These should be hours for necessities,
Not for delights; times to repair our nature
With comforting repose, and not for us
To 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 hue
Of ev'ry flow'r that blows. Go to the field,
And ask the humble daisy why it sleeps
Soon as the sun departs? Why close the eyes
Of blossoms infinite, long ere the moon
Her oriental veil puts off? Think why,
Nor let the sweetest blossom Nature boasts
Be 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 steam
Of midnight theatre, and morning ball.
Give to repose the solemn hour she claims
And from the forehead of the morning steal
The sweet occasion. O there is a charm
Which morning has, that gives the brow of age
A smack of earth, and makes the lip of youth
Shed perfume exquisite. Expect it not,
Ye who till noon upon a down-bed lie,
Indulging feverous sleep.3
2 SHAKESPEARE.
3 HURDIS' VILLAGE CURATE.
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.
4 The explanation following is given in Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. FIDDLESTICK'S END. 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 troop
Of pale distemperatures and foes to life.6
5 The 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.”