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"Politeness has been compared to an air cushion, which, although there is apparently nothing in it,eases our jolts wonderfully."
President Jefferson was one day riding with his grandson, when they met a slave, who took off his hat and bowed. The President returned the salutation by raising his hat, but the grandson ignored the civility of the negro. " Thomas," said
the grandfather, "do you permit a slave to be more of a gentleman than yourself?"
'''' Lincoln was the first great man I talked with freely in the United States," said Fred Douglass, " who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and me, of the difference in color."
" Eat at your own table," says Confucius, " as you would eat at the table of the king." If parents were not careless about the manners of their children at home, they would seldom be shocked or embarrassed at their behavior abroad.
The monk Basle, according to a quaint old legend, died while under the ban of excommunication by the pope, and was sent in charge of an angel to find his proper place in the nether world. But his genial disposition and great conversational powers won friends wherever he went. The fallen angels adopted his manner, and even the good angels went a long way to see him and live with him. He was removed to the lowest depths of Hades, but with the same result. His inborn politeness and kindness of heart were irresistible, and he seemed to change the hell into a heaven. At length the angel returned with the monk, saying that no place could be found in which to punish him. He still remained the same Basle. So his sentence was revoked, and he was sent to Heaven and canonized as a saint.
Aristotle thus described a real gentleman more than two thousand years ago: " The magnanimous man will behave with moderation under both good fortune and bad. He will not allow himself to be exalted; he will not allow himself to be abased. He will neither be delighted with success, nor grieved with failure.He will never choose danger, nor seek it. He is not given to talk about himself or others He does not care that he himself should be praised, nor that other people should be blamed."
A gentleman is just a gentle man: no more, no less; a diamond polished that was first a diamond in the rough. A gentleman is gentle, modest, courteous, slow to take offense, and never giving it. He is slow to surmise evil, as he never thinks it He subjects his appetites, refines his tastes, subdues his feelings, controls his speech, and deems every other person as good as himself. A gentleman, like porcelain-ware, must be painted before he is glazed. There can be no change after it is burned in, and all that is put on afterwards will wash off. He who has lost all but retains his courage, cheerfulness, hope, virtue, and selfrespect, is a true gentleman, and is rich still
No one can fully estimate how great a factor in life is the possession of good manners, or timely thought-fulness with human sympathy behind it. They are the kindly fruit of a refined nature, and are the open sesame to the best of society. Manners are what vex or soothe, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us by a constant, steady, uniform, invincible operation like that of the air we breathe. Even power itself has not half the might of gentleness, that subtle oil which lubricates our relations with each other, and enables the machinery of society to perform its functions without friction.
"Have you not seen in the woods, in a late autumn morning," asks Emerson, " a poor fungus, or mushroom,—a plant without any solidity, nay, that seemed nothing but a soft mush or jelly,—by its constant, total, and Inconceivably gentle pushing, manage to break its way up through the frosty ground, and actually to lift a hard crust on its head? It is the symbol of the power of kindness." " There is no policy like politeness," says Magoon; "since a good manner often succeeds where the best tongue has failed."
The art of pleasing is the art of rising in the world.
- O.S Marden |