CONVERSATION. In table talk I prefer the pleasant and witty before the learned and grave.-Montaigne. The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit.-Sir W. Temple. He that questioneth much shall learn much, and content much; but especially if he apply his questions to the skill of the persons whom he asketh; for he shall give them occasion to please themselves in speaking, and himself shall continually gather knowledge; but let his questions not be troublesome, for that is fit for a poser; and let him be sure to leave other men their turn to speak; nay, if there be any that would reign and take up all the time, let him find means to take them off, and bring others on, - - as musicians used to do with those that dance too long galliards. If you dissemble sometimes your knowledge of that you are thought to know, you shall be thought, another time, to know that you know not.-Bacon. In conversation, humor is more than wit, easiness more than knowledge; few desire to learn, or think they need it; all desire to be Reasonable men are the best dictionaries of pleased, or, at least, to be easy.conversation.-Goethe. Sir W. Temple. Topics of conversation among the multitude are generally persons, sometimes things, scarcely ever principles.-W. B. Clulow. Never hold any one by the button or the hand in order to be heard out; for if people are unwilling to hear you, you had better hold your tongue than them.-Chesterfield. Those persons who never speak till they can make a hit are insufferable. They oblige you to fill up the embroidery of which they will only do the flowers.-Madame Necker. I would establish but one general rule to be observed in all conversation, which is this, that men should not talk to please themselves, but those that hear them.-Steele. COQUETRY. The adoration of his heart had been to her only as the perfume of a wild flower which she had carelessly crushed with her foot in passing. Longfellow. To boast that we never coquet is itself a sort of coquetry.-Rochefoucauld. Heartlessness and fascination, in about Repose is as necessary in conversation as in equal quantities, constitute the receipt for forma picture.-Hazlitt. ing the character of a court coquette.Madame Deluxy. A conversation ought no more to be like a written discourse, than the latter like a conversation. What is pretty singular is, those who fall into the former blemish seldom escape the other; because, being in the habit of speaking as they would write, they imagine they ought to write as they speak. It should be a rule that a man cannot be too much on his guard when he writes to the public, and never too easy towards those with whom he converses. D'Alembert. An accomplished coquette excites the passions of others in proportion as she feels none herself.-Hazlitt. The characteristic of a coquette is affectation governed by whim; for as beauty, wit, goodnature, politeness, and health are sometimes affected by this creature, so are ugliness, folly, nonsense, ill-nature, ill-breeding, and sickness likewise put on by it in their turn. Its life is one constant lie; and the only rule by which you can form any judgment of them is that they are never what they seem.-Fielding. All women seem by nature to be coquettes, though all do not practise coquetry. Some are restrained by reason, some by fear; none are aware of the extent of their coquetry. Rochefoucauld. There are many women who have never intrigued, and many men who have never gamed; but those who have done either but once are very extraordinary animals, and more worthy of a glass case when they die than half the exotics in the British Museum.-Colton. There is one antidote only for coquetry, and that is true love.-Madame Deluzy. A coquette is one that is never to be persuaded out of the passion she has to please, nor out of a good opinion of her own beauty; time and years she regards as things that only wrinkle and decay other women; forgets that age is written in the face, and that the same dress which became her when she was young now only makes her look the older. Affectation cleaves to her even in sickness and pain; she dies in a high-head and colored ribbons.— Bruyère The coquette who sacrifices the ease and reputation of as many as she is able to an illnatured vanity, is a more pernicious creature than the wretch whom fondness betrays to make her lover happy, at the expense of her own reputation.-Fielding. A coquette is a young lady of more beauty than sense, more accomplishments than learning, more charms of person than graces of mind, more admirers than friends, more fools than wise men for attendants.-Longfellow. Men are taught virtue and a love of independence by living in the country.-Menander. The city reveals the moral ends of being, and sets the awful problem of life. The country soothes us, refreshes us, lifts us up with religious suggestion.— Chapin. If country life be healthful to the body, it is no less so to the mind.-Ruffini. Sunny spots of greenery.-Coleridge. In those vernal seasons of the year, when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth.-Milton. I consider it the best part of an education to have been born and brought up in the country. Alcott. COURAGE. True courage is the result of reasoning. A brave mind is always impregnable. Resolution lies more in the head than in the veins, and a bud.just sense of honor and of infamy, of duty and Shakespeare. of religion, will carry us farther than all the force of mechanism.-Jeremy Collier. Loathsome canker lives in sweetest COUNTRY. Seldom shall we see in cities, courts, and rich families, where men live plentifully and eat and drink freely, that perfect health, that athletic soundness and vigor of constitution which is commonly seen in the country, in poor houses and cottages, where nature is their cook, and necessity their caterer, and where they have no other doctor but the sun and fresh air, and that such a one as never sends them to the apothecary-South. One gets sensitive about losing mornings after getting a little used to them with living in the country. Each one of these endlessly varied daybreaks is an opera but once performed.— Willis. Nor rural sights alone, but rural sounds, exhilarate the spirit and restore the tone of languid nature. Cowper. God is the brave man's hope and not the coward's excuse.— Plutarch. Let him not imagine who aims at greatness that all is lost by a single adverse cast of for tune; for if fortune has at one time the better of courage, courage may afterwards recover the advantage. He who is prepossessed with the assurance of overcoming at least overcomes the fear of failure; whereas he who is apprehensive of losing loses, in reality, all hopes of subduing. Boldness and power are such inseparable companions that they appear to be born together; and when once divided, they both decay and die at the same time.-Archbishop Venn. If we survive danger, it steels our courage more than anything else.-Niebuhr. Physical courage, which despises all danger, There is virtue in country houses, in gar-will make a man brave in one way; and moral dens and orchards, in fields, streams, and groves, in rustic recreations and plain manners, that neither cities nor universities enjoy.-Alcott. Sir, when you have seen one green field, you have seen all green fields. Let us walk down Cheapside.—Johnson. Ask any school-boy up to the age of fifteen where he would spend his holidays. Not one in five hundred will say, "In the streets of London," if you give him the option of green fields and running waters. It is, then, a fair presumption that there must be something of the child still in the character of the men or the women whom the country charms in maturer as in dawning life.-Bulwer Lytton. courage, which despises all opinion, will make a man brave in another. The former would seem most necessary for the camp, the latter for council; but to constitute a great man, both are necessary!-Colton. Much danger makes great hearts most res olute.-Marston. Women and men of retiring timidity are cowardly only in dangers which affect themselves, but the first to rescue when others are endangered.—Richter. It is not our criminal actions that require courage to confess, but those which are ridicu lous and foolish.-Rousseau. Courage without discipline is nearer beastliness than manhood.-Sir P. Sidney. An intrepid courage is at best but a holiday kind of virtue, to be seldom exercised, and never but in cases of necessity; affability, mildness, tenderness, and a word which I would fain bring back to its original signification of virtue, I mean good-nature, are of daily use; they are the bread of mankind and staff of life. - Dryden. Courage consists not in blindly overlooking danger, but in seeing it and conquering it.— Richter. True courage is cool and calm. The bravest of men have the least of a brutal bullying insolence; and in the very time of danger are found the most serene and free. Rage, we know, can make a coward forget himself and fight. But what is done in fury or anger can never be placed to the account of courage.-Shaftesbury. Who hath not courage to revenge will never find generosity to forgive.-Henry Home. The truest courage is always mixed with circumspection; this being the quality which distinguishes the courage of the wise from the hardiness of the rash and foolish. Jones of Nayland. Before putting yourself in peril, it is necessary to foresee and fear it; but when one is there, nothing remains but to despise it.— A brave man thinks no one his superior who does him an injury; for he has it then in his power to make himself superior to the other by forgiving it.-Pope. There is no courage but in innocence; no constancy but in an honest cause.-Southern. Courage is always greatest when blended with meekness; intellectual ability is most admirable when it sparkles in the setting of a modest self-distrust; and never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.-Chapin. There is no impossibility to him who stands prepared to conquer every hazard; the fearful are the failing.—Mrs. S. J. Hale. Courage ought to be guided by skill, and skill armed by courage. Neither should hardiness darken wit, nor wit cool hardiness. Be valiant as men despising death, but confident as unwonted to be overcome.—Sir P. Sidney. Courage consists not in hazarding without fear, but being resolutely minded in a just cause.-Plutarch. Courage is poorly housed that dwells in numbers; the lion never counts the herd that are about him, nor weighs how many flocks he has to scatter.-Aaron Hill. I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none.-Shakespeare. The brave man is not he who feels no fear, for that were stupid and irrational; but he whose noble soul its fear subdues, and bravely dares the danger nature shrinks from.— COURTESY. Joanna Baillie. Fenelon. Courage, so far as it is a sign of race, is peculiarly the mark of a gentleman or a lady; but it becomes vulgar if rude or insensitive, while timidity is not vulgar, if it be a character- When we are saluted with a salutation, saistic of race or fineness of make. A fawn is lute the person with a better salutation, or at not vulgar in being timid, nor a crocodile least return the same, for God taketh an ac"gentle" because courageous.-Ruskin. count of all things.-Koran. Nothing costs less nor is cheaper than compliments of civility.-Cervantes. When Zachariah Fox, the great merchant of Liverpool, was asked by what means he contrived to realize so large a fortune as he possessed, his reply was: Friend, by one article alone, and in which thou mayest deal too, if thou pleasest,—it is civility.”—Bentley. What fairer cloak than courtesy for fraud?- Hail! ye small sweet courtesies of life, for smooth do ye make the road of it, like grace and beauty, which beget inclinations to love at first sight; it is ye who open the door and let the stranger in.-Sterne. There is a courtesy of the heart; it is allied to love. From it springs the purest courtesy in the outward behavior.-Goethe. The small courtesies sweeten life; the greater ennoble it.-Bovee. Courtesy which oft is sooner found in lowly sheds, with smoky rafters, than in tapestry halls and courts of princes, where it first was named. Milton. O dissembling courtesy! how fine this tyrant can tickle where she wounds! -Shakespeare. As the sword of the best-tempered metal is most flexible, so the truly generous are most pliant and courteous in their behavior to their inferiors.-Fuller. The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.-Emerson. When my friends are blind of one eye, I look at them in profile.-Joubert. Great talents, such as honor, virtue, learning, and parts, are above the generality of the world, who neither possess them themselves, nor judge of them rightly in others; but all people are judges of the lesser talents, such as civility, affability, and an obliging, agreeable address and manner, because they feel the good effects of them, as making society easy and pleasing.-Chesterfield. A good word is an easy obligation; but not to speak ill requires only our silence, which Approved valor is made precious by natural costs us nothing.-Tillotson. courtesy.-Sir P. Sidney. We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.-Emerson. COURTIER. The chief requisites for a courtier are a flexible conscience and an inflexible politeness. Lady Blessington. Courtesy is a science of the highest impor- Poor wretches that depend on greatness's tance. It is, like grace and beauty in the body, favor dream as I have done; wake and find which charm at first sight, and lead on to fur-nothing.-Shakespeare. ther intimacy and friendship, opening a door that we may derive instruction from the example of others, and at the same time enabling us to benefit them by our example, if there be anything in our character worthy of imitation.— Montaigne. The court does not render a man contented, but it prevents his being so elsewhere.-Bruyère. A courtier's dependant is a beggar's dog.Shenstone. Not a courtier, although they wear their faces to the bent of the king's looks, hath a heart that is not glad at the thing they scowl at. Shakespeare. A court is an assemblage of noble and distinguished beggars.-Talleyrand. COURTSHIP. Courtship consists in a number of quiet at A churlish courtesy rarely comes but either tentions, not so pointed as to alarm, nor so for gain or falsehood.-Sir P. Sidney. vague as not to be understood.-Sterne. |