worldwide the course of courtly life takes its way

"The practitioners of gentility, as the stories related over and over, lived by the standards of the 'best people,' who always existed elsewhere. If they did not always think of European courts, they had the characteristic provincial habit of envisioning some superior society in a grand metropolis that embodied the highest in cultural achievement. They were fixed in a colonial mentality of periphery and center. In villages they thought of Boston or New York with the same awe as New York regarded London or Paris. In village and city, the structure was the same; ultimate authority lay in a distant place. The genteel lived by a standard outside of themselves and their circle. They could not break the colonial and provincial habit of looking upward and outward for leadership."

-- The Refinement of America, Persons, Houses, Cities, Richard L. Bushman, 1992, p. 414.