To the French we owe the word etiquette, and it is amusing to discover its origin in the commonplace familiar warning—­“Keep off the grass.”  It happened in the reign of Louis XIV, when the gardens of Versailles were being laid out, that the master gardener, an old Scotsman, was sorely tried because his newly seeded lawns were being continually trampled upon.  To keep trespassers off, he put up warning signs or tickets—­etiquettes—­on which was indicated the path along which to pass.  But the courtiers paid no attention to these directions and so the determined Scot complained to the King in such convincing manner that His Majesty issued an edict commanding everyone at Court to “keep within the etiquettes.”  Gradually the term came to cover all the rules for correct demeanor and deportment in court circles; and thus through the centuries it has grown into use to describe the conventions sanctioned for the purpose of smoothing personal contacts and developing tact and good manners in social intercourse.  With the decline of feudal courts and the rise of empires of industry, much of the ceremony of life was discarded for plain and less formal dealing.  Trousers and coats supplanted doublets and hose, and the change in costume was not more extreme than the change in social ideas.  The court ceased to be the arbiter of manners, though the aristocracy of the land remained the high exemplar of good breeding.

Yet, even so courtly and materialistic a mind as Lord Chesterfield’s acknowledged a connection between manners and morality, of which latter the courts of Europe seemed so sparing.  In one of the famous “Letters to His Son” he writes:  “Moral virtues are the foundation of society in general, and of friendship in particular; but attentions, manners, and graces, both adorn and strengthen them.”  Again he says:  “Great merit, or great failings, will make you respected or despised; but trifles, little attentions, mere nothings, either done or reflected, will make you either liked or disliked, in the general run of the world.”  For all the wisdom and brilliancy of his worldly knowledge, perhaps no other writer has done so much to bring disrepute on the “manners and graces” as Lord Chesterfield, and this, it is charged, because he debased them so heavily by considering them merely as the machinery of a successful career.  To the moralists, the fact that the moral standards of society in Lord Chesterfield’s day were very different from those of the present era rather adds to the odium that has become associated with his attitude.  His severest critics, however, do concede that he is candid and outspoken, and many admit that his social strategy is widely practised even in these days.