6 SHAKESPEARE.
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
7 SHAKESPEARE.
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 be
When 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 things
And 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 soon
As doth her brother, of whose golden hair
She 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 land
And like a girdle clips her solid waist,
Music and measure both doth understand.
For his great crystal eye is always cast
Up 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: