To sacrifice one’s own self-love to other people’s, is a short, but, I believe, a true definition of civility:  to do it with ease, propriety and grace, is good-breeding.  The one is the result of good-nature; the other of good-sense, joined to experience, observation and attention.

4.  A ploughman will be civil, if he is good-natured, but cannot be well bred.  A courtier will be well bred though perhaps without good-nature, if he has but good sense.  Flattery is the disgrace of good-breeding, as brutality often is of truth and sincerity.  Good-breeding is the middle point between those two odious extremes.

Ceremony is the superstition of good-breeding, as well as of religion:  but yet, being an out-work to both, should not be absolutely demolished.  It is always, to a certain degree, to be complied with, though despised by those who think, because admired and respected by those who do not.

5.  The most perfect degree of good-breeding, as I have already hinted, is only to be acquired by great knowledge of the world, and keeping the best company.  It is not the object of mere speculation, and cannot be exactly defined, as it consists in a fitness, a propriety of words, actions, and even looks, adapted to the infinite variety and combinations of persons, places, and things.  It is a mode, not a substance; for what is good-breeding at St. James’s, would pass for foppery or banter in a remote village; and the homespun civility of that village would be considered as brutality at court.

6.  A cloistered pedant may form true notions of civility; but if amidst the cobwebs of his cell he pretends to spin a speculative system of good-breeding, he will not be less absurd than his predecessor, who judiciously undertook to instruct Hannibal, in the art of war.  The most ridiculous and most aukward of men are, therefore, the speculatively well bred monks of all religions and all professions.

7.  Good-breeding, like charity, not only covers a multitude of faults, but, to a certain degree, supplies the want of some virtues.  In the common intercourse of life, it nets good-nature, and often does what good-nature will not always do; it keeps both wits and fools within those bounds of decency, which the former are too apt to transgress, and which the latter never know.  Courts are unquestionably the seats of good-breeding and must necessarily be so; otherwise they would be the seats of violence and desolation.  There all the passions are in their highest state of fermentation.

8.  All pursue what but few can obtain, and many seek what but one can enjoy.  Good-breeding alone restrains their excesses.  There, if enemies did not embrace they would stab.  There, smiles are often put on to conceal tears.  There, mutual services are professed, while mutual injuries are intended; and there, the guile of the serpent stimulates the gentleness of the dove:  all this, it is true, at the expense of sincerity; but upon the whole, to the advantage of social intercourse in general.