It is generally believed that Lord Chesterfield invented manners: but as he was not born until 1694, just as the seventeenth century was getting staggeringly infirm and indifferent to its externals, and as he did not procure the publication of his Letters until the characters on the blue slate-stones over the bones of the deceased age had become blurred and weather-dimmed, the question of the comparison of their manners with his patent methods and rules did not, we may well believe, much vex those earnest old toilers of the sea and on the land. Single figures stand out in sharp and pleasing picturesqueness against the distant horizon of those Colonial days; in Virginia, John Rolfe; in New York, Petrus Stuyvesant; in Massachusetts, John Eliot; George Calvert, in Maryland; Theophilus Eaton, in Connecticut; Sir John Yeomans, in North Carolina; Roger Williams, in Rhode Island; and many others, who seem in their granite integrity to be poised, like calm sculpture, in ruff and wrist-frill, broad-lapelled coats, short-clothes, silk stockings, and real, unplated silver knee and sleeve buckles.—These figures, tall and stately, with high-bred, courtly manners, bland faces lit up by purposes and convictions, with large, generous waistcoats, made capacious for the pendulations of their big, loving hearts beneath, still arrest our admiring eyes. The great mass of the Colonists, however, were resolute workers, living on a spare diet, sleeping on hard beds, with shake-downs for their friendly, and shake-ups for their unfriendly, guests. Their tastes were simple and confined to a few objects. Those modern houses in which we dwell, more appropriately called museums, the best parts kept for show, and having not one, but several mermaids, a What-is-it, and an assortment of woolly animals with tails for heads, and heads omitted, would have paralyzed and shocked the most advanced Colonists. Their manners were taking, but they were mainly exhibited in taking grain from the fields, fish from the sea, and scant returns from their store sales. The graces were shown mainly by husbands in lifting their spouses on and off pillions, to and from church, and by young men in those sweetly rough compliments that love contrives in all times, and among all classes, to shape out from a scanty, lingual stock in exchange for sheep’s-eyes and assenting blushes.