This is a point I wish to urge on you, even more strongly with regard to
servants. There is great meanness in any display of ill-temper towards
those who will probably lose their place and their character, if they
are tempted by your provocation (and without your restraints of
good-breeding and good education) to the same display of ill-temper that
you yourself are guilty of. On the other hand, there is no better
evidence of dignity, self-respect, and refined generosity of
disposition, than a scrupulous politeness in requiring and requiting
those services for which the low-minded imagine that their money is a
sufficient payment. You will not alone receive as a recompense the love
and the grateful respect of those who serve you, but you will also be
forming habits which will offer a powerful resistance to the temptations
of ill-humour.

You will not surely object to any of the precautions or the practices
recommended above, that they are too trifling or too troublesome; you
have suffered so much from your besetting sin, that I can suppose you
willing to try every possible means of cure.

You should, however, to strengthen your desire of resistance and of
victory, look much further than the unpleasant consequences of
ill-temper in your own case alone. You are still young, life has gone
prosperously with you, the present is fair and smiling, and the future
full of bright hopes; you have, comparatively speaking, few occasions
for irritation or despondency. A naturally warm temper is seen in you
under the least forbidding aspect, combined, as it is, with gay animal
spirits, strong affections, and ready good nature. You need only to look
around, however, to see the probability of things being quite different
with you some years hence, unless a thorough present change is effected.
Look at those cases (only too numerous and too apparent) in which