ceremonial, and be prevailed upon to sit down; and have heartily pitied
my old friend, when I have seen him forced to pick and cull his guests,
as they sat at the several parts of his table, that he might drink their
healths according to their respective ranks and qualities. Honest
_Will Wimble_, who I should have thought had been altogether
uninfected with ceremony, gives me abundance of trouble in this
particular. Though he has been fishing all the morning, he will not help
himself at dinner till I am served. When we are going out of the hall,
he runs behind me; and last night, as we were walking in the fields,
stopped short at a stile till I came up to it, and upon my making signs
to him to get over, told me, with a serious smile, that sure I believed
they had no manners in the country.

There has happened another revolution in the point of good-breeding,
which relates to the conversation among men of mode, and which I cannot
but look upon as very extraordinary. It was certainly one of the first
distinctions of a well-bred man, to express every thing that had the
most remote appearance of being obscene, in modest terms and distant
phrases; whilst the clown, who had no such delicacy of conception and
expression, clothed his _ideas_ in those plain homely terms that
are the most obvious and natural. This kind of good-manners was perhaps
carried to an excess, so as to make conversation too stiff, formal, and
precise: For which reason (as hypocrisy in one age is generally
succeeded by atheism in another) conversation is in a great measure
relapsed into the first extreme; so that at present several of our men
of the town, and particularly those who have been polished in
_France_, make use of the most coarse uncivilized words in our
language, and utter themselves often in such a manner as a clown would
blush to hear.