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tions especially were frequently referred to. Gabriel Harvey alluded to their great popularity at Cambridge, where every one had read them. In recognition of the author of the Courtier, the names of Castilio and Balthazar came to mean in the English language the perfection of courtesy; Marston, Guilpin and Ben Jonson all employed the words in this sense. Thomas Lupton called the book a manual of true gentlemanliness; and Roger Ascham, the puritanical opponent of Italian influence, said in his recommendation of the work: "to join learning with comely exercises, Conte Baldessar Castiglione in his book Cortegiano doth trimly teach; which book advisedly read and diligently followed but one year at home in England, would do a young gentleman more good, I wiss, than three years travel abroad spent in Italy."3 So late as the eighteenth century, it was regarded by Dr. Johnson as the best work on good breeding ever written.*

Courtesy books written in English were not very numerous in Tudor England. Even in such early works as Sir Thomas Elyot's Governour, Laurence Humphrey's The Nobles and the Institution of a Gentleman, the influence of certain Italian writers is plainly evident, though not always acknowledged. Boccaccio and Patrizi, from whom the above mentioned writers borrowed, were, however, of a different type from the true writers of courtesy, whose influence became later

1 Letter-Book, p. 79. 2 T. Lupton, Civil and Uncivil Life & Scholemaster, p. 66.

Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, V, 314.

so noticeable in England. In William Segar, for instance, the influence and example of these Italian courtesy writers was apparent. In the Book of Honor and Arms, he decided a question of etiquette, by quoting as eminent authority the Duke of Urbino; his subsequent work contained numerous allusions to Italian practices of chivalry and even made use of Italian expressions. His argument on virtue as essential to nobility followed closely the example of Italian writers ; although himself garter king-of-arms, he further imitated them by maintaining that the pursuit of learning was in no way inferior to a military career; no state, indeed, could be well governed "unless the governors thereof had studied philosophy." 1

George Pettie, in the preface to his translation of Guazzo's Conversations, was even more emphatic on the same subject. A soldier himself, he said that he ought not to be condemned for spending his time in writing, since learning was necessary to the military man. "Those which mislike study or learning in a gentleman are some fresh water soldiers, who think that in war it is the body which only must bear the brunt of all, not knowing that the body is ruled by the mind, and that in all doubtful and dangerous matters it is the mind only which is the man. . . . Therefore (gentlemen) never deny yourselves to be scholars, never be ashamed to show your learning. . . it is only it which maketh you gentlemen, and seeing that the only way to win immortality is either to

1 Honor, Military and Civil, p. 200 et seq.

do things worth the writing, or write things worth the reading."

If one idea could be picked out as the dominant thought in Italian courtesy books, it was that the outward graces of man should all be cultivated by education. Such education, however, was to be something more than a narrow book learning, and to rest on a broad basis of life. The courtier should be learned, said Pettie, in order that he might be able to properly advise his prince in the government of the state.1 It was for this reason also that Castiglione wished his courtier to be accomplished in so many things. The courtier, however, was to be a soldier as well, and thus the new education was grafted on to the military ideal. Many Englishmen were to exemplify it; Sidney and Raleigh were both scholars and soldiers; so too were Gascoigne, Turbervile, Pettie, Whitehorne, Bedingfield and Hitchcock, to mention only some of the names of English poets and translators, who were to prove that the Italian idea of the soldier as a man of cultivation had likewise taken root in England.

In the Renaissance, when the encouragement of learned men was almost a matter of state policy, the numerous small Italian courts formed centres of patronage for the needy scholar and poet. In England, on the other hand, where similar centres did not exist, and the royal court did not entirely fill their place, this patronage was effected rather by the nobility, who in the sixteenth century began to regard them

1 Guazzo, preface.

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