…is that everything you say can be easily, almost naturally, misconstrued. It works like this:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare (from notes taken by John Payne Collier), transcript of Lecture 6
By manners he meant that which was dependent on the particular customs and fashions of the age. Even in a state of comparative barbarism of manners there might be and was morality. But we had seen much worse times than those, when the mind had been so enervated and degraded, that the most distant associations that could possibly connect our ideas with the basest feelings immediately brought forward those base feelings, without referring to the nobler, thus destroying the little remnant of humanity, excluding from the mind what is good, and calling forward what is bad to keep the bestial nature company.