The _Youths' Behaviour_ contained many rules and instructions worded from still older books on courtesy, such as _The Babees Book_, and _The Boke of Nurture_, and traces of those hackneyed rules lingered even in the etiquette books of Isaiah Thomas, long after the house-furnishings and household conditions indicated by them and sometimes necessitated by them had become as obsolete as the formal duties of the squire's sons, "the younkers of account, youths of good houses, and young gentlemen henxmen," for whom they had originally been written. Let us believe that the habits pointed out by such rules were obsolete also. I cannot think, for instance, that the boy born after our Revolutionary war was in the habit of casting poultry and meat bones under dining tables, even though he is so seriously enjoined not to do so. This rule is a survivor from the earthen floors and dirty ways of old England. A famous book of rules of etiquette, entitled _The Mirror of Compliments_, was printed in 1635 in England, and as late as 1795 many pages of it were reprinted in America by Thomas under the title _A New Academy of Compliments_. The teachings in this book were fearfully and wonderfully polite. This is the sort of thing enjoined upon children and grown folk as correct phrases to be exchanged on the subject of breaking bread together:-- "Sir, you shall oblige me very much if you will do me the honour to take my poor dinner with me. "Sir, you are too courteous and persuasive to be refused and therefore I shall trouble you. "Sir, pray excuse your bad entertainment at the present dinner and another time we will endeavour to make you amends. "Truly, Sir, it has been very good, without any defect, and needs no excuse." The child who sought to be mannerly certainly must have felt rather discouraged at the prospect laid before him. These superfluities of politeness were equalled by the absurdities of restraint. It would certainly have been a study of facial expression to see the average schoolboy when he read this dictum, "It is a wilde and rude thing to lean upon ones elbow." In Brinsley's _Grammar Schoole_, written in 1612, he enumerates the "bookes to bee first learned of children." First were "abcies" and primers, then the Psalms in metre, then the Testament. "Then if any other require any little booke meet to enter Children, the _Schoole of Virtue_ is one of the Principall, and easiest for the first enterers being full of precepts of ciuilitie.... And after the _Schoole of Good Manners_, leading the child as by the hand, in the way of all good manners."