Not to sit at table with one’s legs crossed.
To offer the cup to others only when they want it. (The rules
as to drinking seem throughout to contemplate that two or more
guests are using one cup or vessel.)
To use both hands in drinking.
Never to decline the cup when another offers it, but to drink
no more than one wishes. (This rule still has its analogue at
tables where the custom lingers of requesting ‘the pleasure of
taking wine with’ some one else.)
Not to rummage about in the dish from which one is eating along
with others.
Not to dip bread into the wine of which one is drinking along
with others.
To suspend eating while a man of importance is drinking.
To postpone drinking till the man of importance has finished.
Not to speak to a man who is in the act of drinking. (This rule
seems to contemplate ‘potations pottle-deep,’ such as engage
all one’s energies for some little while together: for a mere
modern sip at a wine-glass such a rule would be superfluous.)
To retain one’s spoon when one’s plate is removed for another
help, (_One_ spoon, it may be inferred, is to last all through
the meal, serving as a fork.)
Not to eat an excessive quantity of bread with the viands.
Not to re-place one’s knife in its sheath prematurely. (It may
be presumed that each guest brings his own knife.)
The reader who considers these rules in their several categories, and
with due allowance for difference of times, manners, and ‘properties,’
will, I think, agree with me in seeing that the essentials of courtesy
at table in Lombardy in the thirteenth century, and in England in the
nineteenth, are, after all, closely related; and that, while some of our
Friar’s tutorings would now happily be supererogatory, and others are
inapplicable to present dining conveniences, not one is ill-bred in any
correct use of that word. The details of etiquette vary indefinitely: the
sense of courtesy is substantially one and the same. In Fra Bonvicino’s
manual, it appears constantly in its genuine aspect, and prompted by its
truest spirit—not so much that of personal correctness, each man for his
own credit, as of uniform consideration for others.
[Sidenote: FRANCESCO DA BARBERINO.]
The same is eminently the case with some of the precepts given by our
next author, Francesco da Barberino. Nothing, for instance, can go beyond
the true _rationale_ of courtesy conveyed in the following injunction[28]
(which we must not here degrade from its grace of Tuscan speech and
verse):
‘Colli minor sì taci,
E prendi il loco che ti danno; e pensa
Che, per far qui difensa,
Faresti lor, per tuo vizio, villani.’