A symptom of the gradual softening away of the sombre habits of the people was exhibited in the earlier part of this year, in the commencement of what was called the Assembly in Edinburgh, by which was meant an arrangement for a weekly meeting of the younger people of both sexes, for the purpose of dancing. The adventure was at first on a very modest scale, and the place of meeting—‘in the great hall in Patrick Steil’s Close’—might be considered as obscure.[[583]] The people who patronised it were chiefly of those at once Tories in politics and Episcopalians in religion, |1723.| who, all through the last century, stood in opposition to the general feelings and habits of their countrymen. They were doubtless well satisfied of the legitimate and even laudable character of their design; yet it appears they felt themselves put on the defensive before the public, and were not a little solicitous to give their project a fair appearance. It was loudly proclaimed that the improvement of manners, the imparting of a ‘genteel behaviour,’ was in view; the utility of healthful exercise was insinuated; and a great point was made of the balances to be handed to the poor, for whose benefit no regulated charitable institution as yet existed. Great care was also professedly taken to insure perfect propriety on the part of the company. The ball opened at four in the afternoon, and was rigorously closed at eleven. Without tickets, at half-a-crown each, there could be no admission. Discreet matrons held indisputable sovereignty over the scene, before whom no vice could dare to shew its face.
The Assembly, of course, met with opposition from the square-toed part of society. ‘Some of the ministers published their warnings and admonitions against promiscuous dancing, and in one of their printed papers, which was cried about the streets, it was said that the devils were particularly busy upon such occasions.’[[584]] A paper pellet was launched, under the title of A Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to his Friend in the City, with an Answer thereto, concerning the New Assembly; from which we learn that there were serious apprehensions, not only that these weekly meetings would introduce effeminate habits amongst the nobility and gentry, preventing them from serving their country in ‘the useful arts and sciences,’ but that they would encourage vice and prodigality, and thus prove ‘scandalous to religion, and of dangerous consequence to human society.’ The gentleman of the city was particularly distressed in remarking, that ‘the ordinary time spent in public worship each Lord’s Day comes short of the seven hours spent in the Assembly.’ He remarked, moreover, that Edinburgh was a place to which young men were sent for their education, and also to learn ‘merchandising’ and mechanical employments. These young persons would now be liable to be diverted from their proper pursuits in order to study how best to dress themselves for the Assembly, and how in that scene of levity they might best make favour with the fair. After attending there, they would most likely go to taverns. In |1723.| short, they would be thoroughly depraved, and the objects of their parents in sending them to town entirely frustrated.
The institution was viewed with especial horror by the more stern professors of Presbyterianism, as folly appears from a book of Patrick Walker, written soon after, in which he reviews the vanities of the age generally. ‘Some years ago,’ he says, ‘we had a profane, obscene meeting, called the Horn Order;[[585]] and now we have got a new assembly and public meeting called Love for Love ... all nurseries of profanity and vanity, and excitements to base lusts; so that it is a shame to speak of these things that are said and done amongst them. Some years ago, our women deformed their heads with cock-ups’ [‘some of them half a yard high, set with wires’]; ‘and now they deform their bodies with farthingales nine yards about; some of them in three stories, very unbecoming women professing godliness.... If we would allow ourselves to think or consider, we need not be so vain or look so high, being born heirs of wrath, and our bodies to go to a consuming stinking grave ... and considering the end of our clothing and how we came by them, to cover our nakedness and for warmness to our bodies, and that the sheep’s old clothes are our new.’
Patrick fairly wondered how any one that ever knew what it was to bow a knee in prayer, ‘durst crook a hough to fyke and fling at a piper’s and fiddler’s springs. I bless the Lord,’ says he, ‘that so ordered my lot in my dancing-days, that made the fear of the bloody rope and bullets to my neck and head, the pain of boots, thumbikens, and irons, cold and hunger, wetness and weariness, to stop the lightness of my head and the wantonness of my feet.’ He felt bound to denounce dancing as a ‘common evil,’ especially among young professors, and he was peculiarly indignant at there being a dancing tune called the Cameronian March, which he conceived to be a mockery of the worthy name of Richard Cameron. In Patrick’s view, however, dancing was |1723.| but a symptom of a general departure from the grave, correct habits of former times. ‘In our speech,’ says he, ‘our Scripture and old Scots names are gone out of request; instead of Father and Mother, Mamma and Papa, training children to speak nonsense, and what they do not understand.’ He likewise complains of ‘a scandalous omission of the worship of God in families ... abounding amongst us in Edinburgh, the most part singing only a verse of a psalm and reading a chapter; on the Sabbath evening some pray and many not, and no more till the next Sabbath evening.’ The open profanation of the Lord’s Day he saw to be more and more abounding in Scotland. ‘The throng streets, particularly fields, milk-houses, ale-houses in and about sinful Edinburgh, is a sad evidence of this; many going to the fields before sermons, and after sermons multitudes go to their walks.’ He states that ‘three in one parish in 1716, and nine together in a neighbour parish in 1717, all of them professors, went to the cornfields in these Sabbath mornings, and did shear so many sheaves of corn.’
The poet Allan Ramsay, who maintained a Horatian code of gaiety and enjoyment in the midst of puritanic soberness, strongly took part with the Assembly, and addressed its fair adherents in a poem which, with its prose dedication, has supplied us with some of the above facts. Allan may have had his heart in his theme, but little is to be said for the eloquence of his verses; nor were some of his views as to the pleasures of the Assembly at all calculated to do away with the prejudices of its opponents. We are told, however, that both in the case of the Assembly and that of the Playhouse, hereafter to be noticed, ‘the ministers lost ground, to their great mortification, for the most part of the ladies turned rebels to their remonstrances.’[[586]]
Two young men destined to be remembered by their country were in the habit of attending the Assembly: one of them a hard-headed, yet speculative genius, rising at the bar; the other a philandering, sentimental being, absorbed in poetry and Jacobitism; their names Henry Home of Kames and William Hamilton of Bangour; at this time, living in bonds of strongest friendship. Hamilton one day addressed Home ‘in the Assembly,’ thus:
‘While, crowned with radiant charms divine,
Unnumbered beauties round thee shine;
When Erskine leads her happy man,
And Johnston shakes the fluttering fan;