charming humor. This latter gift shows in the seeming lapses from his
rigid rule requiring absolute elegance of expression at all times, when
an unexpected coarseness, in some provincial colloquialism, crops out
with picturesque force. The beau ideal of superfineness occasionally
enjoys the bliss of harking back to mother English.

Above all the defects that can be charged against the Letters, there
rises the substantial merit of an honest effort to exalt the gentle in
woman and man--above the merely genteel. "He that is gentil doeth gentil
deeds," runs the mediaeval saying which marks the distinction between the
genuine and the sham in behavior. A later age had it thus: "Handsome is
as handsome does," and in this larger sense we have agreed to accept the
motto of William of Wykeham, which declares that "Manners maketh Man."
OLIVER H. G. LEIGH




LETTER I

BATH, October 9, O. S. 1746

DEAR BOY: Your distresses in your journey from Heidelberg to
Schaffhausen, your lying upon straw, your black bread, and your broken
'berline,' are proper seasonings for the greater fatigues and distresses
which you must expect in the course of your travels; and, if one had a
mind to moralize, one might call them the samples of the accidents, rubs,
and difficulties, which every man meets with in his journey through life.
In this journey, the understanding is the 'voiture' that must carry you
through; and in proportion as that is stronger or weaker, more or less in