Chapter 7

No waving lappets should the dancing fair,Nor ruffles edged with dangling fringes wear;Oft will the cobweb ornaments catch holdOn the approaching button, rough with gold;Nor force nor art can then the bonds divideWhen once the entangled Gordian knot is tied.So the unhappy pair, by Hymen's powerTogether joined in some ill-fated hour,The more they strive their freedom to regain,The faster binds the indissoluble chain.

It was worse than this in the position in which she had placed herself according to rule, for beginning the minuet, she was fastened not by a spell, not by the influence of her malignant Stars, but by the hooks and eyes of her garters. The Countess of Salisbury's misfortune was as much less embarrassing as it was more celebrated.

No such misfortunes could have happened to that Countess who has been rendered illustrious thereby, nor to the once fair danceress, who would have dreaded nothing more than that her ridiculous distress should become publicly known, if they had worngenouillères, that is to say, knee-pieces. A necessary part of a suit of armour was distinguished by this name in the days of chivalry; and the article of dress which corresponds to it may be called kneelets, if for a new article we strike a new word in that mint of analogy, from which whatever is lawfully coined comes forth as the King's English. Dress and cookery are both great means of civilization, indeed they are among the greatest; both in their abuse are made subservient to luxury and extravagance, and so become productive of great evils, moral and physical; and with regard to both the physician may sometimes interfere with effect, when the moralist would fail. In diet the physician has more frequently to oppose the inclinations of his patient, than to gratify them; and it is not often that his advice in matters of dress meets with willing ears, although in these things the maxim will generally hold good, that whatever is wholesome is comfortable, and that whatever causes discomfort or uneasiness is more or less injurious to health. But he may recommend kneelets without having any objection raised on the score of fashion, or of vanity; and old and young may be thankful for the recommendation. Mr. Ready-to-halt would have found that they supported his weak joints and rendered him less liable to rheumatic attacks; and his daughter Much-afraid, if she had worn them when she “footed it handsomely,” might have danced without any fear of such accidents as happened to the Countess of old, or the heroine of the minuet in later times.

Begin therefore forthwith, dear Lady-readers, to knitgenouillèresfor yourselves, and for those whom you love. You will like them better I know by their French name, though English comes best from English lips; but so you knit and wear them, call them what you will.

THE DOCTOR'S OPINION OF LATE HOURS. DANCING. FANATICAL OBJECTION OF THE ALBIGENSES; INJURIOUS EFFECT OF THAT OPINION WHEN TRANSMITTED TO THE FRENCH PROTESTANTS. SIR JOHN DAVIES AND BURTON QUOTED TO SHOW THAT IT CAN BE NO DISPARAGEMENT TO SAY THAT ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE, WHEN ALL THE SKY'S A BALL-ROOM.

I could be pleased with any oneWho entertained my sight with such gay shows,As men and women moving here and there,That coursing one another in their stepsHave made their feet a tune.DRYDEN.

The Doctor was no dancer. He had no inclination for this pastime even in what the song calls “our dancing days,” partly because his activity lay more in his head than in his heels, and partly perhaps from an apprehension of awkwardness, the consequence of his rustic breeding. In middle and later life he had strong professional objections, not to the act of dancing, but to the crowded and heated rooms wherein it was carried on, and to the late hours to which it was continued. In such rooms and at such assemblies, the Devil, as an old dramatist says, “takes delight to hang at a woman's girdle, like a rusty watch, that she cannot discern how the time passes.”1Bishop Hall in our friend's opinion spake wisely when drawing an ideal picture of the Christian, he said of him, “in a due season he betakes himself to his rest. He presumes not to alter the ordinance of day and night; nor dares confound, where distinctions are made by his Maker.”

1WEBSTER.

Concerning late hours indeed he was much of the same opinion as the man in the old play who thought that “if any thing was to be damned, it would be Twelve o'clock at night.”

These should be hours for necessities,Not for delights; times to repair our natureWith comforting repose, and not for usTo waste these times.2

He used to say that whenever he heard of a ball carried on far into the night, or more properly speaking, far into the morning, it reminded him with too much reason of the Dance of Death.

Rise with the lark, and with the lark to bed:The breath of night's destructive to the hueOf ev'ry flow'r that blows. Go to the field,And ask the humble daisy why it sleepsSoon as the sun departs? Why close the eyesOf blossoms infinite, long ere the moonHer oriental veil puts off? Think why,Nor let the sweetest blossom Nature boastsBe thus exposed to night's unkindly damp.Well may it droop, and all its freshness lose,Compell'd to taste the rank and pois'nous steamOf midnight theatre, and morning ball.Give to repose the solemn hour she claimsAnd from the forehead of the morning stealThe sweet occasion. O there is a charmWhich morning has, that gives the brow of ageA smack of earth, and makes the lip of youthShed perfume exquisite. Expect it not,Ye who till noon upon a down-bed lie,Indulging feverous sleep.3

2SHAKESPEARE.

3HURDIS' VILLAGECURATE.

The reader need not be told that his objections were not puritanical, but physical. The moralist who cautioned his friend to refrain from dancing, because it was owing to a dance that John the Baptist lost his head, talked, he said, like a fool. Nor would he have formed a much more favourable opinion of the Missionary in South Africa, who told the Hottentots that dancing is a work of darkness, and that a fiddle is Satan's own instrument. At such an assertion he would have exclaimed a fiddlestick!4—Why and how that word has become an interjection of contempt, I must leave those to explain who can. The Albigenses and the Vaudois are said to have believed that a dance is the Devil's procession, in which they who dance break the promise and vow which their sponsors made for them at their baptism that they should renounce the Devil and all his works, the pomps and vanities of this wicked world,—(not to proceed further,)—this being one of his works, and undeniably one of the aforesaid vanities and pomps. They break moreover all the ten commandments, according to these fanatics; for fanatics they must be deemed who said this; and the manner in which they attempted to prove the assertion by exemplifying it through the decalogue, shows that the fermentation of their minds was in the acetous stage.

4The explanation following is given in Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. FIDDLESTICK'SEND. Nothing: the ends of the ancient fiddlesticks ending in a point: hence metaphorically used to express a thing terminating in nothing.

Unfortunately for France, this opinion descended to the Huguenots; and the progress of the Reformation in that country was not so much promoted by Marot's psalms, as it was obstructed by this prejudice, a prejudice directly opposed to the temperament and habits of a mercurial people. “Dancing,” says Peter Heylyn, “is a sport to which they are so generally affected, that were it not so much enveighed against by their straight-laced Ministers, it is thought that many more of the French Catholicks had been of the Reformed Religion. For so extremely are they bent upon this disport, that neither Age nor Sickness, no nor poverty itself, can make them keep their heels still, when they hear the Music. Such as can hardly walk abroad without their Crutches, or go as if they were troubled all day with a Sciatica, and perchance have their rags hang so loose about them, that one would think a swift Galliard might shake them into their nakedness, will to the Dancing Green howsoever, and be there as eager at the sport, as if they had left their several infirmities and wants behind them. What makes their Ministers (and indeed all that follow the Genevian Discipline) enveigh so bitterly against Dancing, and punish it with such severity when they find it used? I am not able to determine, nor doth it any way belong unto this discourse. But being it is a Recreation which this people are so given unto, and such a one as cannot be followed but in a great deal of company, and before many witnesses and spectators of their carriage in it; I must needs think the Ministers of the French Church more nice than wise, if they choose rather to deter men from their Congregations, by so strict a Stoicism, than indulge any thing unto the jollity and natural gaiety of this people, in matters not offensive, but by accident only.”5

Sweet recreation barr'd, what doth ensue,But moody and dull melancholy,Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair;And at their heels, a huge infectious troopOf pale distemperatures and foes to life.6

5The Rector of a Parish once complained to Fenelon of the practice of the villagers in dancing on Sunday evenings. “My good friend,” replied the prelate, “you and I should not dance, but allowance must be made to the poor people, who have only one day in the week to forget their misfortunes.”

6SHAKESPEARE.

It is a good natured Roman Catholic who says, “that the obliging vices of some people are better than the sour and austere virtues of others.” The fallacy is more in his language than in his morality; for virtue is never sour, and in proportion as it is austere we may be sure that it is adulterated. Before a certain monk of St. Gal, Iso by name, was born, his mother dreamt that she was delivered of a hedge-hog; her dream was fulfilled in the character which he lived to obtain of being bristled with virtues like one. Methinks no one would like to come in contact with a person of this description. Yet among the qualities which pass with a part of the world for virtues, there are some of a soft and greasy kind, from which I should shrink with the same instinctive dislike. I remember to have met somewhere with this eulogium past upon one dissenting minister by another, that he was a lump of piety! I prefer the hedge-hog.

A dance, according to that teacher of the Albigenses whose diatribe has been preserved, is the service of the Devil, and the fiddler, whom Ben Jonson calls Tom Ticklefoot, is the Devil's minister. If he had known what Plato had said he would have referred to it in confirmation of this opinion, for Plato says that the Gods compassionating the laborious life to which mankind were doomed, sent Apollo, Bacchus and the Muses to teach them to sing, to drink, and to dance. And the old Puritan would to his own entire satisfaction have identified Apollo with Apollyon.

“But shall we make the welkin dance indeed?”7

7SHAKESPEARE.

Sir John Davies, who holds an honourable and permanent station among English statesmen and poets deduces Dancing, in a youthful poem of extraordinary merit, from the Creation, saying that it

then began to beWhen the first seeds whereof the world did spring,The fire, air, earth, and water did agree,By Love's persuasion, Nature's mighty king,To leave their first disordered combating;And in a dance such measure to observe,As all the world their motion should preserve.

He says that it with the world

in point of time begun;Yea Time itself, (whose birth Jove never knew,And which indeed is elder than the Sun)Had not one moment of his age outrun,When out leapt Dancing from the heap of thingsAnd lightly rode upon his nimble wings.For that brave Sun, the father of the day,Doth love this Earth, the mother of the Night,And like a reveller in rich array,Doth dance his galliard in his leman's sight.* * * * *Who doth not see the measures of the Moon,Which thirteen times she danceth every year?And ends her pavin thirteen times as soonAs doth her brother, of whose golden hairShe borroweth part, and proudly doth it wear;Then doth she coyly turn her face aside,That half her cheek is scarce sometimes descried.And lo the Sea that fleets about the landAnd like a girdle clips her solid waist,Music and measure both doth understand.For his great crystal eye is always castUp to the Moon, and on her fixed fast;And as she danceth in her pallid sphere,So danceth he about the centre here.

This is lofty poetry, and one cannot but regret that the poet should have put it in the mouth of so unworthy a person as one of Penelope's suitors, though the best of them has been chosen. The moral application which he makes to matrimony conveys a wholesome lesson:

If they whom sacred love hath link'd in one,Do, as they dance, in all their course of life;Never shall burning grief, nor bitter moan,Nor factious difference, nor unkind strife,Arise betwixt the husband and the wife;For whether forth, or back, or round he go,As the man doth, so must the woman do.What if, by often interchange of placeSometimes the woman gets the upper hand?That is but done for more delightful grace;For on that part she doth not ever stand;But as the measure's law doth her command,She wheels about, and ere the dance doth end,Into her former place she doth transcend.8

8It is remarkable that Sir John Davies should have written this Poem, which he entitled the Orchestra, and that very remarkable and beautiful one on the Immortality of the Soul.

This poem of Sir John Davies's could not have been unknown to Burton, for Burton read every thing; but it must have escaped his memory, otherwise he who delighted in quotations and quoted so well, would have introduced some of his stanzas, when he himself was treating of the same subject and illustrated it with some of the same similitudes. “The Sun and Moon, some say,” (says he) “dance about the earth; the three upper planets about the Sun as their centre, now stationary, now direct, now retrograde, nowin apogæo, then inperigæo, now swift, then slow; occidental, oriental, they turn round, jump and trace ♀ and ☿ about the Sun, with those thirty-threeMaculæor Burbonian planets,circa Solem saltantes cytharedum, saith Fromundus. Four Medicean stars dance about Jupiter, two Austrian about Saturn, &c. and all belike to the music of the spheres.”

Sir Thomas Browne had probably this passage in his mind, when he said “acquaint thyself with thechoragiumof the stars.”

“The whole matter of the Universe and all the parts thereof,” says Henry More, “are ever upon motion, and in such a dance as whose traces backwards and forwards take a vast compass; and what seems to have made the longest stand, must again move, according to the modulations and accents of that Music, that is indeed out of the hearing of the acutest ears, but yet perceptible by the purest minds, and the sharpest wits. The truth whereof none would dare to oppose, if the breath of the gainsayer could but tell its own story, and declare through how many Stars and Vortices it has been strained, before the particles thereof met, to be abused to the framing of so rash a contradiction.”

DANCING PROSCRIBED BY THE METHODISTS. ADAM CLARKE. BURCHELL's REMARKS ON THE UNIVERSALITY OF THIS PRACTICE. HOW IT IS REGARDED IN THE COLUMBIAN PHILOSOPHY.

Non vi par adunque che habbiamo ragionato a bastanza di questo? A bastanza parmi, rispose il Signor Gasparo; pur desidero io d'intendere qualche particolarità anchor.

ILCORTEGIANO.

The Methodist Preachers in the first Conference (that is Convocation or Yearly Meeting) after Mr. Wesley's death, past a law for the public over which their authority extends, or in their own language made a rule, that “schoolmasters and schoolmistresses who received dancing-masters into their schools, and parents also who employed dancing-masters for their children, should be no longer members of the Methodist Society.” Many arguments were urged against this rule, and therefore it was defended in the Magazine which is the authorized organ of the Conference, by the most learned and the most judicious of their members, Adam Clarke. There was however a sad want of judgement in some of the arguments which he employed. He quoted the injunction of St. Paul, “whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him,” and he applied the text thus. Can any person, can any Christiandancein the name of the Lord Jesus? Or, through him, give thanks to God the Father for such an employment?

Another text also appeared to him decisive against dancing and its inseparable concomitants; “woe unto them who chaunt unto the sound of the viol, and invent unto themselves instruments of music, as did David.” The original word which we translatechaunt, signifies according to him,to quaver, to divide, to articulate,and may, he says, as well be applied to the management of the feet, as to the modulations of the voice. This interpretation is supported by the Septuagint, and by the Arabic version; but suppose it be disputed, he says, “yet this much will not be denied, that the text is pointedly enough against that without which dancing cannot well be carried on, I mean, instrumental music.” He might have read in Burton that “nothing was so familiar in France as for citizens wives, and maids to dance a round in the streets, and often too for want of better instruments to make good music of their own voices and dance after it.” Ben Jonson says truly “that measure is the soul of a dance, and Tune the tickle-foot thereof,” but in case of need, the mouth can supply its own music.

It is true the Scripture says “there is a time to dance;” but this he explains as simply meaning “that human life is a variegated scene.” Simple readers must they be who can simply understand it thus, to the exclusion of the literal sense. Adam Clarke has not remembered here that the Psalms enjoin us to praise the Lord with tabret and harp and lute, the strings and the pipe, and the trumpet and the loud cymbals, and to praise his name in the dance, and that David danced before the Ark. And though he might argue that Jewish observances are no longer binding, and that some things which werepermittedunder the Jewish dispensation are no longer lawful, he certainly would not have maintained that any thing which wasenjoinedamong its religious solemnities, can now in itself be sinful.

I grant, he says, “that a number of motions and steps, circumscribed by a certain given space, and changed in certain quantities of time, may be destitute of physical and moral evil. But it is not against these things abstractedly that I speak. It is against their concomitant and consequent circumstances; the undue, the improper mixture of the sexes; the occasions and opportunities afforded of bringing forth those fruits of death which destroy their own souls, and bring the hoary heads of their too indulgent parents with sorrow to the grave.”

So good a man as Adam Clarke is not to be suspected of acting like an Advocate here, and adducing arguments which he knew to be fallacious, in support of a cause not tenable by fair reasoning. And how so wise a man could have reasoned so weakly, is explained by a passage in his most interesting and most valuable autobiography. “Malâ ave, when about twelve or thirteen years of age, I learned todance. I long resisted all solicitations to this employment, but at last I suffered myself to be overcome; and learnt, and profited beyond most of my fellows. I grew passionately fond of it, would scarcely walk but inmeasured time, and was continuallytripping, moving andshuffling, in all times and places. I began now to value myself, which, as far as I can recollect, I had never thought of before; I grew impatient of control, was fond of company, wished to mingle more than I had ever done with young people; I got also a passion forbetter clothing, than that which fell to my lot in life, was discontented when I found a neighbour's sondressed betterthan myself. I lost the spirit ofsubordination, and did notlove work, imbibed a spirit ofidleness, and in short, drunk in all the brain-sickening effluvia ofpleasure;dancing and company took the place ofreadingandstudy;and the authority of my parents was feared indeed, but not respected; and few serious impressions could prevail in a mind imbued now with frivolity, and the love of pleasure; yet I entered into no disreputable assembly, and in no one case, ever kept any improper company; I formed no illegal connection, nor associated with any whose characters were either tarnished or suspicious. Neverthelessdancingwas to me aperverting influence, anunmixed moral evil;for although by the mercy of God, it led me not to depravity of manners, it greatly weakened themoral principle, drowned the voice of a well instructed conscience, and was the first cause of impelling meto seek my happiness in this life. Every thing yielded to the disposition it had produced, and every thing was absorbed by it. I have it justly in abhorrence for the moral injury it did me; and I can testify, (as far as my own observations have extended, and they have had a pretty wide range,) I have known it to produce the same evil in others that it produced in me. I consider it therefore as a branch of thatworldly education, which leads from heaven to earth, from things spiritual to things sensual, and from God to Satan. Let them plead for it who will; I know it to beevil, and thatonly. They who bring up their children in this way, or send them to these schools wheredancingis taught, are consecrating them to the service of Moloch, and cultivating the passions, so as to cause them to bring forth the weeds of a fallen nature, with an additional rankness, deep rooted inveteracy, and inexhaustible fertility.Nemo sobrius saltat, ‘no man in his senses will dance,’ said Cicero, a heathen; shame on those Christians who advocate a cause by which manysonshave become profligate, and manydaughtershave been ruined.” Such was the experience of Adam Clarke indancing, and such was his opinion of the practice.1

1It is old Fuller's observation, that “people over strait-laced in one part will hardly fail to grow awry in another.” Over against the observations of Adam Clarke may be set the following, from the life of that excellent man—Sir William Jones. “Nor was he so indifferent to slighter accomplishments as not to avail himself of the instructions of a celebrated dancing master at Aix-la-Chapelle. He had before taken lessons from Gallini in that trifling art.”—Carey's Lives of English Poets. Sir William Jones, p. 359.

An opinion not less unfavourable is expressed in homely old verse by the translator of the Ship of Fools, Alexander Barclay.

Than it in the earth no game is more damnable;It seemeth no peace, but battle openly,They that it use of minds seem unstable,As mad folk running with clamour, shout and cryWhat place is void of this furious folly?None; so that I doubt within a whileThese fools the holy Church shall defile.Of people what sort or order may we find,Rich or poor, high or low of nameBut by their foolishness and wanton mind,Of each sort some are given unto the same.The priests and clerks to dance have no shame.The friar or monk, in his frock and cowl,Must dance in his dortour, leaping to play the fool.To it comes children, maids, and wives,And flattering young men to see to have their prey;The hand-in-hand great falsehood oft contrives.The old quean also this madness will assay;And the old dotard, though he scantly mayFor age and lameness stir either foot or hand,Yet playeth he the fool, with others in the band.Then leap they about as folk past their mind,With madness amazed running in compace;He most is commended that can most lewdness find,Or can most quickly run about the place,There are all manners used that lack grace,Moving their bodies in signs full of shame,Which doth their hearts to sin right sore inflame.Do away your dances, ye people much unwise!Desist your foolish pleasure of travayle!It is methinks an unwise use and guiseTo take such labour and pain without avayle.And who that suspecteth his maid or wives tayle,Let him not suffer them in the dance to be;For in that game though size or cinque them fayleThe dice oft runneth upon the chance of three.

The principle upon which such reasoning rests is one against which the Doctor expressed a strong opinion, whenever he heard it introduced. Nothing, he thought, could be more unreasonable than that the use of what is no ways hurtful or unlawful in itself, should be prohibited because it was liable to abuse. If that principle be once admitted, where is it to stop? There was a Persian tyrant, who having committed some horrible atrocity in one of his fits of drunkenness, ordered all the wine in his dominions to be spilt as soon as he became sober, and was conscious of what he had done; and in this he acted rightly, under a sense of duty as well as remorse, for it was enjoining obedience to a law of his religion, and enforcing it in a manner the most effectual. But a Christian government which because drunkenness is a common sin shall prohibit all spirituous liquors, would by so doing subject the far greater and better part of the community to an unjust and hurtful privation, thus punishing the sober, the inoffensive and the industrious, for the sake of the idle, the worthless and the profligate.

Jones of Nayland regarded these things with no puritanical feeling. “In joy, and thanksgiving,” says that good and true minister of the Church of England, “the tongue is not content with speaking, it must evoke and utter a song, while the feet are also disposed to dance to the measures of music, as was the custom in sacred celebrities of old among the people of God, before the World and its vanities had engrossed to themselves all the expressions of mirth and festivity. They have now left nothing of that kind to religion; which must sit by in gloomy solemnity, and see the World with the Flesh and the Devil assume to themselves the sole power of distributing social happiness.”

“Dancing,” says Mr. Burchell, “appears to have been in all ages of the world, and perhaps in all nations, a custom so natural, so pleasing, and even useful, that we may readily conclude it will continue to exist as long as mankind shall continue to people the earth. We see it practised as much by the savage as by the civilized, as much by the lowest, as by the highest classes of society; and as it is a recreation purely corporeal, and perfectly independent of mental qualification, or refinement, all are equally fitted for enjoying it: it is this probably which has occasioned it to become universal. All attempts therefore at rendering any exertion of the mind necessary to its performance, are an unnatural distortion of its proper and original features. Grace and ease of motion are the extent of its perfection; because these are the natural perfections of the human body. Every circumstance and object by which man is surrounded may be viewed in a philosophical light; and thus viewed, dancing appears to be a recreative mode of exercising the body and keeping it in health, the means of shaking off spleen, and of expanding one of the best characters of the heart,—the social feeling. When it does not affect this, the fault is not in the dance, but in the dancer; a perverse mind makes all things like itself. Dancing and music, which appears to be of equal antiquity, and equally general among mankind, are connected together only by a community of purpose: what one is for the body, the other is for the mind.”

The Doctor had come to a conclusion not unlike this traveller's concerning dancing,—he believed it to be a manifestation of that instinct by which the young are excited to wholesome exercise, and by which in riper years harmless employment is afforded for superfluous strength and restless activity. The delight which girls as well as boys take in riotous sports were proof enough, he said, that Nature had not given so universal an inclination without some wise purpose. An infant of six months will ply its arms and legs in the cradle, with all its might and main, for joy,—this being the mode of dancing at that stage of life. Nay, he said, he could produce grave authorities on which casuists would pronounce that a probable belief might be sustained, to prove that it is an innate propensity and of all propensities the one which has been developed in the earliest part of mortal existence; for it is recorded of certain Saints, that on certain holidays, dedicated either to the mystery, or to the heavenly patron under whose particular patronage they were placed, they danced before they were born, a sure token or presage of their future holiness and canonization, and a not less certain proof that the love of dancing is an innate principle.

Lovest thou Music?Oh, 'tis sweet!What's dancing?E'en the mirth of feet.2

2From a Masque quoted by D'ISRAELI.

A SERIOUS WORD IN SAD APOLOGY FOR ONE OF THE MANY FOOLISH WAYS IN WHICH TIME IS MIS-SPENT.

Time as he passes us, has a dove's wing,Unsoil'd, and swift, and of a silken sound;But the World's Time, is Time in masquerade!Their's, should I paint him, has his pinions fledged,With motley plumes; and where the peacock shewsHis azure eyes, is tinctured black and redWith spots quadrangular of diamond form,Ensanguined hearts, clubs typical of strife,And spades, the emblem of untimely graves.COWPER.

Hunting, gaming and dancing are three propensities to which men are inclined equally in the savage and in the civilized,—in all stages of society from the rudest to the most refined, and in all its grades; the Doctor used to say they might be called semi-intellectual. The uses of hunting are obvious wherever there are wild animals which may be killed for food, or beasts of prey which for our own security it is expedient to destroy.

Indeed because hunting, hawking and fishing (all which according to Gwillim and Plato are comprised in the term Venation) tend to the providing of sustenance for man, Farnesius doth therefore account them all a species of agriculture. The great heraldic author approves of this comprehensive classification. But because the more heroic hunting in which danger is incurred from the strength and ferocity of the animals pursued, hath a resemblance of military practice, he delivers his opinion that “this noble kind of venation is privileged from the title of an Illiberal Art, being a princely and generous exercise; and those only, who use it for a trade of life, to make sure thereof, are to be marshalled in the rank of mechanics and illiberal artizans.” The Doctor admired the refinement of these authors, but he thought that neither lawful sporting, nor poaching could conveniently be denominated agricultural pursuits.

He found it not so easy to connect the love of gaming with any beneficial effect; some kind of mental emotion however, he argued, was required for rendering life bearable by creatures with whom sleep is not so compleatly an act of volition, that like dogs they can lie down and fall asleep when they like. For those persons therefore who are disposed either by education, capacity, or inclination to make any worthier exertion of their intellectual faculties, gaming, though infinitely dangerous as a passion, may be useful as a pastime. It has indeed a strong tendency to assume a dangerous type, and to induce as furious an excitement as drunkenness in its most ferocious form, but among the great card-playing public of all nations, long experience has produced an effect in mitigating it analogous to what the practice of inoculation has effected upon the small-pox. Vaccination would have afforded our philosopher a better illustration if it had been brought into notice during his life.

Pope has assigned to those women who neither toil or spin, “an old age of cards,” after “a youth of pleasure.” This perhaps is not now so generally the course of female life, in a certain class and under certain circumstances, as it was in his days and in the Doctor's. The Doctor, certainly was of opinion that if the senescent spinsters and dowagers within the circle of his little world, had not their cards as duly as their food, many of them would have taken to something worse in their stead. They would have sought for the excitement which they now found at the whist or quadrille table, from the bottle, or at the Methodist Meeting. In some way or other, spiritual or spirituous they must have had it;1and the more scandalous of these ways was not always that which would occasion the greatest domestic discomfort, or lead to the most injurious consequences. Others would have applied to him for relief from maladies which by whatever names they might be called, were neither more nor less than the effect of thattædium vitæwhich besets those who having no necessary employment have not devised any for themselves. And when he regarded the question in this light he almost doubted whether the invention of cards had not been more beneficial than injurious to mankind.

1It happened during one of the lamented Southey's visits here at the Vicarage, West-Tarring, that a cargo of spirits was run close by. His remark was—“Better spirituous smuggling than spiritual pride.”

It was not with an unkind or uncharitable feeling, still less with a contemptuous one that Anne Seward mentioning the death of a lady “long invalid and far advanced in life,” described her as “a civil social being, whose care was never to offend; who had the spirit of a gentlewoman in never doing a mean thing, whose mite was never withheld from the poor; and whose inferiority of understanding and knowledge found sanctuary at the card-table, that universal leveller of intellectual distinctions.” Let not such persons be despised in the pride of intellect! Let them not be condemned in the pride of self righteousness!

“Our law,” says the Puritan Matthew Mead, “supposes all to be of some calling, not only men but women, and the young ladies too; and therefore it calls them during their virgin state spinsters. But alas, the viciousness and degeneracy of this age hath forfeited the title. Many cancard, but few can spin; and therefore you may write themcarders,dancers,painters,ranters,spenders, rather than spinsters. Industry is worn out by pride and delicacy; the comb and the looking-glass possess the place and the hours of the spindle and the distaff; and their great business is to curl the locks, instead of twisting wool and flax. So that both male and females are prepared for all ill impressions by the mischief of an idle education.”

“There is something strange in it,” says Sterne, “that life should appear so shortin the gross, and yet so longin the detail. Misery may make it so, you'll say;—but we will exclude it,—and still you'll find, though we all complain of the shortness of life what numbers there are who seem quite overstocked with the days and hours of it, and are constantly sending out into the highways and streets of the city, to compel guests to come in, and take it off their hands: to do this with ingenuity and forecast, is not one of the least arts and business of life itself; and they who cannot succeed in it, carry as many marks of distress about them, as bankruptcy itself could wear. Be as careless as we may, we shall not always have the power,—nor shall we always be in a temper to let the account run thus. When the blood is cooled, and the spirits which have hurried us on through half our days before we have numbered one of them, are beginning to retire;—then wisdom will press a moment to be heard,—afflictions, or a bed of sickness will find their hours of persuasion:—and should they fail, there is something yet behind:—old age will overtake us at the last, and with its trembling hand, hold up the glass to us.”

MORE OF THE DOCTOR'S PHILOSOPHY, WHICH WILL AND WILL NOT BE LIKED BY THE LADIES, AND SOME OF THE AUTHOR'S WHICH WILL AND WILL NOT BY THE GENTLEMEN. THE READER IS INTRODUCED TO COUNT CASTIGLIONE, AND TO SIR JOHN CHEKE.

Ou tend l'auteur à cette heure?Que fait-il? Revient-il? Va-t-il? Ou s'il demeure?L'AUTEUR.Non, je ne reviens pas, car je n'ai pas été;Je ne vais pas aussi, car je suis arrété;Et ne demeure point, car, tout de ce pas mêmeJe pretens m'en aller.MOLIERE.

The passage with which the preceding Chapter is concluded, is extracted from Sterne's Sermons, one of those discourses in which he tried the experiment of adapting the style of Tristram Shandy to the pulpit;—an experiment which proved as unsuccessful as it deserved to be. Gray however thought these sermons were in the style which in his opinion was most proper for the pulpit, and that they showed “a very strong imagination and a sensible head. But you see him, he adds, often tottering on the verge of laughter, and ready to throw his perriwig in the face of his audience.”

The extract which has been set before the reader is one of those passages which bear out Gray's judgement; it is of a good kind, and in its kind so good, that I would not weaken its effect, by inserting too near it the following Epigram from an old Magazine, addressed to a lady passionately fond of cards.

Thou, whom at length incessant gaming dubs,Thrice honourable title! Queen of Clubs,Say what vast joys each winning card imparts,And that, too justly, called the King of Hearts.Say, when you mourn of cash and jewels spoil'd,May not the thief be Knave of Diamonds stil'd?One friend, howe'er, when deep remorse invades,Awaits thee Lady; 'tis the Ace of Spades!

It has been seen that the Doctor looked upon the love of gaming as a propensity given us to counteract that indolence which if not thus amused, would breed for itself both real and imaginary evils. And dancing he thought was just as useful in counteracting the factitious inactivity of women in their youth, as cards are for occupying the vacuity of their minds at a later period. Of the three semi-intellectual propensities, as he called them which men are born with, those for hunting and gaming are useful only in proportion, as the earth is uncultivated, and those by whom it is inhabited. In a well ordered society there would be no gamblers, and the Nimrods of such a society, must like the heroes in Tongataboo, be contented with no higher sport than rat-catching: but dancing will still retain its uses. It will always be the most graceful exercise for children at an age when all that they do is graceful; and it will always be that exercise which can best be regulated for them, without danger of their exerting themselves too much, or continuing in it too long. And for young women in a certain rank, or rather region of life,—the temperate zone of society,—those who are above the necessity of labour, and below the station in which they have the command of carriages and horses,—that is for the great majority of the middle class;—it is the only exercise which can animate them to such animal exertion as may suffice

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