Books provided a ready means of transmitting English standards of life to the colony. The carefully selected volumes in the manor houses clearly reveal their owners' aspiration to become "compleat gentlemen." It was not unusual for the collection of a prosperous planter to number as many as one or two thousand. Works providing guidance in the mode of life they admired greatly predominated, though works of literature were not absent. English "courtesy" and "conduct" books were on every gentleman's shelves. Richard Allestree's _A Gentleman's Calling_ and Henry Peacham's _The Compleat Gentleman_, and other works which portrayed fortitude, prudence, temperance, justice, liberality, and courtesy as cardinal virtues appear again and again in the inventories of the period, along with the writings of Castiglione and other Italians of an earlier day from whom English authors had derived ideas of courtly conduct. Most numerous were works stressing a gentleman's religious obligations. Duty to God and Church was set forth in devotional works of various kinds, collections of sermons, and theological treatises. Then came books on historical subjects which offered actual examples of men of great deeds. There were also many volumes on politics and statecraft and military manuals, all of them useful in teaching the larger obligations which a man of wealth owed to society. Guidance in the practical duties of a great estate was furnished in treatises on various phases of farming and gardening, manuals of medicine and surgery, books on surveying and engineering, commentaries on law and legal procedure and handbooks of architecture.[8] [8] Cf. Wright, _First Gentlemen_, _passim_. Naturally, the character of the schooling provided for the growing generation greatly concerned the Virginia gentlemen. Many, eager to give their children direct contact with the traditional learning and culture of the mother country, sent them for a period of years to English schools.[9] Not infrequently, mere infants were placed under the protection of relatives and friends in the mother country. As early as 1683 William Byrd II, then nine years old, and his sister Susan, about six, were being watched over in English schools by their Horsmanden grandparents, and plans were making to send over their little sister, Ursula, aged four. Each of the great "King" Carter's five boys was sent overseas at an early age. In 1762 John Baylor of Caroline County, who had received his own education at Putney Grammar School and Caius College, Cambridge, sent his twelve-year-old son to Putney, and about the same time put his four young daughters at a boarding school at Croyden in Kent.[10]