average spirit of the energetic class is good sense, acting under certain limitations and to certain ends.  It entertains every natural gift.  Social in its nature, it respects everything which tends to unite men.  It delights in measure.[426] The love of beauty is mainly the love of measure or proportion.  The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight.  If you wish to be loved, love measure.  You must have genius, or a prodigious usefulness, if you will hide the want of measure.  This perception comes in to polish and perfect the parts of the social instrument.  Society will pardon much to genius and special gifts, but, being in its nature a convention, it loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming together.  That makes the good and bad of manners, namely, what helps or hinders fellowship.  For, fashion is not good sense absolute, but relative; not good sense private, but good sense entertaining company.  It hates corners and sharp points of character, hates quarrelsome, egotistical, solitary, and gloomy people; hates whatever can interfere with total blending of parties; whilst it values all peculiarities as in the highest degree refreshing, which can consist with good fellowship.  And besides the general infusion of wit to heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society as the costliest addition to its rule and its credit.

15.  The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, but it must be tempered and shaded, or that will also offend.  Accuracy is essential to beauty, and quick perceptions to politeness, but not too quick perceptions.  One may be too punctual and too precise.  He must leave the omniscience of business at the door, when he comes into the palace of beauty.  Society loves creole natures,[427] and sleepy, languishing manners, so that they cover sense, grace, and good-will:  the air of drowsy strength, which disarms criticism; perhaps, because such a person seems to reserve himself for the best of the game, and not spend himself on surfaces; an ignoring eye, which does not see the annoyances, shifts, and inconveniences, that cloud the brow and smother the voice of the sensitive.

16.  Therefore, besides personal force and so much perception as constitutes unerring taste, society demands in its patrician class, another element already intimated, which it significantly terms good-nature, expressing all degrees of generosity, from the lowest willingness and faculty to oblige, up to the heights of magnanimity and love.  Insight we must have, or we shall run against one another, and miss the way to our food; but intellect is selfish and barren.  The secret of success in society, is a certain heartiness and sympathy.  A man who is not happy in the company, cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion.  All his information is a little impertinent.  A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the