GOOD MANNERS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3099, 3 June 1881, Page 4

GOOD MANNERS.

This is a grace of which I think American women are becoming careless, They are so beautiful as a race, so accustomed to conquest, that perhaps tbey are getting to believe that Pope's line, "Look in. her face and you forget them all, " applies to manners ; but a beautiful woman without good manners is a flower without fragrance. She is worse ; she becomes a positive nuisance, presuming on her beauty and abusing one of God's great gifts. You must look at her, but you look to regret, to disapprove, instead of being chained for life to " sweet looks married to graceful action," you grow to despise and hate lier. In a country like ours we must expect to find frequent coupling of ignorance witli wealth, of official station with awkwardness, of high social position with bad manners —combinations more rarely remarked in the older and more settled States of the world. Kings and Queens must be decently well bred and well educated. They cannot help knowing the proper way to eat a dinner; they cannot help knowing the proprieties of dress and etiquette, and the people immediately about them must follow their example. No such necessity exists here._ We may have a Governor or a Mayor who is entirely untrammelled by tho laws of grammar, and of spelling, who uses his own sweet will in regard to his knife and fork, and who is still the proper person to receive the representative of a foreign power. In our cities how siokening it is to see the potentiality of some vulgar rich man who can "buy tho crowd" in more sense than one. How mournful to note tho absence of good manners in somo of our prominent literary and religious celebrities—men whom you hesitate to ask to your house, although their talents are exorcising so much influence in the world, and their names are on everybody's lips. The trouble lies in a deficiency of respect, a, lack of training, an absence of something to look up to. The best bred men in America aro the officers of the regular army and navy. They have been taught to look up to, reverence, authority, and to be respectful. It nevor leaves thorn ; they become tho most dignified and the most Bimple men in the community. When women reach a larger grasp of the subject and observe this great rule, that " the possession of power is better than the show of it," they will have advanced fnr beyond their present status. The end and aim of the weak and uncertain is to appear strong and well posted, at whatever cost. It has apparently struck some women in the society of our new country, which must be On a shifting scale, that they appear to

stand well by being disagreeable ; that an air of huiteur and _uJ-:-!C?» is becoming and aristocratic. It is the mistake o_ and would soon be cured by a careful study of the best models in Europe.—Weekly Bulletin.