The nature of an ordinary healthy energetic child, high-spirited and boisterous, full of a hundred interests of its own, finds the mere attention to these things a heavy yoke, and the constant self-denial needed to carry them out is a laborious work indeed.
The slow process of polishing marble has more than one point of resemblance with the training of manners; it is satisfactory to think that the resemblance goes further than the process, that as only by polishing can the concealed beauties of the marble be brought out, so only in the perfecting of manners will the finer grain of character and feeling be revealed.

Polishing is a process which may reach different degrees of brilliancy according to the material on which it is performed; and so in the teaching of manners a great deal depends upon the quality of the nature, and the amount of expression which it is capable of acquiring.

It is useless to press for what cannot be given, at the same time it is unfair not to exact the best that every one is able to give.

As in all that has to do with character, example is better than precept.
But in the matter of manners example alone is by no means enough; precept is formally necessary, and precept has to be enforced by exercise.

It is necessary because the origin of established conventionalities is remote; they do not speak for themselves, they are the outcome of a general habit of thought, they have come into being through a long succession of precedents.