Good Manners

Erasmus, A Handbook on Good Manners for Children. Translated by Eleanor Merchant (London: Preface Publishing, 2008), pp. 25-26:

There are some who teach that a child should hold in digestive wind by clenching his buttocks. But it's not good manners to make yourself ill in your eagerness to appear polite. If you can go somewhere else, then do that on your own. But if not, as the oldest of proverbs goes, 'let him disguise the fart with a cough.' Anyway, why don't those people teach in the same way that children should refrain from moving their bowels, since it's far more damaging to refrain from breaking wind than to constrict the bowels?

Hat tip: A friend.