But to these qualities and virtues of the knight the courtier must needs add those of the scholar. The ordinary knight despised learning and held the virtues of the scholar in contempt. But the ideal of courtliness grew up in a land where humanistic studies had become a ruling passion, and in an age when the highest ambition of many an Italian prince was to be known as a patron of learning. It was natural that, developing in the atmosphere of these courts, the new standard of perfect manhood should give a prominent place to the qualifications and virtues of the scholar. This ideal of the courtier was never such a moral force in history as that of the monk or of the knight, but there were in it ethical elements of positive value to the moral life of the world. It was the inspiration of many of the finest spirits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[711] Of the noble-minded Sir Philip Sidney a biographer says, “He conscientiously molded his life on the model of the perfect courtier of Cortelliani.” Nor has the ideal ever ceased to appeal to the imagination, or lost its power to soften and refine manners and ennoble conduct. It inspires gentle consideration for others of whatsoever estate, incites to unselfish service, and induces absolute good faith and self-forgetting loyalty to friends and to the cause espoused, all of which are moral qualities of high value, and all of which have entered or are entering as permanent elements into the growing world ideal of perfect manhood. [Sidenote: The ethics of industry: the medieval towns the cradle of the modern business conscience] In the medieval town was developed a moral ideal as distinct and individual as that of the monastery or of the castle. Central in this type of goodness were the homely virtues of industry, carefulness in workmanship, punctuality, honesty, faithful observance of engagements, and general fair dealing. To these lay virtues were added all those which made up the Church ideal for the ordinary life, for there had not yet been effected that divorce of business from theology which had been effected in the case of politics. The development of this ideal of goodness was a matter of immense importance for the moral life of the West, because, acted upon by the practical ethical spirit of Protestantism and other agencies, it was destined to supersede the ascetic and chivalric ideals of life, which for more than a thousand years had been the ruling moral forces in the life of Christendom, for neither of these ideals of goodness could be more than a partial and passing form of the moral life. The ascetic ideal, having for its distinctive qualities such virtues as celibacy, poverty, solitary contemplation, vigils, fastings, and mortifications of the body, could not possibly become the standard for all men. It was confessedly a standard of perfection for the few only.