There is only one motto for good manners: the two words "noblesse oblige"—not in the restricted sense of the word “noblesse” but in the widest sense in which every human being has a conscious nobility. The sense of infinite obligation to one’s fellows is not easy to maintain continuously before one’s eyes, yet it is that sense, never forgotten, insistent as conscience, forcing itself to beautiful expression against the appetites and the prejudices, so ingrained by habit or disposition as to be almost unconscious, which is the root of good manners. St Paul’s “Charity” hardly transcends it, and it towers above the Catechism’s “Duty towards my neighbour” as a Gothic cathedral above a dissenting conventicle. To one in whom this sense, if not perfect, is strongly developed, a lapse from good manners brings inevitable remorse. The great prompter of these lapses is self-seeking, and that is why the best manners are to be found among those who have simplicity of soul and stability of position. The young, the ambitious, the rising with their eye on a far goal, the falling in dread of an abyss, the searcher intent on his quest, the thinker absorbed in his theory, the poet and artist hot-foot after beauty, the over-burdened toiler—all these are forced to swerve by other dominant influences from the path which good manners would point out. But for those who are contented or resigned, even for those who are complacent, the path is not so difficult to trace, for they are not hindered by thickets of their own emotions and desires, while from those whose hearts are single, serenely undistracted by the conflicting desires and aims of human life, good manners come as naturally as light from the sun. The happy ray beams forth from their personalities, illuminating all on whom it falls: it adds a quality to their glances, their voices, their very motions which irresistibly attracts the more dingy and struggling spirits of commoner humanity. It may proceed from a rugged exterior as well as from features delicately chiselled by centuries of selective generation. It is no negation, no monkish self-suppression, no humility of Uriah Heep, but a positive force issuing from a positive feeling of right pride, of “noblesse,” to which any poor-minded action or speech must seem contemptible.