"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."
The constant reading of these books, and the persistent reprinting of their formal rules of behavior, may have tended to conserve the old-fashioned deportment of children which has been so lamented by aged grumblers and lovers of the good old times. It was certainly natural that children should be affected by the regard for etiquette, the distinctions of social position which they saw heeded all around them, and in all departments of life. No man could enlist in the Massachusetts Cavalry unless he had a certain amount of property. Even boys in college had their names placed in the catalogues, not by classes, years, scholarship, or alphabetical order, but by the dignity and wealth of their family and social position; and a college boy at Harvard had to give the baluster side of the staircase to any one who was his social superior. Of course the careful "seating of the meeting" was simply an evidence of this regard of rank and station.
Thomas Aston Coffin, Three Years Old
It was a profound distance between Mr. and Goodman. Mistress and Goody marked a distinction as positive if not as great as between a duchess and a milkmaid. Unmarried women and girls, if deemed worthy any title at all, were not termed Miss, but were also Mrs. Rev. Mr. Tompson wrote a funeral tribute to a little girl of six, entitled, "A Neighbour's Tears dropt on ye Grave of an amiable Virgin; a pleasant Plant cut down in the blooming of her Spring, viz: Mrs. Rebecka Sewall August ye 4th, 1710." Cotton Mather wrote of "Mrs. Sarah Gerrish, a very beautiful and ingenious damsel seven years of age." Miss was not exactly a term of reproach, but it was not one of respect. It denoted childishness, flippancy, lack of character, and was not applied in public to children of dignified families. In Evelina the vulgar cousins, the Branghtons, call the heroine Miss. "Lord! Miss, never mind that!" "Aunt has told you all hant she, Miss?"
A certain regard for formality obtained even in very humble households. The childhood of David and John Brainerd, born respectively in 1718 and 1720, in East Haddam, Connecticut, who later in life were missionaries to the New Jersey Indians, has been written by a kinsman. They were nurtured under the influences of Connecticut Puritanism, in a simple New England home. Their biographer writes of their rearing:—