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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
class in a kingdom in arms. We owe this, perhaps, as much to the
general increase of civilization as to the working of any
particular set of rules or system. But the principle which
actuated the French nobility, at the time alluded to, is an
inherent one in the human mind, and would be likely to repeat
itself in some shape or another, not so violently perhaps, but
still to repeat itself, were it not kept in check by the known
laws of society.

Courts. Best. Law. Schools. Jail. Justice. Avoid. Attorneys. News. System.