a dinner party, on the argument that there is always a look of consciousness or bustle when people come in a way that they know to be beneath them. She detected an effort to strike the balance with himself for having done what was beneath his fortune and figure in the world.

We are not blaming persons who cheat themselves (not as religious self-denial, but) thereby to make a better appearance in the eyes of others. People of small means are constantly so placed as to make this almost a matter of necessity. A thorough harmony, a pervading correctness, would, in a great many people, cost more time and thought than with their peculiar temperament they have leisure and patience for; but all must see the enormous advantage persons of fortune and station possess in the particular of

manner, who have every appointment in absolute order, who have no makeshifts-nothing loose, incomplete, or shabby-about them, who can stand a thorough inspection, who can never be taken by surprise or caught unawares, over others who associate with them perhaps, and assume so far to be of their standing, but who must throw all their expense on what catches the eye of others, and endure the pinch of all shortcomings in their proper person; who never like to be caught, and who would not be seen without preparation. And most people must be able to recall some pleasant contrast to all this, some little ménage where these disturbing causes are counteracted by a vigilant self-respect, some modest home of exact, unfailing neatness, and pure trim propriety, where nothing is sacrificed to externals, where there are no concealments, and in which the inmates are willing to let the world see them all day long, and follow them in their busiest employments. And here we believe they will have also admired the self-possessed dignity and repose of manner in the ruling spirit of this fair scene of order. We grant that in case of limited means this result cannot be obtained without a considerable outlay of time and thought—what many would consider waste of time. Hand and eye must be habituated to see defects before others see them, and to be beforehand with decay. A certain fastidiousness of neatness and taste must be encouraged, and the law of order allowed to take a first place, to have its first turn, so to say, in the business of life. Of course all these are essentially feminine arts-we have necessarily a woman in our eye-but the benefits of her system do not rest with her. The man with such a wife acquires a reliance in his home, which gives security and ease to his deportment; while the woman-confident in her surroundings-whose delicate cultivated sense of propriety has brought all things into harmony about her,

who has permitted no finery which is not a natural efflorescence, who has arranged everything, not mainly to meet other eyes, but to satisfy her innate love of neatness and grace, her desire that all about herself should be attuned to a certain law of fitness, is almost sure to have a good manner. It will be self-possessed, because there are no under-hand wounds to self-respect on her consciousness: it will be without effort, for the habits of her mind are all opposed to display; it will be easy and graceful, for there are no counteracting influences to impose restraint.

We cannot think long on the subject without finding our requirements grow with the consideration of it. In the first place, nothing deserves to be called a good manner that will not stand every test, that is not equal to all occasions. We all of us have our place, where it is to be hoped we pass muster; most of our acquaintance do very well to see them in their ordinary circumstances amongst their own friends, at their own work in their own drawing-room and family circle. In these familiar scenes, their words and actions, their talk and their silence, their gravity and their mirth, their postures, gait, and address, all harmonise. But put them into new scenes, amongst strangers, where they are uncertain of their position, where they feel that they have to assert themselves, and where they will be judged by the figure they make, then ease and harmony of manner are apt to forsake them, and hence awkwardness, eccentricities, obtrusiveness, and shyness. There are people who do excellently well in the country, who astonish us by a general air of failure and unfitness in London society, while the regular Londoner does not look less out of place in a country circle. There are men who are lords of all they survey in morning costume, who hide their diminished heads in the restraint of a dress-coat. Is it too much to say that dress may have something to do with the ease

and savoir faire of the grand manner? The habit of changing from one costume to another, involved in a full alternate participation in all the pursuits and pleasures of London and the country, must facilitate that feeling of being one and the same under all circumstances, so essential to ease; while the practice of assimilating every garb to the idea of self, and establishing a feeling of real ownership and mastery, goes far to give composure, dignity, and even elegance to the deportment. Joe Gargery is described as looking cowed and desponding in his Sunday clothes they oppressed and overpowered him; the clothes had, in fact, the ascendant. There is no dress, however fantastic, however novel, however homely or gorgeous, that a fine gentleman will not subdue to an absolute subordination; nothing shall be able to hide or disguise him; he shall be supreme, able to cast off each in turn, and be himself alike in all. Thus not only the taste and quality, but also the variety of his costume, sets him off if he is master of his art.

No doubt the sensitive temperament subjected to this discipline has a good deal to go through, and probably never attains to the perfection of manner. A man of taste and refinement knows how to act under every circumstance; but when it comes to knowledge-when a man betrays by the least sign of stiffness or embarrassment that he is thinking how to move, how to stand, how to look-the triumph of manner is over. He is one of ourselves, no longer the superior being, lifted by nature and circumstances out of the range of our little difficulties. It is the intuitive perception of the right thing to do and say-sometimes attributed to high birth-what is meant by an aristocratic bearing, which "snobs" are so often reproached for worshipping. Well, we think there is something to say for their reverence, and for their unavailing envy. To be one's self everywhere; everywhere at home amongst ladies, amongst

public men, amongst the learned, the fashionable, the idle, the precise; to be neither obtrusive, nor shy, nor uncomfortable; to be right without thinking of it, as a matter of course, because it is ourself; what a convenient and enviable faculty or power! Or is it only a knack? With some people it looks, after all, very much like it. This is the manner for the weak, the timid and over-sensitive, to envy; but what is really worthy of our admiration, is something different still.

There are two sorts of fine manners the one, which expresses an easy sense of fitness for every company; lofty, a shade supercilious, but really good-the manner caricatured in Punch's portrait of "swells," and only serviceable to the owner; the other of a cast already alluded to, which confers benefit on others, and which must proceed from deeper and kindlier sources than self-appreciation, selfrespect, and the habit of good company. One which, if it does not imply a more excellent nature than common, shows a nature whose best qualities are now within our reach -a gift to society, the manner which conveys to us the idea that we are worth pleasing, that we have inspired an interest, and waked sympathy. We rise in our own opinion in such a presence; we feel ourselves appreciated, our powers are quickened, we are at ease, and show ourselves at our best. What is it that makes some women so charming some men so pleasant? What quality that diffuses an aroma, an influence as of rose-leaves about them? that manifests itself in hands that receive us with graceful warmth, in eyes that beam with kindly pleasure, in smiles so genuine, so tender; in the general radiance of reception. What a benignant sunshine of welcome! how soothing to be cared for! how easily the time passes! And what constitutes this charm for we are not supposing it to arise from any deep moral or intellectual superiority, which, truth to say, does not often exhibit itself

in this way. Surely it is a natural sweetness, an inherent tenderness of sympathy-pervading rather than deep-acting upon a desire to please. There are some persons on whom society acts almost chemically, compelling them to be charming. It is part of themselves to meet advances, to labour, in their graceful way, to create a favourable impression, and to give pleasure; and yet, perhaps, our arrival was, after all, ill-timed our approach at least was not welcome-we interrupted, we necessitated an effort. If at night we could overhear our friend's summary of the day, we might find ourselves classed as one of its troubles and hindrances: and, as we have said, we might unjustly feel a twinge of ill-usage. But is it not something not to have been made uncomfortable at the time-to have spent a happy hour instead of sitting on thorns, as with certain of our acquaintance we should inevitably have been made to do? They are not necessarily more sincere because they take no pains to conceal that we are in their way. The kindly welcomer has been as true to his character all the while as our surly friend has been to his. It would have cost too much; it would have been impossible for him to be ungracious. Thus he is neither insincere, for he has sincerely wished to please, nor, what might seem the other alternative, affected, for he has been acting according to his nature. Which brings us to a consideration of what really constitutes affectation.

It is perhaps more easy to hate affectation than to know exactly the reason why. What is it in affectation which "inflames our hostile passions" as it is said to do? On the face of it, it implies trouble taken on our behalf. We must be of some consequence to the man who takes pains to feign for us, to alter himself, to get up a little pantomime before us; and the conclusion that we influence his movements, actions, and words, that the whole man undergoes a

transformation in our presence, might be supposed flattering to our vanity. Yet, so far from a compliment being inferred, the irritation belonging to a sense of personal insult lies somewhere at the bottom of the hostility; we feel towards affectation that sensation which made Hotspur "mad" at sight of the lord who "smiled and talked," and used holiday and lady terms on the battle-field. Whether it is that our manhood is sensible of an affront, or that we feel our discernment set at nought and our taste disparaged in being assumed unable to distinguish the false from the true, certain it is that a man's affectation excites in impatient tempers a strong and active repugnance. We can tolerate it better in women; there it may awake a tender and amused compassion rather than anger. Indeed, some of the best writing in our language is spent on defining and illustrating with indulgent humour the prettinesses of feminine affectation. Men cannot be very hard on airs put on purely to attract themselves; but this tolerance is purchased by the pretty triflers at the price of an acknowledged inferiority; their affectation is treated as one of the chosen trappings of folly. Dr Johnson, who, body and soul, recoiled from affectation, at any rate in men, says, analysing his own sensations, "It is not folly, but pride-not error, but deceit-which the world means to persecute when it raises the full cry of nature to hunt down affectation"-going on to define it as "the art of counterfeiting those qualities which we might with innocence safely be without." But we are used to both pride and deceit under other forms, without such personal animosity being excited. This does not seem to get to the bottom of our feelings. We rather prefer that other solution which he finds in Cicero, who ascribes our antipathy to the wound inflicted, not on our individual self-love, but on the more generous instinct of respect for humanity, implanted in us all. Every man, he says, has

two characters-one which he partakes with all mankind, and by which he is distinguished from brute animals; another which discriminates him from the rest of his own species, and impresses on him a manner and temper peculiar to himself. This particular character, if it be not repugnant to the laws of general humanity, it is always his business to cultivate and preserve. There is something pitiful, to be sure, in a man deserting himself so far as to assume a mask; and he contemptibly betrays a trust who, instead of cultivating what is distinctive in himself, seeks to overlay and tinsel it with unnatural, uncongenial, and varying fopperies; who adapts his manner to a fashion, and changes it with the cut of his coat. Addison adopts and extends the same line of thought, attributing the main part of the absurdity and ridicule we meet with in the world to the impertinent affectation of excelling in characters men are not fit for. "It is," he says, "to this we owe the whole race of coxcombs"-finely adding, "Nature, in her whole drama, never drew such a part; she has sometimes made a fool, but a coxcomb is always of a man's own making, by applying his talents otherwise than nature designed; who ever bears a high resentment for being put out of her course, and never fails of taking her revenge on those that do so."

And here, we think, is to be found the only legitimate distinction between affectation and selfconsciousness. We do not, after all, think affectation a very common vice of this day. As each age has its own physical diseases, which in their turn give way to others, so, we think it is with moral blemishes. Affectation is not so common, nor is there the same temptation to it, as in Addison's time; but many people are called affected who are only, as we say, self-conscious-who are so constituted that they cannot quite forget themselves-who, under no circumstances whatever, could be thoroughly oblivious of how and

why they act, in little as well as great things. Now, in all this they are not acting against nature, for nature has made them thus, and they are not solicitous to look like something or somebody else, they only wish not to misrepresent and do themselves injustice. It is no merit in some people to be simple and easy; it is no fault in others to be sensitive, and forced into ill-timed speculations as to words and movements. The first have it in comfort and general favour, but they do not necessarily have it in morality. The one may be as single-minded, as little bent on pretence or display, as the other. All his care may be not to commit himself, not to produce an unfavourable impression; to do justice to good intentions. There is no harm, indeed, in a direct endeavour to do well. Nay, we can hardly withhold praise from this sort of study on particular occasions. It has added greatness to the great occasions of great men's lives; and Cæsar, wrapping his robe about him as he fell, vigilant even in that supreme moment to do nothing unbecoming, invests the whole scene with a noble decorum, which constitutes the last movement, the last folding of the hands, an adequate consummation of a heroic career. Jeremy Taylor somewhere tells of a Spanish noble who, on his way to the scaffold, incurred the rebuke of his confessor for the care with which he disposed the folds of his cloak so as not to interfere with the dignity of his ascent to the last fatal elevation. We may be sure that our bishop vindicates the action and the motive on principles of which the dull confessor could not see the weight. But it is to be assumed that men who took such pains to do themselves credit in their death, must have lived in a certain habit of intention and design-with an ideal of chivalrous grace, dignity, and refinement-with a care to do nothing unbecoming, pretty constantly before them. There may be in every society manners of this order -never, we trust, to be tested by the

poniard or the scaffold-which, without affectation, may, from the same causes, be cast in a mould distinct from the ordinary and more natural one; and which may be valuable as keeping up the general standard, and preventing ease from degenerating into carelessness and want of consideration for the claims of others. Apart from characteristic graces, we should say that he must have the best manner who has the most perfect and impartial perception on this one point-his own claims and the claims of others; and if an obtrusive and formal politeness errs on the one side, modern negligence may very well betray us into an opposite extreme. In youth, especially, we would observe that too much ease is, in all cases, a bar to excellence. Is it that ease should follow, not precede, any acquirement, and that an easy style in boyhood of writing, talking, and acting, results from not seeing the real difficulties that stand in the way of doing anything well? or that timidity and a certain backwardness are essential stages of moral immaturity, which must go before a ripe completeness? We find the authority we have before quoted, Mrs Delany, who was by common consent mistress of the art of good manners in her own time, greatly prefer for her young niece any amount of awkwardness arising from timidity, to a "too forward and pert genteelness." On the same principle, we should not augur ill for the future elegance of that young lady, whose nervous tremors, as she sat by Sydney Smith at dinner, he, with characteristic good nature, endeavoured to allay: "I observe you crumble your bread; when I dine with the Archbishop of Canterbury I crumble my bread with both hands."

Not that real awkwardness is tolerable long, but here women have a permanent advantage over men. Not only does timidity in them naturally find more graceful expression, but they can generally find something legitimate to do with their hands-some little occu