Manners And Social Usages

gossip, backbiting, divorce, and slander. They read that the fashionable people at popular resorts commit all sorts of vulgarities, such as talking aloud at the opera, and disturbing their neighbors; that young men go to. a dinner, get drunk, and break glasses; and one ingenuous young girl remarks, "We do not call that good society in Atlanta." Such a letter might have been written to that careful chronicler of " good society " in the days of Charles II., old Pepys of courtly fame. The young maiden of Hertfordshire, far from the Court, might well have thought of Rochester and such "gay sparks," and the ladies who threw glasses of wine at them, as not altogether well-bred, nor entitled to admission into "good society." We cannot blame her. It is the old story. Where, too, as in our land, pleasure and luxury rule a certain set-who enjoy no tradition of good manners, the contradiction in terms ARROGANCE OP FASHION. 37 is the more apparent. Even the external forms of respect to good manners are wanting. No such overt vulgarity, for instance, as talking aloud at the opera will ever be endured in London, because a powerful class of really well-born and well-bred people will hiss it down, and insist on the quiet which music, of all other things, demands. That is what we mean by a tradition of good manners. In humbler society, we may say as in the household of a Scotch peasant, such as was the father of Carlyle, the breaches of manners which are often seen ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.