Dancing was the daily occupation rather than the amusement at court and elsewhere, and the names of dances exceeded the list of the virtues—­such as the French brawl, the pavon, the measure, the canary, and many under the general titles of corantees, jigs, galliards, and fancies.  At the dinner and ball given by James I. to Juan Fernandez de Velasco, Constable of Castile, in 1604, fifty ladies of honor, very elegantly dressed and extremely beautiful, danced with the noblemen and gentlemen.  Prince Henry danced a galliard with a lady, “with much sprightliness and modesty, cutting several capers in the course of the dance”; the Earl of Southampton led out the queen, and with three other couples danced a brando, and so on, the Spanish visitors looking on.  When Elizabeth was old and had a wrinkled face and black teeth, she was one day discovered practicing the dance step alone, to the sound of a fiddle, determined to keep up to the last the limberness and agility necessary to impress foreign ambassadors with her grace and youth.  There was one custom, however, that may have made dancing a labor of love:  it was considered ill manners for the gentleman not to kiss his partner.  Indeed, in all households and in all ranks of society the guest was expected to salute thus all the ladies a custom which the grave Erasmus, who was in England in the reign of Henry VIII., found not disagreeable.

Magnificence of display went hand in hand with a taste for cruel and barbarous amusements.  At this same dinner to the Constable of Castile, the two buffets of the king and queen in the audience-chamber, where the banquet was held, were loaded with plate of exquisite workmanship, rich vessels of gold, agate, and other precious stones.  The constable drank to the king the health of the queen from the lid of a cup of agate of extraordinary beauty and richness, set with diamonds and rubies, praying his majesty would condescend to drink the toast from the cup, which he did accordingly, and then the constable directed that the cup should remain in his majesty’s buffet.  The constable also drank to the queen the health of the king from a very beautiful dragon-shaped cup of crystal garnished with gold, drinking from the cover, and the queen, standing up, gave the pledge from the cup itself, and then the constable ordered that the cup should remain in the queen’s buffet.

The banquet lasted three hours, when the cloth was removed, the table was placed upon the ground—­that is, removed from the dais—­and their majesties, standing upon it, washed their hands in basins, as did the others.  After the dinner was the ball, and that ended, they took their places at the windows of a roam that looked out upon a square, where a platform was raised and a vast crowd was assembled to see the king’s bears fight with greyhounds.  This afforded great amusement.  Presently a bull, tied to the end of a rope, was fiercely baited by dogs.  After this tumblers danced upon a rope and performed feats of agility on horseback.  The constable and his attendants were lighted home by half an hundred halberdiers with torches, and, after the fatigues of the day, supped in private.  We are not surprised to read that on Monday, the 30th, the constable awoke with a slight attack of lumbago.