There have been modern scholars who have wondered that so eminent a prelate, and so austere and passionate a lyric poet (for the licentious capitoli were best forgotten), "should have thought it worthy of his pains to formulate so many rules of simple decency," descending even to such trifles as the use of the napkin, the avoidance of immodest topics, and the details of personal apparel. It might, however, be pointed out that it is just because such distinguished men as our Archbishop formulated these details for us in the Renaissance that they have become part and parcel of our social code; that to quarrel with the Archbishop on this score were not unlike quarrelling with Euclid because he formulated laws of geometry which mathematicians nowadays leave to schoolboys; and that the serious preoccupation with manners, characteristic of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, made it possible for modern European society to form an organic social whole, with a model of the finished gentleman, more or less the same in all countries and all periods. But the fact is that it is the didactic form and tone, and not the content, of the Archbishop's treatise with which our modern taste has its quarrel. If books on etiquette are no longer in fashion, it is not because preoccupation with the details of social conduct has ceased, but because we no longer express it in the form of rules or codes. Our plays, our novels, our essays, are mosaics of reflections on the very things that interested the courts and coteries of the Renaissance. When a modern writer wishes to enforce the idea that such apparent trifles are of real concern, he no longer says: "It is important that every young man should pay careful heed to the little tricks of manners," but he puts into the mouth of one of his characters, as Mr. Galsworthy does, such a speech as this: "For people brought up as we are, to have different manners is worse than to have different souls.... How are you going to stand it; with a woman who----? It's the little things." The Archbishop of Benevento, if permitted to read passages like this in modern plays and essays, would recognize his own ideas in all of them; he could point to dialogues and discourses of his own time in which dogmatic precepts were in like manner disguised as witty and elegant conversation; but because he was the product of an age of formal treatises, exquisitely written, he would have insisted on his right to state precepts as precepts, and to sum them up in such a rounded code as he has given us in the "Galateo."