Your Lordship does well to upbraid me for treating in so light a manner
what deserves, indeed, the most indignant reproof. For, what is this
endeavour to quench ingenuous shame, but a blasphemous attempt to
counteract the designs of Providence, and obliterate, by main force,
one of the most natural, as well as most precious, distinctions of
early youth? Modesty is the blush of budding reason and virtue: and if
art could succeed in the preposterous project of forcing the fruit
without the bud, not only this prime grace of the year would be lost,
but the production itself, though it might be wondered at as a rarity,
could never pretend to the flavour and ripeness of that which is of
nature’s own growth.
In plain words, my Lord, modesty is the ornament of youth: and the
earnest or rather the proper cause, of all that is excellent in riper
age. It graces the boy, and, in due time, forms the man: whereas in
suppressing this young virtue, you precipitate, indeed, a sort of
manhood; which, yet, in effect, is only a perpetual boyism, or rather a
portentous mixture of both states, without the virtues of either.
I am far from meaning by all this, and your Lordship will be as far
from suspecting me to mean, that an easy unconstrained manner is not an
amiable and agreeable thing. I am only for waiting the proper time of
its appearance; which nature makes a little later than our impatient
fancies are ready to prescribe to her.
Consider too this polite accomplishment, this supreme finishing
of a well-formed character, can only be acquired, except in
some extraordinary instances, by long incessant use and habit in
conversation; which, besides the unfitness of the thing in other
respects, would dissipate the young mind too much, and take it off from
those other more important pursuits, which are proper to that age.
Nay, I might further say, and with much truth, that politeness, in your
Lordship’s, at least the court-sense of the word, is not to be attained
by the ablest men; and when it is attainable, would generally do hurt,
I mean beyond a certain degree, to its possessors.
No very great man was ever what the world calls, perfectly polite. Men
of that stamp cannot afford such attention to little things, as is
necessary to form and complete that character.
And even to men of a common make, that excessive sedulity about grace
and manner, which constitutes the essence of good-breeding, would be
injurious; as it tends to cramp their faculties, effeminate the temper,
and break that force and vigour of mind which is requisite in a man of
business for the discharge of his duty, in this free country.
So that, for any thing I see, this exquisite ease of good breeding
should be left to the ambition of still inferior spirits, of such
indeed as are conscious to themselves of an incapacity for any other.