driven out the old, voices have been raised in protest, and the unjust charge of immorality has been made.
Thoinot Arbeau, who wrote the first history of dancing, was a monk who had to hide his name under the pen name of Tabourot, so great was the animosity toward social dancing in 1588. After witnessing a ball where the Volta, a new dance, was introduced for the first time, he writes:
"The damosel, her skirt fluttering in the air, has displayed her legs, and you shall return her to her seat, when, put what face on it she may, she will find her shaken-up brain full of swimming and whirling, and you will not perhaps be much better. I leave it to you to consider if it be decorous for a young lady thus to straddle and stride, and whether in this Volta honor and health be not hazarded."
The good Monsieur was accustomed to the figure dances, and considered these the acme and perfection of terpsichorean art. The idea of a lady being lifted a little in the air shocked this humourous old writer to the root of his being. Yet the Volta came to stay, and after a trip to Germany returned to its birth-place, France, under the name of Waltz, to delight generation after generation.
When Margarite de Valois, who married James
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