hat has read it can
forget the account of the dance which King David executed before the
ark, dancing with all his might, and girded only with a linen ephod?
Dancing has always seemed to us to be an essentially ridiculous
transaction,--for a man, at least; and we confess that we sympathize
with David's wife, Michal, who, seeing this extraordinary _pas seul_
from her window, "despised David in her heart," and treated him to a
little conjugal irony when he came home. What would the lovely Eugenie
have thought, if, after the fall of Sebastopol, she had seen his
Majesty, the Emperor of the French, "cutting it down," in broad
daylight, before the towers of Notre Dame, girded only with a linen
ephod,--though that's not exactly the name we give the garment
now-a-days? But David was master, not only in Israel, but in his own
household, (which is not the case with all kings and great men,) and
he said to Michal,--"It was before the Lord, which chose me before thy
father and before all his house;.... therefore will I play before the
Lord;.... and of the maid-servants which thou hast spoken of, of them
shall I be had in honor." And Michal all her life repented bitterly the
offence that she had given her husband.

But dancing was not one of the regular ceremonies of the Christian
Church, even in its corruptest days; and yet dances were performed four
hundred years ago in the churches and in church-yards, as a part of, or
an appendage to, entertainments of a religious character. These were the
Mysteries and Moralities, which are the origin of our drama;--and it is
remarkable that in all countries the drama has been at first a religious
ceremony. These Mysteries and Moralities were religious plays of the
rudest kind: the Mysteries being a representation, partly by dumb show
and partly by words, of some well-known incident related in the Bible;
and the Moralities, a kind of discussion and enforcement of religious
doctrine or moral truth by allegorical personages. They were performed
at first almost entirely in the churches, upon scaffolds erected for the
purpose.

In a Mystery called "Candlemas Day, or the Killing of the Children of
Israel," which represented the Massacre of the Innocents, and in which
Herod, Simeon, Joseph, the Virgin Mary, Watkin, a comic character, and
Anna the Prophetess, appeared, there was a general dance of all the
characters after the Prologue; and at the close of the play, there is
a stage-direction for ano