ritance and our portion; to keep the purest faculties, the noblest energies of intellect, the powers and compass of the soul, exalted and ascendant, elevated high above the transient and embarrassed scene of temporal vicissitudes and exigencies; should be the proper aim of the philosopher, aud is the great prerogative of the

POTT.

CHRISTIAN.

No. XXV.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1787.

Decipimur specie.

THERE are, I believe, no paths of literature so beset with difficulties as definition and biography. Of difficulties unsurmounted in biography we have lamentable instances in those adventurers who have attempted to write the life of Johnson; and the errors of definition are sufficiently apparent in those who have laboured to instruct the world wherein consists true politeness.

From the writings of lord Chesterfield, we collect, that politeness consists in the nameless trifles of an easy carriage, an unembarrassed air, and a due portion of supercilious effrontery. The attainment of these perfections is the grand object to which the son of many a fond and foolish parent is directed, from whose conduct one might reasonably

suppose they thought every accomplishment, necessary or ornamental to man, attainable through the medium of the tailor, the hair-dresser, and the dancing-master; reserving only for the mind such salutary precepts as may tend to inspire pertness and insolent confidence.

In the Galateo of the Archbishop of Benevento* are contained all the rules which are necessary to introduce a person into company, and to regulate his behaviour when introduced. Yet I cannot but think the plan of this, and every other treatise, too much confined, which would inform us, that it is the principal end of this qualification to fix the minutiæ of dress, and reduce manners to a system. He is supposed to have attained the summit of politeness, who can take an apparent interest in the concern of people for whom he has no regard; be earnest in inquiries after persons for whose welfare he is not solicitous; and discipline his bow, his smile, and his tongue, to all rules of studied grimace and agreeable insipidity. Thus, that politeness of which we hear so much, the race which every toothless dotard has run, and the goal to which every beardless fool is hastening, is only an hypocritical show of feelings we do not possess; an art by which we conciliate the favour of others to our own interest.-The two characters which are generally contrasted with each other, in order to show the perfection of politeness, and the extreme of its opposite, are the soldier and the scholar the former is exhibited to us with all the ornament of graceful manners and bodily accom

* Monsign. Giovanni de la Casa.

plishments, with the advantages of early intercourse with the world, and the profit of observation from foreign travel. The advantages here enumerated, will, I fear, upon a nearer survey of them, appear visionary and unsubstantial, and not such as are likely, in the end, to justify the hopes of those, who, in the great love for their country, remove their sons from school before they can have answered any end for which they were sent thither; and produce them to the world before they can have any fixed principle to be the guide of their conduct. They make observations, of which ignorance and wonder are the source; they form opinions in which judgment has no share; they tra vel; and he who sets out a Mummius is foolishly expected to return home a Cæsar. In enumerating the disadvantages under which the scholar labours, we are reminded, that a studious and sedentary life are too apt to generate peevish and morose habits, the bane of society, and the torment of their own possessor. We are told that the student, receiving no impressions but such as books are likely to make, cannot apply his observations to the usage of common life; that he forms Utopian opinions, and is surprised to find they cannot 'be realized; that he becomes jealous of the dignity of literature, for which the world seems to have too little respect; and that the life, which was begun with the hopes of excelling in those pursuits wherein he finds few competitors, is at length concluded in the disappointment of expected reputation, or the scarce more sensible gratification of triumphs thinly attended, and applauses partially given. In such colours is the studious man painted to us, by

our arbiters of elegance, who, in their obliging zeal for the regulation of our manners, confound learning with pedantry; and, under pretence of removing from us a trifling evil, would rob us of a substantial good.

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Learning," says Shenstone, "like money, may be of so base a coin, as to be utterly void of use; or, if sterling, may require good management to make it serve the purposes of sense and happiness.” What Shenstone has here with truth affirmed may be, there are others who have ventured with some confidence to declare must be.

True as it is, it would no doubt appear a paradox to many, should any one affirm, that the surest method of attaining politeness is to seek it through the medium of literature. We should have thought less of the politeness of Cæsar, but for the author of his Commentaries. Crichton would not have been called the mirror of politeness, merely for his skill in the tournament; nor would "Granville the polite" have been the theme of Mr. Pope's song, for his address in entering a room. The truth is, we mistake a mental qualification for a bodily one. We expect politeness to be conveyed to us with our coat from the tailor, or that we may extract it from the heel of a dancing-master; 'when, in fact, it is only to be obtained by cultivating the understanding, and imbibing that sense of propriety in behaviour, with which the deportment of the body has, but at best, a secondary concern. I know not why it is, but from our misinterpretation of the word, that politeness, when applied to a virtuous action, immediately becomes ridiculous. Who would not suppose the chastity of the Roman general ironi

cally commended, who should call that the politeness of Scipio, which others have called his continence? Or would not the congregation of a grave ́divine be somewhat surprised to hear their preacher celebrating the politeness of the good Samaritan? Yet these acts are the substance of that virtue, to whose shadow we compliment away our rights and opinions, frequently our honesty, and sometimes our interests.

"Politeness," says a good author of our own time," is nothing more than an elegant and con cealed species of flattery, tending to put the person to whom it is addressed, in good humour and respect with himself."

It is rather, in my opinion, the badge of an enlightened mind, and, if not a positive virtue in itself, it is, at least, a testimony that its possessor has many qualifications which are really such.-It lives in every article of his conduct, and regulates his behaviour on every occasion, not according to the whimsical and capricious rules of fashion, but according to some fixed principles of judgment and propriety. It prevents the impertinence of unseasonable joking, it restrains wit which might wound the feelings of another, and conciliates favour, not by" an elegant and concealed flattery," but by a visible inclination to oblige, which is dignified and undissembled. To the acquisition of this rare quality so much of enlightened understanding is necessary, that I cannot but consider every book in every good science, which tends to make us wiser, and of course better men, as a treatise on a more enlarged system of politeness, not excluding the experiments of Archimedes, or the elements of Euclid. It is a