Our Deportment: Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined SocietyYoung, John H.
General
Our Deportment: Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society
Young, John H.
Etiquette
A charming manner not only enhances personal beauty, but even hides
ugliness and makes plainness agreeable. An ill-favored countenance is
not necessarily a stumbling-block, at the outset, to its owner, which
cannot be surmounted, for who does not know how much a happy manner
often does to neutralize the ill effects of forbidding looks? The
fascination of the demagogue Wilkes's manner triumphed over both
physical and moral deformity, rendering even his ugliness agreeable; and
he boasted to Lord Townsend, one of the handsomest men in Great Britain,
that "with half an hour's start he would get ahead of his lordship in
the affections of any woman in the kingdom." The ugliest Frenchman,
perhaps, that ever lived was Mirabeau; yet such was the witchery of his
manner, that the belt of no gay Lothario was hung with a greater number
of bleeding female hearts than this "thunderer of the tribune," whose
looks were so hideous that he was compared to a tiger pitted with the
small-pox.
FORTUNES MADE BY PLEASING MANNERS.
Pleasing manners have made the fortunes of men in all professions and in
every walk of life--of lawyers, doctors, clergymen, merchants, clerks
and mechanics--and instances of this are so numerous that they may be
recalled by almost any person. The politician who has the advantage of a
courteous, graceful and pleasing manner finds himself an easy winner in
the race with rival candidates, for every voter with whom he speaks
becomes instantly his friend. Civility is to a man what beauty is to a
woman. It creates an instantaneous impression in his behalf, while
gruffness or coarseness excites as quick a prejudice against him. It is
an ornament, worth more as a means of winning favor than the finest
clothes and jewels ever worn. Lord Chesterfield said the art of pleasing
is, in truth, the art of rising, of distinguishing one's self, of making
a figure and a fortune in the world. Some years ago a drygoods salesman
in a London shop had acquired such a reputation for courtesy and
exhaustless patience, that it was said to be impossible to provoke from
him any expression of irritability, or the smallest symptom of vexation.
A lady of rank learning of his wonderful equanimity, determined to put
it to the test by all the annoyances with which a veteran shop-visitor
knows how to tease a shopman. She failed in her attempt to vex or
irritate him, and thereupon set him up in business. He rose to eminence
in trade, and the main spring of his later, as of his earlier career,
was politeness. Hundreds of men, like this salesman, have owed their
start in life wholly to their pleasing address and manners.
CULTIVATION OF GOOD MANNERS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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