Part 8

J. J. ROBINSON & CO.,

New York.

Manufacturers and Dealers in the Newest Styles of Coffins, Caskets, and Embalming Fluids.

Orders carefully attended to.

All payments C.O.D.

No deductions for damages allowed after thirty days.

Under that heading appears a note of congratulation:

“DEAR TOM: I hasten to congratulate you on your marriage. Believe me, I wish you every blessing, and if you should ever need anything in my line, you will always receive the greatest possible reduction in price. May you live long and prosper!

“Yours very affectionately, “J. J. ROBINSON.”

This is an extreme example, I admit; but who has not seen social notes written under business headings just as incongruous? When we write to anybody not on business, let us use spotless white paper without lines; let the paper and envelopes be as thick as possible; and let us not put any ornamental flower, or crest, or coat-of-arms, or any bit of nonsense at the top of our letters. The address ought to be written plainly at the head of our letter-paper, or printed if you will. And if we begin a letter with “Dear Sir,” we ought to write in the left-hand corner of the last sheet the name of the person to whom the letter is addressed. But if we begin a letter with “Dear Mr. Robinson,” it is not necessary to write Mr. Robinson’s name again. If a man gets an invitation written in the third person he must answer it in the third person. If

“Mrs. J. J. Smith requests the pleasure of Mr. J. J. Jones’s company at dinner on Wednesday, April 23, at seven o’clock,”

young Mr. J. J. Jones would stamp himself as ignorant of the ways of society if he wrote back:

“DEAR MRS. SMITH: I will come, of course. If I am a little late, keep something on the fire for me. I shall be umpire at a base-ball match that afternoon, and I shall be hungry. Good-by.

“Yours devotedly, “J. J. JONES.”

You may be sure that if young Mr. Jones should put in an appearance after that note he would find the door closed in his face.

An invitation to dinner must be accepted or declined on the day it is received. One is not permitted to say he will come if he can. He must say Yes or No at once. The words “polite,” “genteel,” and “present compliments” are no longer used. “Your kind invitation” now takes the place of “your polite invitation;” and “genteel” is out of date. The letters “R. S. V. P.” are no longer put on notes or cards. It is thought it is not necessary to tell, in French, people to “answer, if you please.” All well-educated people are pleased to answer without being told to do so. The custom of putting “R. S. V. P.” in a note is as much out of fashion as that of drawing off a glove when one shakes hands. In the olden times, when men wore armor, a hand clothed in a steel or iron gauntlet was not pleasant to touch. There was then a reason why a man should draw off his glove when he extended his hand to another, especially if that other happened to be a lady. But the reason for the custom has gone by; and it is not necessary to draw off one’s glove now when one shakes hands.

But to return to the subject of letter-writing. If you are addressing a Doctor of Medicine or Divinity, you may put “Esq.” after his name in addition to his title “M.D.” or “D.D.” but it is a senseless custom. But “Mr.” and “Esq.” before and after a man’s name sends the writer, in the estimation of well-bred people, to “the bottom of the sea.” Paper with gilt edges is never used; in fact, a man must not have anything about him that is merely pretty. Usage decrees that he may wear a flower in his button-hole—and Americans are becoming as fond of flowers as the ancient Romans; but farther than that he may not go, in the way of the merely ornamental, either in his stationery or his clothes.

It is the fashion now to fasten envelopes with wax and to use a seal; but it is not at all necessary, though there are many who prefer it, as they object to get a letter which has been “licked” to make its edges stick.

Begin, in addressing a stranger, with “Madam” or “Sir.” “Miss” by itself is never used. After a second letter has been received, “Dear Madam” or “Dear Sir” may be used. Conclude all formal letters with “Yours truly,” or “Sincerely yours,” not “Affectionately yours.” Sign your full name when writing to a friend or an equal. Do not write “T. F. Robinson” or “T. T. Smith;” write your name out as if you were not ashamed of it.

Put your address at the head of your letters, and if you make a blot, tear up the paper. A dirty letter sent, even with an apology, is as bad a breach of good manners as the extending of a dirty hand. Answer at once any letter in which information is asked. Do not write to people you do not know or answer advertisements in the papers “for fun.” A man that knows the world never does this. These advertisements often hide traps, and a man may get into them merely by writing a letter. And the kind of “fun” which ends in a man’s being pursued by vulgar postal cards and letters wherever he goes does not pay.

In writing a letter, do not begin too close to the top of the page, or too far down towards the middle. Do not abbreviate when you can help it; you may write “Dr.” for “Doctor.”

Do not put a yellow envelope over a sheet of white note-paper. It is not necessary to leave wide margin at the left-hand side. A habit now is to write only on one side of the paper; to begin your letter on the first page, then to go to the third, then back to the second, ending, if you have a great deal to say, on the fourth. A late fad is to jump from the first to the fourth.

With a good dictionary at his elbow, black ink, white paper, a clear head, and a remembrance of the rules and prohibitions I have given, any young man cannot fail, if he write, to impress all who receive his letters with the fact that he is well-bred.

VII. What to Read.

Young people who determine to study English literature seriously sometimes find themselves discouraged by the multitude of books; consequently they get into an idle way of accepting opinions at second hand—the ready-made opinions of the text-book. In order to study English literature, it is not necessary to read many books; but it is necessary to read a few books carefully. The evident insincerity of some of the people who “go in” for literary culture has given the humorous paragrapher, often on the verge of paresis from trying to be funny every day, many a straw to grasp at. There is no doubt that some of his gibes and sneers are deserved, and that others, undeserved, serve as cheap stock in trade for people who are too idle or too stupid to take any interest in literary matters.

Literary insincerity and pretension are sufficiently bad, but they are not worse than the superficial and silly jeers at poetry and art in the line of the worn-out witticisms about the “spring poet” and the “mother-in-law.”

The young woman who thinks it the proper thing to go into ecstasies over Robert Browning without having read a line of the poet’s work, except, perhaps, “How They Carried the News from Ghent to Aix,” is foolish enough; but is the man who sneers at Browning and knows even less about him any better? The earnest student of literature makes no pretensions. He reads a few books well, and by that obtains the key to the understanding of all others. He does not pretend to admire epics he has not read. He knows, of course, that the Nibelungenlied is the great German epic; but he does not talk about it as if he had studied and weighed every line. If he finds that the Inferno of Dante is more interesting than the Paradiso, he says so without fear, and he does not express ready-made opinions without having probed them. If the perfection of good manners is simplicity, the perfection of literary culture is sincerity.

Among Catholics there sometimes crops out a kind of insincerity which almost amounts to snobbishness. It is the tendency to praise no book until it has had a non-Catholic approbation. Now that Dr. Gasquet’s remarkable volume on the suppression of the English monasteries and Father Bridgett’s “Sir Thomas More” have received the highest praise in England and swept Mr. Froude’s historical rubbish aside, there are Catholics who will not hesitate to respect them, although they did hesitate before the popular laudation was given to these two great books.