Then came the necessary comparison of Russell’s Boke with the _Boke of Curtasye_, edited by Mr Halliwell from the Sloane MS. 1986 for the Percy Society. Contrasts had to be made with it, in parts, many times in a page; the tract was out of print and probably in few Members’ hands; it needed a few corrections[15], and was worthy of a thousand times wider circulation than it had had; therefore a new edition from the MS. was added to this volume. Relying on Members reading it for themselves, I have not in the notes indicated all the points of coincidence and difference between this Boke and Russell’s. It is of wider scope than Russell’s, takes in the duties of outdoor officers and servants as well as indoor, and maybe those of a larger household; it has also a _fyrst Boke_ on general manners, and a _Second Book_ on what to learn at school, how to behave at church, &c., but it does not go into the great detail as to Meals and Dress which is the special value of Russell’s Boke, nor is it associated with a writer who tells us something of himself, or a noble who in all our English Middle Age has so bright a name on which we can look back as “good Duke Humphrey.” This personality adds an interest to work that anonymity and its writings of equal value can never have; so that we may be well content to let the _Curtasye_ be used in illustration of the _Nurture_. The MS. of the _Curtasye_ is about 1460 A.D., Mr Bond says. I have dated it wrongly on the half-title. _The Booke of Demeanor_ was “such a little one” that I was tempted to add it to mark the general introduction of handkerchiefs. Having printed it, arose the question, ‘Where did it come from?’ No Weste’s _Schoole of Vertue_ could I find in catalogues, or by inquiring of the Duke of Devonshire, Mr W. C. Hazlitt, at the Bodleian, &c. Seager’s _Schoole of Vertue_ was the only book that turned up, and this I accordingly reprinted, as Weste’s Booke of Demeanor seemed to be little more than an abstract of the first four Chapters of Seager cut down and rewritten. We must remember that books of this kind, which we look on as sources of amusement, as more or less of a joke, were taken seriously by the people they were written for. That _The Schoole of Vertue_, for instance--whether Seager’s or Weste’s--was used as a regular school-book for boys, let Io. Brinsley witness. In his _Grammar Schoole_ of 1612, pp. 17, 18, he enumerates the “Bookes to bee first learned of children”:-- 1. their Abcie, and Primer. 2. The Psalms in metre, ‘because children wil learne that booke with most readinesse and delight through the running of the metre, as it is found by experience. 3. Then the Testament.’ 4. “If any require any other little booke meet to enter children; _the Schoole of Vertue_ is one of the principall, and easiest for the first enterers, being full of precepts of ciuilitie, and such as children will soone learne and take a delight in, thorow the roundnesse