BUT, as no one can please in company, however graceful in his air,
unless he be clean and neat in his person, this qualification comes next
to be considered.
NEGLIGENCE of one’s person not only implies an unsufferable indolence,
but an indifference whether we please or not. It betrays an insolence
and affectation, arising from a presumption, that we are sure of
pleasing, without having recourse to those means which many are obliged
to use.
HE who is not thoroughly clean in his person, will be offensive to all
he converses with. A particular regard to the cleanliness of your mouth,
teeth, hands and nails, is but common decency. A foul mouth and unclean
hands, are certain marks of vulgarity; the first is the cause of an
offensive breath, which nobody can bear, and the last is declarative of
dirty work; one may always know a gentleman by the state of his hands
and nails. The flesh at the roots should be kept back, so as to shew the
semicircles at the bottom of the nails; the edges of the nails should
never be cut down below the ends of the fingers, nor should they be
suffered to grow longer than the fingers. When the nails are cut down to
the quick, it is a shrewd sign that the man is a mechanic, to whom long
nails would be troublesome, or that he gets his bread by fiddling; and
if they are longer than his fingers’ ends, and encircled with a black
rim, it foretells he has been laboriously and meanly employed, and too
fatigued to clean himself; a good apology for want of cleanliness in a
mechanic, but the greatest disgrace that can attend a gentleman.
THESE things may appear too insignificant to be mentioned; but when it
is considered that a thousand little nameless things, which every one
feels, but no one can describe, conspire to form that _whole_ of
pleasing, I hope you will not call them trifling. Besides, a clean shirt
and a clean person are as necessary to health, as not to offend other
people. It is a maxim with me, which I have lived to see verified, that
he who is negligent at twenty years of age, will be a sloven at forty,
and intolerable at fifty.