Della Casa invents no new laws for conduct, deduces no new theories of courtesy or manners; even the details are to be found in many of his mediaeval and Renaissance predecessors. What he adds, in precept or dictum or anecdote, is the fruit both of his own social experience and of his classical studies. His book is, like Castiglione's "Cortegiano" and Sannazzaro's "Arcadia," almost a mosaic of Greek and Latin borrowings. Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics," Plutarch's moral treatises, the "Characters" of Theophrastus, and the moral and rhetorical works of Cicero are the chief sources, although none of these books is devoted solely, like his, to the superficial conduct of men among their equals and superiors. But even to these he adds something that was born out of those refinements of life which in Renaissance Italy had been developed more highly than elsewhere, and had made the fashions of Urbino, Mantua, and Ferrara the models of all courts and coteries, wherever the Renaissance gained a foothold beyond the Alps. In the courts and cities of Italy, combining alike the atmosphere of the mediaeval court and the ancient city,--combining, that is to say, "courtoisie" and "civilitas" (urbanitas),--the modern "gentleman," as distinguished from his classical or romantic forbears, may be said to have been born. "Courtesy," as its very name indicates, is the flowering of that spirit which first shone in the little courts of mediaeval Provence and France, but which did not, perhaps, find its most complete expression, as a philosophy of life, until Castiglione wrote the "Cortegiano" at the beginning of the sixteenth century. By that time the small court was already beginning to give way to the larger court or the cultivated coterie as the overwhelming centre of social influence in Europe, although the glory of Ferrara and Mantua and Urbino did not wane for two or three generations. But even before Castiglione's day the more humane and graceful of courtly manners had spread beyond the confines of courts; and almost before he was dead, the name "courtesy," in so far as it still suggested a definite locus, no longer expressed the new wide range of polished manners. Other words crept into cultivated speech, so that, by the first half of the seventeenth century, we find in a little French treatise on manners, the "Loix de la Galanterie," four distinct terms for man regarded simply as a creature of social manners,--courtisain, honnête homme, galant, and homme du monde. The first of these, as described by Castiglione, seemed to this author Italianate and obsolete, and the second, which had just furnished the title to a treatise on "L'Honnête Homme, ou l'Art de Plaire à la Cour," still retained something of its original moral significance, so that "gallant" and "man of the world" summed up, best of all, the social qualities of the life of the day. It is no longer the court but the "monde" about which social life centres, not that other men