17.  When the nails are cut down to the quick, it is a shrewd sign that the man is a mechanic, to whom long nails would be troublesome, or that he gets his bread by fiddling; and if they are longer than his fingers ends, and encircled with a black rim, it foretells he has been laboriously and meanly employed, and too fatigued to clean himself:  a good apology for want of cleanliness in a mechanic, but the greatest disgrace that can attend a gentleman.

18.  These things may appear too significant to be mentioned; but when it is considered that a thousand little nameless things, which every one feels but no one can describe, conspire to form that whole of pleasing, I hope you will not call them trifling.  Besides a clean shirt and a clean person are as necessary to health, as not to offend other people.  It is a maxim with me, which I have lived to see verified, that he who is negligent at twenty years of age, will be a sloven at forty, and intolerable at fifty.

Dress.

19.  Neatness of person I observed was as necessary as cleanliness; of course some attention must be paid to your dress.

Such is the absurdity of the times, that to pass well with the world, we must adopt some of its customs, be they ridiculous or not.

20.  In the first place, to neglect one’s dress is to affront all the female part of our acquaintance.  The women in particular pay an attention to their dress; to neglect, therefore, your’s, will displease them, as it would be tacitly taxing them with vanity, and declaring that you thought them not worth the respect which every body else does.  And, as I have mentioned before, as it is the women who stamp a young man’s credit in the fashionable world, if you do not make yourself agreeable to the women, you will assuredly lose ground among the men.

21.  Dress, as trifling as it may appear to a man of understanding, prepossesses on the first appearance, which is frequently decisive; and indeed we may form some opinion of a man’s sense and character from his dress.  Any exceeding of the fashion, or any affectation in dress whatever, argues a weakness of understanding, and nine times out of ten it will be found so.

22.  There are few young fellows but what display some character or other in this shape.  Some would be thought fearless and brave:  these wear a black cravat, a short coat and waistcoat, an uncommon long sword hanging to their knees, a large hat fiercely cocked, and are flash all over.  Others affect to be country squires; these will go about in buckskin breeches, brawn frocks, and great oaken cudgels in their hands, slouched hats, with their hair undressed and tucked up behind them to an enormous size, and imitate grooms and country boobies so well externally, that there is not the least doubt of their resembling them as well internally.

23.  Others, again, paint and powder themselves so much, and dress so finically, as leads us to suppose they are only women in boy’s clothes.  Now a sensible man carefully avoids all this, or any other affectation.  He dresses as fashionable and well as persons of the best families and best sense; if he exceeds them, he is a coxcomb; if he dresses worse, he is unpardonable.