Page:The Works of John Locke - 1823 - vol 01.djvu/43

Rh to find him all affability, good-humour, and complaisance. If there was any thing which he could not bear, it was ill-manners, with which he was always disgusted, unless when it proceeded from ignorance; but when it was the effect of pride, ill-nature, or brutality, he detested it. Civility he considered to be not only a duty of humanity, but of the Christian profession, and what ought to be more frequently pressed and urged upon men than it commonly is. With a view to promote it, he recommended a treatise in the moral essays written by the gentlemen of Port Royal, "concerning the means of preserving peace among men;" and also the Sermons of Dr. Wichcote on this and other moral subjects. He was exact to his word, and religiously performed whatever he promised. Though he chiefly loved truths which were useful, and with such stored his mind, and was best pleased to make them the subjects of conversation; yet he used to say, that, in order to employ one part of this life in serious and important occupations, it was necessary to spend another in mere amusements; and, when an occasion naturally offered, he gave himself up with pleasure to the charms of a free and facetious conversation. He remembered many agreeable stories, which he always introduced with great propriety; and generally made them yet more delightful, by his natural and pleasant manner of telling them. He had a peculiar art, in conversation, of leading people to talk concerning what they best understood. With a gardener, he conversed of gardening; with a jeweller of jewels; with a chemist of chemistry, &c. "By this," said he, "I please those men, who commonly can speak pertinently upon nothing else. As they believe I have an esteem for their profession, they are charmed with showing their abilities before me; and I, in the meanwhile, improve myself by their discourse." And, indeed, he had by this method acquired a very good insight into all the arts. He used to say too, that the knowledge of the arts contained more true philosophy, than all those fine learned hypotheses, which, having, no relation to the nature of things, are fit only to make men lose their time in inventing or comprehending them. By the several questions which he would put to artificers, he would find out the secret of their art, which they did not understand themselves; and often give them views entirely new, which sometimes they put in practice to their profit. He was so far from assuming those affected airs of gravity, by which some persons, as well learned as unlearned, love to distinguish themselves from the rest of the world, that, on the contrary, he looked upon them as infallible marks of impertinence. Nay, sometimes he would divert himself with imitating that studied