and what they should say or do.  They have a great gift, but they lay down their price for it, and suffer for others as well as in themselves more than their share.  But in general, the average boy and girl needs a “daily exercise” which in most cases amounts to “nagging,” and in the best hands is only saved from nagging by its absence of peevishness, and the patience with which it reminds and urges and teases into perfect observance.  The teasing thing, and yet the most necessary one, is the constant check upon the preoccupying interests of children, so that in presence of their elders they can never completely let themselves go, but have to be attentive to every service of consideration or mark of respect that occasion calls for.  It is very wearisome, but when it has been acquired through laborious years—­there it is, like a special sense superadded to the ordinary endowments of nature, giving presence of mind and self-possession, arming the whole being against surprise or awkwardness or indiscretion, and controlling what has so long appeared to exercise control over it—­the conditions of social intercourse.

How shall we persuade the children of to-day that manners and conventions have not come to an end as part of the old regime which appears to them an elaborate unreality V It is exceedingly difficult to do so, at school especially, as in many cases their whole family consents to regard them as extinct, and only when startled at the over-growth of their girls’ unmannerly roughness and self-assertion they send them to school “to have their manners attended to”; but then it is too late.  The only way to form manners is to teach them from the beginning as a part of religion, as indeed they are.  Devotion to Our Lady will give to the manners both of boys and girls something which stamps them as Christian and Catholic, something above the world’s level.  And, as has been so often pointed out, the Church’s ritual is the court ceremonial of the most perfect manners, in which every least detail has its significance, and applies some principle of inward faith and devotion to outward service.

If we could get to the root of all that the older codes of manners required, and even the conventionalities of modern life—­these remnants, in so far as they are based on the older codes—­it would be found that, as in the Church’s ceremonial, not one of them was without its meaning, but that all represented some principle of Christian conduct, even if they have developed into expressions which seem trivial.  Human things tend to exaggeration and to “sport,” as gardeners say, from their type into strange varieties, and so the manners which were the outcome of chivalry—­exquisite, idealized, and restrained in their best period, grew artificial in later times and elaborated themselves into an etiquette which grew tyrannical and even ridiculous, and added violence to the inevitable reaction which followed.  But if we look beyond the outward form