the general moral life of which manners are only an ornament or a garment. He has written a book that touches on the essentials of good manners as they affect all classes and groups which aim at individual perfection,--not merely the young, but the mature; not merely men or women, but both sexes; not merely the courtier, but all cultivated classes. In this sense, it is the first of its kind. It is a trifling and perhaps negligible kind, but at least this much distinction belongs to the book. The "Galateo" is a product of the Catholic Reaction. It is one of the results of the casuistry and the scholastic spirit which in every field of intellectual activity were applied to the life and art that had found creative expression in the age of the Renaissance. What the Renaissance did or wrote, the Catholic Reaction reasoned about, codified, and stereotyped. The creative poetry of the Renaissance was reduced to formulae in the treatises on the art of poetry of the later sixteenth century; politics and history found reasoned expression in treatises on political theory and historical method; and in similar fashion, the social life of earlier Italy resulted in this age in treatises on the practice and theory of society. It would be idle to catalogue the various examples of this curious intellectual activity, for the works of the sixteenth century dealing with this subject may be numbered by hundreds, indeed by thousands. There were of course treatises on court life and the ideals of the courtier, from the "Cortegiano" of Castiglione to the discourses of Domenichi and Tasso; treatises on honour and the duel, of which Possevino's "Dell'Onore" is the type; treatises on the gentleman, his nature, his education, and his occupations, like "Il Gentiluomo" of Muzio Justinipolitano, the quality of which may be tasted in English in Peacham's "Compleat Gentleman;" treatises on love and the relations of the sexes, all summed up in Equicola's encyclopaedic "Libro di Natura d'Amore;" treatises on social amusements, parlor games, and the like, such as Scipione Bargagli's "I Trattenimenti" and Ringhieri's "Cento Giuochi Liberali e d'Ingegno;" treatises on conversation, like Guazzo's "Civil Conversatione;" and finally, a large number of treatises on the education of women and children. Among all these the "Cortegiano," one of the earliest, stands out preëminently, just because it is the spontaneous product of the age of which it is also a reasoned expression; that is to say, because it is a work of art of the Renaissance rather than a mere scholastic treatise of the Catholic Reaction. It is in no sense a courtesy-book; it is concerned with principles of social conduct rather than with details of etiquette. But of all the mere courtesy-books, the "Galateo" alone survives; its name is current coin in Italian speech to-day; and in the eighteenth century Dr. Johnson coupled it with the "Cortegiano" as "two books yet celebrated in Italy for purity and elegance."