Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 5.djvu/193

No. 5. awaked, and could not help wishing, that the deputy censors of my late institution, were endued with the same instinct as these parish lions.

From my own apartment in Channel-row, 5.

HOSE inferiour duties of life, which the French call les petites morales, or the smaller morals, are with us distinguished by the name of good manners or breeding. This I look upon, in the general notion of it, to be a sort of artificial good sense, adapted to the meanest capacities, and introduced to make mankind easy in their commerce with each other. Low and little understandings, without some rules of this kind, would be perpetually wandering into a thousand indecencies and irregularities in behaviour; and in their ordinary conversation, fall into the same boisterous familiarities, that one observes among them when a debauch has quite taken away the use of their reason. In other instances it is odd to consider, that for want of common discretion, the very end of good breeding is wholly perverted; and civility, intended to make us easy, is employed in laying chains and fetters upon us, in debarring us of our wishes, and in crossing our most reasonable  sires