The age he adorned lived in constant readiness for the fiddler.
Eleven o'clock in the morning was as good an hour as another for a
dance, and poetry, too, was gay betimes, but intricate with
figures. It is the very order, the perspective, as it were, of the
movement that seems to baffle the eye, but the game was a free
impulse. Since the first day danced with the first night, no
dancing was more natural--at least to a dancer of genius. True,
the dance could be tyrannous. It was an importunate fashion. When
the Bishop of Hereford, compelled by Robin Hood, in merry
Barnsdale, danced in his boots ("and glad he could so get away"),
he was hardly in worse heart or trim than a seventeenth century
author here and there whose original seriousness or work-a-day
piety would have been content to go plodding flat-foot or halting,
as the muse might naturally incline with him, but whom the tune,
the grace, and gallantry of the time beckoned to tread a perpetual
measure. Lovelace was a dancer of genius; nay, he danced to rest
his wings, for he was winged, cap and heel. The fiction of flight
has lost its charm long since. Modern art grew tired of the idea,
now turned to commonplace, and painting took leave of the buoyant
urchins--naughty cherub and Cupid together; but the seventeenth
century was in love with that old fancy--more in love, perhaps,
than any century in the past.
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