for without Sympathy and Knowledge you have nothing to control but your physical body.  To practise Poise as a mere gymnastic exercise, or a study in etiquette, is to be self-conscious, stiff, preposterous and ridiculous.  Those who cut such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make angels weep are men void of Sympathy and Knowledge trying to cultivate Poise.  Their science is a mere matter of what to do with arms and legs.  Poise is a question of spirit controlling flesh, heart controlling attitude.  And so in the cultivation of Poise it is well to begin quite aways back.  Let perfect love cast out fear; get rid of all secrets; have nothing in your heart to conceal; be gentle, generous, kind; do not bother to forgive your enemies—­it is better to forget them, and cease conjuring them forth from your inner consciousness.  The idea that you have enemies is egotism gone to seed.  Get Knowledge by coming close to Nature, listening to her heart-beats, studying her ways.  And let your heart go out to humanity by a desire to serve.

That man is greatest who best serves his kind.  Sympathy and Knowledge are for use—­you acquire that you may give out; you accumulate that you may bestow.  And as God has given you the sublime blessings of Sympathy and Knowledge, there will come to you the wish to reveal your gratitude by giving them out again, for the wise man knows that we retain spiritual qualities only as we give them away.  Let your light shine.  To him that hath shall be given.  The exercise of wisdom brings wisdom; and at the last the infinitesimal quantity of man’s knowledge, compared with the Infinite, and the meagerness of man’s Sympathy when compared with the source from which ours is absorbed, will evolve an abnegation and a humility that will lend a perfect Poise.  The Gentleman is a man with Sympathy, Knowledge and Poise; and as I sit here in this quiet corner, Joseph Addison seems to me to fit the requirements a little better than any other name I can recall.

* * * * *

Born into a family where economy was a necessity, yet Addison had every advantage that good breeding and thorough tutorship could give.

At Charterhouse School he won the affection of his teachers by his earnest wish to comply.  The receptive spirit and the desire to please were his by inheritance.  When fifteen he went to Queen’s College, Oxford, where, within a year, his beauty, good nature and intelligence made his presence felt.

In another year he was elected a scholar at Magdalen College, his recommendation being his skill in Latin versification.

It was the hope and expectation of his parents that he should become a clergyman and follow in his father’s footsteps.  This also seems to have been the bent of the young man’s mind.  But the grace of his personality, his obliging disposition, with a sort of furtive ability to peer into a millstone as far as any, had attracted the attention of several statesmen.  One of these, Charles Montague, afterward Lord Halifax, remarked, “I am a friend of the Church, but I propose to do it the injury of keeping Addison out of it.”