the generous behaviors are.

Bad behavior the laws cannot reach. Society is invested with rude,
cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and
whom a public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by
the sense of all, can reach;--the contradictors and railers at public
and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a
dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house
by barking him out of sight;--I have seen men who neigh like a horse
when you contradict them, or say something which they do not
understand;--then the overbold, who make their own invitation to your
hearth; the persevering talker, who gives you his society in large,
saturating doses; the pitiers of themselves,--a perilous class; the
frivolous Asmodeus, who relies on you to find him in ropes of sand to
twist; the monotones; in short, every stripe of absurdity;--these are
social inflictions which the magistrate cannot cure or defend you from,
and which must be intrusted to the restraining force of custom, and
proverbs, and familiar rules of behavior impressed on young people in
their school-days.

In the hotels on the banks of the Mississippi, they print, or used to
print, among the rules of the house, that "No gentleman can be permitted
to come to the public table without his coat;" and in the same country,
in the pews of the churches, little placards plead with the worshipper
against the fury of expectoration. Charles Dickens self-sacrificingly
undertook the reformation of our American manners in unspeakable
particulars. I think the lesson was not quite lost; that it held bad
manners up, so that the churls could see the deformity. Unhappily, the
book had its own deformities. It ought not to need to print in a reading
room a caution to strangers not to speak loud; nor to persons who look