Page of The School of Manners
The young student's passage from his home to his school should be as decorous as his demeanor at either terminus:—
"Run not Hastily in the Street, nor go too Slowly. Wag not to and fro, nor use any Antick Postures either of thy Head, Hands, Feet or Body. Throw not aught on the Street, as Dirt or Stones. If thou meetest the scholars of any other School jeer not nor affront them, but show them love and respect and quietly let them pass along."
Boys took a good deal from their preceptors, and took it patiently and respectfully; but I can well imagine the roar of disgust with which even a much-hampered, eighteenth-century schoolboy read the instructions to show love and respect to the boys of a rival school and not to jeer or fire stones at them.
This book of manners was reprinted in Worcester by Isaiah Thomas in 1787. I have seen an earlier edition, called The School of Manners, which was published in London in 1701. The title-page and a page of the precepts are here reproduced. The directions in these books of etiquette are plainly copied from a famous book entitled Youths' Behaviour, or Decency in Conversation Amongst Men, a book unsurpassed in the seventeenth century as an epitome of contemporary manners, and held in such esteem that it ran through eleven editions in less than forty years after its first appearance. Not the least remarkable thing about this volume was the fact that the first edition in English was by an "ingeniose Spark" not then eight years of age, one Francis Hawkins, who rendered it from "the French of grave persons." The bookseller begs the reader to "connive at the stile," on the plea that it was "wrought by an uncouth and rough file of one in green years." Green years! we cannot fancy sober young Francis as ever green or as anything but a sere and prematurely withered leaf. We can see him in sad colored attire, carefully made quill pen in hand, seated at desk and standish, his poor little shrunken legs hanging pitifully down, inditing on foolscap with precision and elegance his pompous precepts. After all he only translated these maxims; hence, perhaps, was the reason that he managed to live to grow up. For translating did not tax his "intellectuals" as would have composition.
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:—