Rules Of Etiquette Essay Research Paper ETIQUETTE

Rules Of Etiquette Essay, Research Paper

ETIQUETTE is a comprehensive term, for it embraces not only all observances connected with social intercourse, but such as belong particularly to the home circle.

To obtain fireside comforts and home-born enjoyments and happiness, something more is required than a handsome house, a beautiful lawn, shade-trees, and a garden filled with flowers and arranged in the most artistic order.

Family bickerings and strife; a lack of politeness, good-breeding and etiquette, would turn the loveliest Eden into a barren waste.

It will avail us little to furnish our houses with all the elegancies which the upholsterer’s art can afford, and to cultivate the grounds with the utmost skill, if our hearts and minds are uncultivated, rough, uncouth and uncivil.

The members of one family must unceasingly interchange kind offices; must rejoice and mourn, hope and fear smile and weep in unison; and must exchange sympathetic emotions, with a due regard to each other’s feelings, or the charming delights of the domestic circle will lose much of their relish, or will be broken up and become totally devoid of interest.

And it cannot be too strongly impressed upon the mind, that mutual respect is the basis of true affection; and, although it may seem a trifling matter in the family whether this or that mode of speech is adopted, in reality it is a very important thing.

Children and servants are greatly influenced by the demeanor of master and mistress of the house; and the husband who addresses his wife, in their presence, in a derogatory manner, does both himself and her a decided injury. While the wife, on her part, is equally bound to show all due respect to her husband.

Every human being possesses an innate perception of what is right. Children and servants are not exceptions to this general rule; and those of us who indulge in unkind expressions towards each other, lower ourselves more than we can, perhaps, understand in the opinions of those about us.

In many cases, a feeling of dislike is engendered, which no after circumstances can obliterate — a feeling near akin to contempt, also; for who can cherish respect for individuals who cannot govern themselves.

A generous-minded boy will never forget the unkind and taunting words which he has heard an irritable and ill-governed father address to his dearly loved mother; nor will either girls or boys forget similar breaches of politeness and good-breeding exhibited by their mother towards the father.

Truly, we have need of patience! and in the family circle it is one of the brightest virtues.

“Can’t you both have patience.” murmured a little gentle boy once in our hearing, while his parents were indulging in unseemly bickerings, and there was a whole volume of reproof in that one sentence.

Chesterfield, a pattern of good-breeding, tells his son, that –

“The most familiar and intimate habitudes, connections and friendships, require a degree of good-breeding both to preserve and cement them. The best of us have our bad sides; and it is as imprudent as it is ill-bred to exhibit them. I shall not use ceremony with you, it would be misplaced between us; but I shall certainly observe that degree of good-breeding which, I am sure, is absolutely necessary to make us like one another’s company long.”

This is the best advice which can be given to husbands and wives, parents and children, and also to relatives and friends.

The habit of bantering, which is so often adopted by married people before children and servants, is very undesirable, and frequently leads to serious consequences.

The husband will give a ridiculous appellation to the wife, which will raise a laugh at her expense; but in the end, it may lower him far more than the mother in the opinion of the children; and in their turn, they will often feel more respect and affection for the mother than for the father.

Nothing can be more injurious, or inconsistent with true politeness and good-breeding, than the constant habit of fault-finding concerning little petty trifles, when indulged in by either husband or wife, in the presence of others or by themselves.

There are men who never come to the table but they will find fault with the dishes served upon it. If roast beef is the chief dish, they will say: –

“Beef! beef! why didn’t you have chicken or turkey. I am tired of this everlasting beef!”

Or vice versa. No matter what the wife may have provided, such a man will always evince a desire for something else.

Now, were the gentleman accused of fault-finding, he would indignantly deny it; and he may be a kind and good and true husband and father, and only have inadvertently fallen into this habit of not being satisfied with what has been provided.

A good way to cure him, would be for the wife to hand him a pencil and a card every morning as he leaves the house, and request him to put down what he desires for dinner; so that the daily fault-finding can be, in a measure, averted. This would convince him of his practice of picking flaws in the m.nage; and go far towards effecting a reformation in it.

Half of us find fault from habit; but some of us, we fear, do so from an inborn ugliness of disposition.

Of the latter class we have little hopes; b

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