It is very difficult for a non-ceremonious people to understand the precise value of old ceremonial forms. Even the poor and meagre survivals of them seem devoid of meaning to those who do not practise them at all, yet assuredly they had a meaning which was not exactly that of the words employed. After much reflection and much studying of the matter, as a barbarian, from the outside, I have come to the conclusion that a great repertory of formal phrases would be valued as a means of decently concealing the emptiness of genteel intercourse. To us they are embarrassing because we have not learned our lesson well, but the French upper classes of the eighteenth century knew them all by heart, and could repeat them without thinking. When people take any serious interest in a subject worth talking about, polite phrases are forgotten, the only instance to the contrary that I remember being the pretty one of a French professor lecturing in the royal presence, when he announced that two gases would “have the honour of combining before His Majesty.” [Sidenote: Embarrassments of Social Intercourse.] The real embarrassments of social intercourse are awkward silence, stiffness, ignorance of conventional usages. As for the degree of affectation or falsity that there may be in the expression of so many amiable or deferential sentiments that one does not exactly feel, everybody knows that they have only a secondary signification. [Sidenote: Our Opinion about Foreign Manners.] [Sidenote: English Simplicity.] In any attempt to judge of manners, especially in a foreign nation, we are liable to two mistakes. We are likely to think that a degree of polish inferior to our own is rudeness, whilst the refinement that surpasses ours is affectation, we ourselves having exactly that perfection of good breeding which is neither one nor the other. An Englishman is particularly liable to think in this way, because the present English ideal of good manners is a studied simplicity. We come to think that a simple manner is unaffected, whilst high polish must have been learned from the etiquette-book. However, in a perfectly bred French gentleman, a somewhat ceremonious manner with a vigilant politeness is so habitual as to be second nature. It remains constantly the same; if it were only assumed, it would be involuntarily forgotten in privacy or in moments of fatigue or vexation. The history of the relation between English and French manners may be conveniently divided into three periods. [Sidenote: Manners in the Eighteenth Century.] [Sidenote: The French retain old Fashions.]