I suppose there was never yet a woman who had not somewhere set up on a pedestal in her brain an ideal of manhood. He is by no means immutable, this paragon. On the contrary, he changes very often.

If, however, the woman whose ideal he is grows upward in every way as she grows older, then these changes all go to improve him, and by the time he is finished he is a very fine creature. He never is finished till the brain of his creator ceases to work, till she has added her last touch to him, and has laid down the burden of life and gone elsewhere, perhaps to some happy land where ideals are more frequently realised than ever happens here.

Like every other woman, I have my ideal of manhood. The difficulty is to describe it. First of all, he must be a gentleman; but that means so much that it, in its turn, requires explanation. Gentleness and moral strength combined must be the salient characteristics of the “gentleman,” together with that polish that is never acquired but in one way: constant association with those so happily placed that they have enjoyed the influences of education and refinement all through their lives. He must be thoughtful for others, kind to women and children and all helpless things, tender-hearted to the old and the poor and the unhappy, but never foolishly weak in giving where gifts do

harm instead of good—his brain must be as fine as his heart, in fact. There are few such men; but they do exist. I know one or two. Reliable as rocks, judicious in every action, dependable in trifles as well as the large affairs of life, full of mercy and kindness to others, affectionate and well-loved in their homes, their lives are pure and kindly.

It was once said by a clever man that no one could be a gentleman all round who had not

knocked about the world and associated with all sorts and conditions of men, high and low, rich and poor, good and bad. Experiences like these are like the processes for refining gold. The man who emerges unharmed from the fire of poverty and its associations, and who retains his independent manliness in relations with those high-placed, must have within him a fibre of strength that is the true essence of manliness. So many, alas! go down, down, when “puirtith cauld” touches them with her terrible, chilly finger. And so many become obsequious and subservient, false to themselves, in dealings with those above them.

Well! my ideal does neither. He is always true to himself, and “cannot then be false to any man.” And he must have a sense of humour, too, otherwise he would be far

from perfect. How life is brightened by a sense of fun! Think of what breakfast, lunch, and dinner would be if all were to be as solemn and as serious as some folk would have it!

If good manners are not practised at home, but are allowed to lie by until occasion calls upon their wearer to assume them, they are

sure to be a bad fit when donned. It may be a trifle of the smallest to acquire a habit of saying “if you please” and “thank you” readily, but it is no trifling defect in a young man to fail to do so. If he does not jump up to open the door for his mother or sister, he may omit to do so some day when the neglect will tell against him in the estimation of those to please whom he would gladly give much. Carelessness in dress and personal appearance amount to bad manners. In the home there is sometimes a disagreeable negligence in this respect. At the breakfast-table unkempt hair, untended finger-nails, and a far from immaculate collar are occasionally to be seen, especially on late-comers who do not practise the ingratiating politeness of punctuality. Lounging, untidy habits are another form of bad manners. The ill-bred young man smokes

all over the house, upstairs and downstairs, and even in his mother’s drawing-room. He may be traced from room to room by the litter of newspapers and magazines he leaves behind him. The present fashion of taking one’s reading in pills, so to speak, snatching it in scrappy paragraphs from weekly miscellanies, is but too favourable to this lack of order. In this young man’s own room there is chaos. The maids have endless trouble in clearing up after him. His tobacco is spilled over tables, chairs, and carpets. His handkerchiefs, ties, socks, and collars are lying about in every corner of the room. He is too indolent even to put his boots outside the door at night that they may be cleaned in the morning. To save himself trouble he bangs all the doors instead of gently latching them. And yet, perhaps, if he could but realise that all this is “bad manners,” he would become as neat as he is now the reverse, and would be as decorative at table as he is, at the present moment, unornamental.

It is not only young men whose standard of behaviour in the home is a low one. Masters of the

house, fathers of families, men of middle age, who are terribly put out if any one fails in duty to them, are sometimes conspicuously ill-bred in everyday matters. They are late for every meal, to the discomfort of the other members of the family and the great inconvenience of the servants. Polite to the world outside, they are brusque and disagreeable in their manner at home: rough to the servants, rude to their wives, and irritable with their children. Sometimes a good heart and considerable family affection are hidden away behind all this, but the families of such men would be very glad to compound for a little less affection and hidden goodness and rather more gentleness and outward polish.

Apart from faults of temper, men fall into careless habits of speech and manner at home, and one form of this, viz., habitually using strong language in the presence

of women and children, is particularly offensive. Besides, it defeats itself; for if the forcible expressions are intended to express disapprobation, they soon become weak and powerless to do so, because they are used on every possible occasion. After a time they lose all meaning.

I know a family where there are sons and daughters, the latter charming and in every respect young gentlewomen. But the sons fall far below their level.

They come to the door with thundering knocks that make every one in the house start disagreeably with surprise, walk through the hall without introducing their muddy boots to either scraper or doormat, sit down to meals without the usual preliminary of hand-washing and hair-brushing, and are altogether rough and unpresentable. If friends call at the house these young men rush away from the chance of encountering them; or, if they cannot help meeting them, they blush scarlet, look very gauche and uncomfortable, and feel miserable. They knock things over out of pure awkwardness, and never realise that the secret of the whole matter is the want of self-training.

Girls are animated by a greater wish to please, an amiable desire that need not be confounded with vanity, and this wish has led the sisters of these young men to practise those small acts of daily self-denial which after awhile produce the highest self-culture so far as manners go.

What is habitual neatness but constant coercion of human nature’s innate indolence? What is politeness in the home but the outcome of affection and self-respect, and the suppression of all those natural instincts of self-seeking that, allowed their way, produce the worst manners in the world?

If any young man desires to be a perfect gentleman, he must begin in his own home.

It is delightful to see some young men unobtrusively attentive to their sisters, watchful of every need of their father and mother, cheerful and pleasant in their manner, full of fun and brightness, yet never losing the gentleness that denotes the fine nature, and so beloved in the home for all these endearing qualities, that when they leave it they are sadly missed. The father misses them for the pleasant companionship; the sisters miss them for the boyish spirits and the exuberant fun that never exceeds the bounds of good taste and refinement; and the mother misses them more than any one else, for no one better than she knows how many times a day her boys have set aside their own wishes in deference to hers, quietly, silently, unostentatiously—in a word, out of pure good manners, in the deepest, highest, truest sense of the words.

Such gentle, virile natures look out at the world through the countenance, which is a letter of recommendation to them wherever they go.

I have but faintly sketched my ideal. The following pages may fill in the remaining touches.

Many men who go out into the world while still very young to earn their living have few opportunities of acquiring a knowledge of social observances.

Leaving home when boys, at an age when they are utterly careless of such things as etiquette and the “nice conduct of a cane,” they live in lodgings or at boarding-houses of the cheaper sort, where the amenities of existence have to yield to its practicalities.

Meals are served in a fashion that means despatch rather than elegance, economy rather than taste, and very few hints can be picked up for the guidance of young fellows when they enter the homes of friends and acquaintances.

Their anxiety to fall in accurately and easily with the observances of those they meet on such occasions is as great as it is natural. They know well that to fail in these trifling acts of omission and commission is tacitly to acknowledge that they are unversed in the ways of good society.

There is not necessarily any snobbishness in this. A man may be perfectly manly and yet most unwilling to show himself inferior in any way to others of the class to which he belongs by birth and education. Even should those with whom he occasionally associates be his superiors, is he not right to try to rise?

Culture may mean little or nothing to the uncultured. Polish may be an empty word to the unpolished. But they are realities, and go far to produce an inward and corresponding refinement of mind and spirit.

There are thousands of young men in London alone at this very moment who are longing to acquire the ease and aplomb of good society.

The desire is worthy of all encouragement. Only those with real good in them can feel it. The men who are destitute of it are those who associate with their inferiors, contentedly accept a low moral standard, adopt a mode of speech and action that is coarse and rough, and finally let themselves down to the frequenting of public-houses and places of amusement, where the entertainment has been carefully planned to suit the uneducated, the low-born, and others whose vitiated taste leads them to dislike what is lovely and of good report, and to revel in the reverse.

But, unfortunately, many a good fellow has been driven to seek companionship with those beneath him by the very difficulty he experiences in getting on in society.

He fancies that his small solecisms are the subject of observation and comment, and he suffers agonies of mauvaise honte.

Girls often laugh very unkindly at shy youths, when they might find opportunities of acting the good angel to them, and by the exercise of tact screening from observation those failures in good manners which are inevitable to the inexperienced. When he finds himself the butt of a few giggling girls, a young man feels miserably uncomfortable and humiliated, and he vows to himself that he will never again put himself in the way of such annoyance. Consequently he cuts good society, not realising that he would very soon overcome these initial difficulties and feel at home in it.

He must find amusement somewhere. It is only natural to youth to crave it. At first his taste is jarred by those inferior to him, and his fastidiousness offended by their manners.

But, such is the fatal adaptability of human nature to what is bad for it, he soon becomes accustomed to all that he at first objected to, and even forgets that he had ever found anything disagreeable in it. After a few months his speech begins to assimilate the errors of those about him in his leisure hours. He uses the very expressions that jarred upon him at first. His dress and carriage deteriorate, and he is well on his way downhill in life long before he realises that he has quitted his own level, probably for ever.

And if only he had held his own at a few gatherings, and acquired experience, even at the cost of a little present pain and mortification, he would in the same interval of time be enjoying society, educating himself in its customs, and acquiring that exterior polish which comes of intimate acquaintance with its rules and ease in practising them.

Should this little manual of manners be of use to any such in enabling them to master the theory, as it were, of social customs in the educated classes, it will have attained its aim.

I have always felt the greatest compassion for young men when first introduced, after school and college life, to the routine of dinner, dance, and ball.

I have not forgotten the days when shyness made my own heart sink at the prospect of a dinner-party and when the hardest task on earth was the finding of nothings to say to a partner at a ball. It is a miserable feeling of confusion and gaucherie, and if I can in any way avert it from others it will be a source of great gratification to me.