do not belong to the world (as this author naïvely explains), but because we are concerned solely with that great world which is the home of fashion. This was the age of précieux and précieuses, and their code was no longer that of the court of Urbino, as it flourished in Castiglione's day; it was the over-refined manners of the academies and coteries of Siena and Ferrara during the later sixteenth century that furnished all that was essential in French préciosité. For the moment "gallantry" sufficed to express good manners; but gradually it too became obsolete, and the Latin term "civility," with its inclusion of all civil society rather than any group or class, superseded both "gallantry" and "courtesy." "Courtois is scarcely any longer used in cultivated conversation," Callières, a French wit of the end of the seventeenth century, tells us, "just as civilité has replaced courtoisie." Indeed, the word "courtoisie" no longer finds a place in any but elevated or poetic language in France to-day; and English speech, which has retained it after its original meaning has been lost, now finds it necessary to distinguish between the courtly and the courteous, by the former suggesting the content of what once, at least in part, belonged to the latter. It is the "civilitas" of ancient Rome no less than the "civilité" of seventeenth century France that is summed up in the "Galateo." As Castiglione expresses the courtly ideals of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, so Della Casa expresses the ideals of manners no longer restricted to courts and courtiers, but common to all cultivated civilians, the manners that were to form the basis of the European code from that time to this. A long line of Italian predecessors had prepared the way for its coming. Indeed, every encyclopaedia, every romance of chivalry of the Middle Ages, contains precepts which find a place in its pages. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Provence and Italy had already begun to furnish books on such subjects. The "Breviari d'Amor" of Matfre Ermengaud includes instruction in social conduct; the Italian, Bonvesin da Riva, had written a treatise on "Fifty Courtesies of the Table;" Francesco da Barberino had dealt at length with "The Manners and Behaviour of Women;" still later, Sulpizio Verulano had written a treatise on the table manners of children, which had found currency beyond the Alps; and most influential of all, the great Erasmus, in 1526, had dealt at length with children's manners in his "De Civilitate Morum Puerilium Libellus." Della Casa follows tradition, or is moved by the example of Erasmus, to the extent of representing his book as the discourse of an old man to a young one; but this is a mere subterfuge, and neither youth nor age figures in the precepts that follow. Unlike his predecessors, he is concerned not merely with children, or with women, or with the ideals of a narrow class like the courtier, or with