Than playinge on instrumentes and other vayne pleasure; For virtuous manners is a most precious treasure." The importance given to outward forms of courtesy was a natural result of the domination for centuries of the laws of chivalry and rules of heraldry. But they were something more than outward show. Emerson says, "The forms of politeness universally express benevolence in a superlative degree." They certainly developed a regard for others which is evinced in its highest and best type in the character of what we term a gentleman and gentlewoman. It is impossible to overestimate the value these laws of etiquette, these conventions of customs had at a time when neighborhood life was the whole outside world. Without them life would have proved unendurable. Even savage nations and tribes have felt in their isolated lives the need of some conventions, which with them assume the form of taboos, superstitious observances, and religious restrictions. The laws of courtesy had much influence upon the development of the character of the colonial child. Domestic life lacked many of the comforts of to-day, but save in formality it did not differ in essential elements from our own home life. Everything in the community was made to tend to the preservation of relations of civility; this is plainly shown by the laws. Modern historians have been wont to wax jocose over the accounts of law-suits for slander, scandal-monging, name-calling, lying, etc., which may be found in colonial court records. Astonishingly petty seem many of the charges; even the calling of degrading nicknames, making of wry faces, jeering, and "finger-sticking" were fined and punished. But all this rigidity tended to a preservation of peace. The child who saw a man fined for lying, who beheld another set in the stocks for calling his neighbor ill names, or repeating scandalous assertions, grew up with a definite knowledge of the wickedness and danger of lying, and a wholesome regard for the proprieties of life. These sentiments may not have made him a better man, but they certainly made him a more endurable one. The child of colonial days had but little connection with, little knowledge of, the world at large. He probably never had seen a map of the world, and if he had, he didn't understand it. Foreign news there was none, in our present sense. Of special English events he might occasionally learn, months after they had happened; but never any details nor any ordinary happenings. European information was of the scantiest and rarest kind; knowledge of the result of a war or a vast disaster, like the Lisbon earthquake, might come. From the other great continents came nothing.