disregarded or in any way set aside. The abuse of them is no
argument against them, any more than gluttony is any reason for
starvation. It is not the food that is in fault, but the excess of
the person partaking of it. The fault must be laid wholly and
solely at the door of those who misunderstand the use and
intention of really sound and excellent precepts. The extravagance
of an overdisplay of etiquette is really only another form of
innate vulgarity, although there are instances which may be drawn
from the side of over refinement, from the history of people and
societies, who become extravagant in their devotion to what they
deem good breeding, simply because, like the stars that looked
down upon Molly Bawn, "they'd nothing else to do."

There are to be found, even in grave history--amid the records of
war, treaties, conquests, administrations and revolutions--
accounts given in equally grave language of deep questions of
etiquette which seem to have been debated and settled with as much
care and energy as the most serious questions of state affairs.
Cases of this sort are announced and well founded. Whoever likes
to see the extent to which attention was given to the subject can
seek instances in the memoirs of public characters who lived in
the seventeenth century, in the diaries of minute detailers like
the Duke de St. Simon, Page to His Most Christian Majesty, Louis
the Fourteenth; like Sir John Finett, Master of Ceremonies to
Charles the First, and in the domestic histories of the courtiers
and grandees of the Spanish and Venetian courts.

Fortunately, the time has gone by when nice questions about
trifling points of etiquette served to light the flame of civil
war, as once they did in France, and to set the whole of the upper