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 c...
