makes too great a figure in story to be passed over His tawny beard was th' equal grace The nether orange mixt with gray. The whisker continued for some time among us after the extirpation of beards; but this is a subject which I shall not here enter upon, having discussed it at large in a distinct treatise, which I keep by me in manuscript, upon the mustachio. friend of mine, who has lately been under this r cipline. He tells me he had the honour to dance before the emperor himself, not without the applause and acclamations both of his imperial majesty and the whole ring; though I dare say, neither I, not any of his acquaintance, ever dreamt he would have merited any reputation by his activity. ་ "I can assure you, Mr. Spectator, I was very near being qualified to have given you a faithful and painful account of this walking bagnio, if I may so call it, myself. Going the other night along Fleet-street, and having, out of curiosity, just entered into discourse with a wandering female who was travelling the same way, a couple of fellows advanced towards us, drew their swords, and cried out If my friend Sir Roger's project of introducing to each other, A sweat! a sweat! Whereupon, beards should take effect, I fear the luxury of the suspecting they were some of the ringleaders of the present age would make it a very expensive fashion. bagnio, I also drew my sword, and demanded a parThere is no question but the beaux would soon pro-ley; but finding none would be granted me, and vide themselves with false ones of the lightest co-perceiving others behind them filing off with great lours, and the most immoderate lengths. A fair bear. diligence to take me in flank, I began to sweat for of the tapestry size, which Sir Roger seems to fear of being forced to it: but very luckily betaking approve, could not come under twenty guineas. myself to a pair of heels, which I had good reasuă The famous golden beard of Esculapius would to beleive would do me justice, I instantly got p hardly be more valuable than one made in the ex-session of a very snug corner in a neighbouring travagance of the fashion. alley that lay in my rear; which post I maintained Besides, we are not certain that the ladies would for above half an hour with great firmness and renot come into the mode, when they take the air on solution, though not letting this success so far overhorseback. They already appear in hats and fea-comne me as to make me numindful of the circumthers, coats and periwigs: and I see no reason why we may not suppose that they would have their riding-beards on the same occasion. I may give the moral of this discourse in another paper.-X. No. 332.] FRIDAY, MARCH 21 1712. Minus aptus acutis Naribus horum hominum-HOR. 1 Sat. iii. 29 He cannot bear the raillery of the age.-CREECH "DEAR SHORT FACE, "Your very humble Servant, spection that was necessary to be observed upon my advancing again towards the street; by which prodence and good management I made a handsome and orderly retreat, having suffered no other damage in this action than the loss of my baggare, and the dislocation of one of my shoe heels, waith last I am just now informed is in a fair way of recovery. These sweaters, by what I can learn from my friend, and by as near a view as I was able to take of them myself, seem to me to have at present but a rude kind of discipline amongst them. It is probable, if you would take a little pains with them, they might be brought into better order. But I'll "IN your speculation of Wednesday last, you leave this to your own discretion; and will only have given us some account of that worthy society add, that if you think it worth while to insert this of brutes, the Mohocks; wherein you have parti- by way of caution to those who have a mind to precularly specified the ingenious performances of the serve their skins whole from this sort of cupping, lion tippers, the dancing-masters, and the tumblers: and tell them at the same time the hazard of treatbut as you acknowledged you had not then a perfecting with night-walkers, you will perhaps oblige history of the whole club, you might very easily others, as well as omit one of the most notable species of it, the sweaters, which may be reckoned a sort of dancingmasters too. It is, it seems, the custom for half a dozen, or more, of these well-disposed savages, as soon as they have enclosed the persons upon whom they design the favour of a sweat, to whip out their swords, and holding them parallel to the horizon, they describe a sort of magic circle round about him with the points. As soon as this piece of conjuration is performed, and the patient without doubt already beginning to wax warm, to forward the operation, that member of the circle towards whom he is so rude as to turn his back first, runs his sword directly into that part of the patient whereon schoolboys are punished; and as it is very natural to imagine this will soon make him tack about to some other point, every gentleman does himself the same justice as often as he receives the affront. After this jig has gone two or three times round, and the paticut is thought to have sweat sufficiently, he is yery handsomely rubbed down by some attendants, who carry with them instruments for that purpose, and so discharged. This relation I had from a "P. S. My friend will have me acquaint you, that though he would not willingly detract from the merit of that extraordinary strokesnian, Mr. Sprightly, yet it is his real opinion, that some of those fellows who are employed as rubbers to this new-fashioned baguio, have struck as bold strokes as ever he did in his life. "I had sent this four-and-twenty hours sooner, if I had not had the misfortune of being in a great doubt about the orthography of the word bagno. I consulted several dictionaries, but found no relief: at last having recourse both to the bagnio in New gate-street, and to that in Chancery-lane, and find ing the original manuscripts upon the sign-posts of each to agree literally with my own spelling, I re turned home full of satisfaction, in order to dratch this epistle." "MR. SPECTATOR, "As you have taken most of the circumstancar of human life into your consideration, we the under- In short, the poet never mentions any thing of written thought it not improper for us also to repre- this battle, but in such images of greatness and sent to you our condition. We are three ladies terror as are suitable to the subject. Among several who live in the country, and the greatest improve-others I cannot forbear quoting that passage where ment we make is by reading. We have taken a the Power, who is described as presiding over the smail journal of our lives, and find it extremely chaos, speaks in the second book." opposite to your last Tuesday's speculation. We rise by seven, and pass the beginning of each day in devotion, and looking into those affairs that fall within the occurrences of a retired life; in the afternoon we sometimes enjoy the good company of some friend or neighbour, or else work or read: at night we retire to our chambers, and take leave of each other for the whole night at ten o'clock. We fake particular care never to be sick of a Sunday. Mr. Spectator, we are all very good maids, but ambitious of characters which we think more laudable, that of being very good wives. If any of your correspondents inquire for a spouse for an honest country gentleman, whose estate is not dipped, and wants a wife that can save half his revenue, and yet make a better figure than any of his neighbours of the same estate, with finer-bred women, you shall have farther notice from, T. "Sir, your courteous Readers, "MARTHA BUSIE, Thus Satan; and him thus the Anarch old, Confusion worse confounded; and heaven's gates It required great pregnancy of invention, and strength of imagination to fill this battle with such circumstances as should raise and astonish the mind of the reader; and at the same time an exactness of judgment, to avoid every thing that might appear light or trivial. Those who look into Homer are surprised to find his battles still rising one above another, and improving in horror to the conclusion of the Iliad. Milton's fight of angels is wrought up with the same beauty. It is ushered in with such signs of wrath as are suitable to Omnipotence incensed. The first engagement is carried on under a cope of fire, occasioned by the flights of innumerable burning darts and arrows which are discharged No. 333.] SATURDAY, MARCH 22, 1711-12. | from either host. The second onset is still more vocat in certamina divos.-VIRG He calls embattled deities to arms. terrible, as it is filled with those artificial thunders, which seem to make the victory doubtful. and proWe are now entering upon the sixth book of duce a kind of consternation even in the good Paradise Lost, in which the poet describes the angels. This is followed by the tearing up of mounbattle of the angels; having raised his reader's ex. tains and promontories; till in the last place the pectation, and prepared him for it by several pas- Messiah comes forth in the fulness of majesty and sages in the preceding books. I omitted quoting terror. The pomp of his appearance, amidst the these passages in my observations on the former roarings of his thunders, the flashes of his lightbooks, having purposely reserved them for the open-nings, and the noise of his chariot-wheels, is deing of this, the subject of which gave occasion to them. The author's imagination was so inflamed with this great scene of action, that wherever he speaks of it, he rises, if possible, above himself. Thus, where he mentions Satan in the beginning of his poem: -Him the Almighty Power Hurl'd beadlong flaming from th ethereal sky, In adamantine chains and penal fire. Who durst defy th' Ompotent to arms. scribed with the utmost flights of human imagination. There is nothing in the first and last day's engagement which does not appear natural, and agreeable enough to the ideas most readers would conceive of a fight between two armies of angels. The second day's engagement is apt to startle an imagination which has not been raised and qualified for such a description, by the reading of the ancient poets, and of Homer in particular. It was certainly a very bold thought in our author, to ascribe the first use of artillery to the rebel angels. But as such a pernicious invention may be well supposed to We have likewise several noble hints of it in the have proceeded from such authors, so it enters very infernal conference. O prince! O chief of many-throned powers, second: What when we fled amain, pursued and struck probably into the thoughts of that being, who is all along described as aspiring to the majesty of his Maker. Such engines were the only instruments he could have made use of to imitate those thunders, that in all poetry, both sacred and profane, are represented as the arms of the Almighty. The tearing up the hills was not altogether so daring a thought as the former. We are, in some measure, prepared for such an incident by the description of the giants' war, which we meet with among the ancient poets. What still made this circumstance the more proper for the poet's use, is the opinion of many learned so great a noise in antiquity, and gave birth to the men, that the fable of the giants' war, which makes sublimest description in Hesiod's works, was an allegory founded upon this very tradition of a fight between the good and bad angels. It may, perhaps, be worth while to consider with what judgment Milton, in this narration, has avoided 2 C sword of Turnus which came from a mortal forge. The griding sword with discontinuous wound every thing that is mean and trivial in the descriptions of the Latin and Greek poets; and at the same time improved every great hint which he met with in their works upon this subject. Homer, in that passage which Longinus has celebrated for its sublimeness, and which Virgil and Ovid have copied after him, tells us, that the giants threw Ossa upon Olympus, and Pelion upon Ossa. He adds an epithet to Pelion, which very much swells the idea, by bringing up to the reader's imagination all the woods that grew upon it. There is further a greater beauty in his singling out by name these three remarkable mountains so well known to the Greeks. This last is such a beauty, as the scene of Milton's war could not possibly furnish him with. Claudian, in his fragment upon the giants' war, has given full scope to that wildness of imagination which was natural to him. He tells us that the giants tore up whole islands by the roots, and threw them at the gods. He describes one of them in particular, Homer tells in the same manner, that upon Dietaking up Lemnos in his arms, and whirling it to medes wounding the gods, there flowed from the the skies, with all Vulcan's shop in the midst of it. wound an ichor, or pure kind of blood, which was not Another tears up Mount Ida, with the river Eni-bred from mortal viands: and that, though the pens, which ran down the sides of it; but the poet, pain was exquisitely great, the wound soon closed not content to describe him with this mountain upon up and healed in those beings who are vested with his shoulders, tells us that the river flowed down his immortality. back as he held it up in that posture. It is visible to every judicious reader that such ideas savour more of the burlesque than of the sublime. They proceed from a wantonness of imagination, and rather divert the mind than astonish it. Milton has taken every thing that is sublime in these several passages, and composes out of them the following great image: From their foundations loos'ning to and fro, We have the full majesty of Homer, in this short description, improved by the imagination of Claudian, without its puerilities. I need not point out the description of the fallen angels seeing the promontories hanging over their heads in such a dreadful manner, with the other numberless beauties in this book, which are so conspicuous, that they cannot escape the notice of the most ordinary reader. There are indeed so many wonderful strokes of poetry in this book, and such a variety of sublime ideas, that it would have been impossible to have given them a place within the bounds of this paper. Besides that I find it in a great measure done to my hand at the end of my Lord Roscommon's Essay on Translated Poetry. I shall refer my reader thither for some of the master-strokes of the sixth book of Paradise Lost, though at the same time there are many others which that noble author has not taken notice of Milton, notwithstanding the sublime genius he was master of, has in this book drawn to his assistance all the helps he could meet with among the ancient poets. The sword of Michael, which makes so great a havoc among the bad angels, was given him, we are told, out of the armoury of God: But the sword Of Michael from the armoury of God Was given him, temper'd so that neither keen This passage is a copy of that in Virgil, wherein the poet tells us, that the sword of Eneas, which was given him by a deity, broke into pieces the A stream of nectarous humour issuing flow'd I question not but Milton in his description of his furious Moloch flying from the battle, and bellowing with the wound he had received, had his eye on Mars in the Iliad: who upon his being wounded, is represented as retiring out of the fight, and making an outcry louder than that of a whole army when it begins the charge. Homer adds, that the Greeks and Trojans, who were engaged in a general battle, were terrified on each side with the bellowing of this wounded deity. The reader will easily ob serve how Milton has kept all the horror of this image, without running into the ridicule of it: -Where the might of Gabriel fought. Milton has likewise raised his description in this book with many images taken out of the poetical The Messiah's chariot, as I parts of Scripture. have before taken notice, is formed upon a vision of in him of Homer's spirit in the poetical parts of his Ezekiel, who, as Grotius observes, has very much prophecy. The following lines in that glorious commission which is given the Messiah to extirpate the host of rebel angels, is drawn from a sublime passage in the Psalms: Go then, thou mightiest, in thy Father's might. The reader will easily discover many other strokes of the same nature. There is no question but Milton had heated his imagination with the fight of the gods in Homer, before he entered upon this engagement of the angels. Homer there gives us a scene of men, he roes, and gods, mixed together in battle. Mars animates the contending armies, and lifts up his voice in such a manner, that it is heard distinctly amidst all the shouts and confusion of the fight Jupiter at the same time thunders over their heads while Neptune raises such a tempest, that the whole field of battle, and all the tops of the mountains, shake about them. The poet tells us, that Pluto himself, whose habitation was in the very centre of the earth, was so affrighted at the shock, that he leapt from his throne. Homer afterward describes Vulcan as pouring down a stonin of fire upon the river Xanthus, and Minerva as throwing a rock at Mars; who, he tells us, covered seven acres in his fall. As Homer bas introduced into his battle of the gods every thing that is great and terrible in nature, Milton has filled his fight of good and bad angels with all the like circumstances of horror. The shout of armies, the rattling of brazen chariots, the hurling of rocks and mountains, the earthquake, the fire, the thunder, are all of them employed to lift up the reader's imagination, and give him a suitable idea of so great an action. With what art has the poet represented the whole body of the earth trembling, even before it was created! All heav'n resounded; and had earth been then, demand; and that these very great talents were often rendered useless to a man for want of small attainments. A good mien (a becoming motion, gesture, and aspect) is natural to some men; but even these would be highly more graceful in their carriage, if what they do from the force of nature were confirmed and heightened from the force of reason. To one who has not at all considered it, to mention the force of reason on such a subject will appear fantastical; but when you have a little attended to it, an assembly of men will have quite another view; and they will tell you, it is evident from plain and infallible rules, why this man with those beautiful features, and a well-fashioned person, is not so agreeable as he who sits by him without any of those advantages. When we read, we do it without any exerted act of memory that presents the shape of the letters; but habit makes us do it mechanically, without staying, like children, to recollect and join those letters." A man who has not had the regard of his gesture in any part of his education, will find himself unable to act with freedom before new company, as a child that is but now In how sublime and just a manner does he after-learning, would be to read without hesitation. It is ward describe the whole heaven shaking under the wheels of the Messiah's chariot, with that exception to the throne of God! Under his burning wheels The stedfast empyrean shook throughout, Notwithstanding the Messiah appears clothed with so much terror and majesty, the poet has still found means to make his readers conceive an idea of him beyond what he himself is able to describe : for the advancement of the pleasure we receive in being agreeable to each other in ordinary life, that one would wish dancing were generally understood as conducive, as it really is, to a proper deportment in matters that appear the most remote from it. A man of learning and sense is distinguished from others as he such, though he never runs upon points too difficult for the rest of the world; in like manner the reaching out of the arm, and the most ordinary motion, discovers whether a man ever learnt to know what is the true harmony and comYet half his strength he put not forth, but check'd posure of his limbs and countenance. Whoever His thunder in mid volley; for he meant has seen Booth, in the character of Pyrrhus, maren Not to destroy, but root them out of heaven. to his throne to receive Orestes, is convinced that In a word, Milton's genius, which was so great majestic and great conceptions are expressed in the in itself, and so strengthened by all the helps of very step; but, perhaps, though no other man learning, appears in this book every way equal to the could perform that incident as well as he does, he subject, which was the most subline that could enter himself would do it with a yet greater elevation into the thoughts of a poet. As he knew all the arts were he a dancer. This is so dangerous a subject of affecting the mind, he has given it certain rest- to treat with gravity, that I shall not at present ing-places, and opportunities of recovering itself enter into it any further: but the author of the folfrom time to time; several speeches, reflections, simi-lowing letter has treated it in the essay he speaks litades, and the like reliefs, being interspersed to diversify his narration, and ease the attention of the reader. L. No. 334.] MONDAY, MARCH 24, 1711-12. rescere-Cic. de Gestu. of in such a manner, that I am beholden to him for a resolution, that I will never hereafter think meanly of any thing, till I have heard what they who have another opinion of it have to sav in its defence. "MR. SPECTATOR, "Since there are scarce any of the arts and Voluisti, in suo genere, unumquemque nostrum sciences that have not been recommended to the quasi quendam esse Roscium, dixistique non tam ea quæ recta essent probari, quam quæ prava sunt fastidiis adhæ-world by the pens of some of the professors, masters, or lovers of them, whereby the usefulness, excel. lence, and benefit arising from them, both as to the speculative and practical part, have been made pub lic, to the great advantage and improvement of such arts and sciences; why should dancing, an art cele brated by the ancients in so extraordinary a man. ner, be totally neglected by the moderns, and left destitute of any pen to recommend its various excellences and substantial merit to mankind? You would have each of us be a kind of Roscius in his way; "The low ebb to which dancing is now fallen, is altogether owing to this silence. The art is esteemed only as an amusing trifle; it lies altogether uncultivated, and is unhappily fallen under the imputation of illiterate and mechanic. As Terence, in one of his prologues, complains of the ropedancers drawing all the spectators from his play; so we may well say, that capering and tumbling is Bow preferred to, and supplies the place of. just and regular dancing on our theatres. It is, therefore, in my opinion, high time hat some one should come in to its assistance, and relieve it from the many gross and growing errors that have crept into it, and overcast its real beauties; and, to set dancing in its true light, would show the usefulness and elegance of it, with the pleasure and instruction produced from it; and also lay down some fundamental rules, that might so tend to the improvement of its professors, and information of the spectators, that the first might be the better able to perform, and the latter rendered more capable of judging what is (if there be any thing) valuab! in this art. fore noise, to one of the most delightful sciences, by marrying it to the mathematics; and by that means caused it to be one of the most abstract and demonstrative of sciences. Who knows therefore but motion, whether decorous or representative, may not (as it seems highly probable it may) be taken into consideration by some person capable of reducing it into a regular science, though not so demonstrative as that proceeding from sounds, yet sufficient to entitle it to a place among the magnified arts? "Now, Mr. Spectator, as you have declared yourself visitor of dancing-schools, and this being an undertaking which more immediately respects them, I think myself indispensably obliged, before I proceed to the publication of this my essay, to ask your advice; and hold it absolutely necessary to have your approbation, in order to recommend my treatise to the perusal of the parents of such as learn to dance, as well as to the young ladies, to whom, as visitor, you ought to be guardian. Salop, March 19, "I am, Sir, T. 1711-12. "Your most humble Servant.” "To encourage therefore some ingenious pen capable of so generous an undertaking, and in some measure to relieve dancing from the disadvantages it at present lies under, I, who teach to dance, have attempted a small treatise as an Essay towards a History of Dancing: in which I have inquired into its antiquity, origin, and use, and shown what esteem the ancients had for it. I have likewise considered the nature and perfection of all its several parts, and how beneficial and delightful it is, both as a qualification and an exercise; and endeavoured to answer all objections that have been maliciously No. 335.] TUESDAY, MARCH 25, 1711-12. raised against it. I have proceeded to give an acRespicere exemplar vitæ morumque jubebo count of the particular dances of the Greeks and Doctu: imitatorem, et veras hinc ducere voces. Romans, whether religious, warlike, or civil; and HOR, Ars Poet. 327. taken particular notice of that part of dancing reKeep Nature's great original in view, lating to the ancient stage, in which the pantomimes And thence the living images pursue,—FRANCIS. had so great a share. Nor have I been wanting in My friend Sir Roger de Coverley, when we last giving an historical account of some particular masmet together at the club, told me that he had a ters excellent in that surprising art; after which I have advanced some observations on modern dan- great mind to see the new tragedy with me, assurcing, both as to the stage, and that part of it so ab-ng me at the same time, that he had not been at a play these twenty years. "The last I saw," said solutely necessary for the qualification of gentlemen Sir Roger, "was the Committee, which I should and ladies; and have concluded with some short renot have gone to neither, had not I been told beforemarks on the origin and progress of the character hand that it was a good church of England comedy.” by which dances are writ down, and communicated He then proceeded to inquire of me who this disto one master from another. If some great genius trest mother was; and upon hearing that she was after this would arise, and advance this art to that Hector's widow, he told me that her husband was a perfection it seems capable of receiving, what might brave man, and that when he was a school-boy he not be expected from it? For, if we consider the had read his life at the end of the dictionary. My origin of arts and sciences, we shall find that some of friend asked me in the next place, if there would them took rise from beginnings so mean and unpro- not be some danger in coming home late, in case mising, that it is very wonderful to think that ever the Mohocks should be abroad. "I assure you," such surprising structures should have been raised says he, "I thought I had fallen into their hands upon such ordinary foundations. But what cannot last night; for I observed two or three lusty black a great genius effect? Who would have thought men that followed me half way up Fleet-street, and that the clangorous noise of a smith's hammers mended their pace behind me, in proportion as I should have given the first rise to music? Yet put on to get away from them. You must know," Macrobius in his second book relates that Pytha- continued the knight with a smile, “I fancied they goras, in passing by a smith's shop, found that the had a mind to hunt me; for I remember an honest sounds proceeding from the hammers were either gentleman in my neighbourhood, who was served more grave or acute, according to the different such a trick in King Charles the Second's time, for weights of the hammers. The philosopher, to im- which reason he has not ventured himself in town prove this hint, suspends different weights by strings ever since. I might have shown them very good of the same bigness, and found in a like manner that the sounds answered to the weights. This sport, had this been their design; for, as I am an old fox-hunter, I should have turned and dodged, being discovered, he found out those numbers which and have played them a thousand tricks they had produced sounds that were consonant: as that two never seen in their lives before." Sir Roger added, strings of the same substance and tension, the one that "if these gentlemen had any such intention, being double the length of the other, gave that interval they did not succeed very well in it; for I threw which is called diapason, or an eighth the same them out," says he, 66 at the end of Norfolk-street, was also effected from two strings of the same length where I doubled the corner, and got sheker in my and size, the one having four times the tension of lodgings before they could imagine what was bethe other. By these steps, from so mean a begin- come of me. However," says the knight, "if Capning, did this great man reduce, what was only be-tain Sentry will make one with us to-morrow night, and you will both of you call upon me about four An Essay towards a History of Dancing, &c. By John Weaver, 12mo. 1712 The Distrest Mother |