for faulte of
better musike." [233]

However, Dallington is very much against the saltations of elderly
persons. "I remember a countriman of ours, well seene in artes and
language, well stricken in yeares, a mourner for his second wife, a
father of mariageable children, who with his other booke studies
abroade, joyned also the exercise of dancing: it was his hap in an
honourable _Bal_ (as they call it) to take a fall, which in mine opinion
was not so disgracefull as the dancing it selfe, to a man of his
stuffe."[234]

Dallington would have criticized Frenchmen more severely than ever had
he known that even Sully gave way in private to a passion for dancing.
At least Tallemant des Reaux says that "every evening a valet de chambre
of the King played on the lute the dances of the day, and M. de Sully
danced all alone, in some sort of extraordinary hat--such as he always
wore in his cabinet--while his cronies applauded him, although he was
the most awkward man in the world."[235]

Tennis is another courtly exercise in which Dallington urges moderation.
"This is dangerous, (if used with too much violence) for the body; and
(if followed with too much diligence,) for the purse. A maine point of
the Travellers care." He reached France when the rage for tennis was at
its height,--when there were two hundred and fifty tennis courts in
Paris,[236]--and "two tennis courts for every one Church through
France," according to his computation.[237] Everyone was at it;--nobles,
artizans, women, and children. The monks had had to be requested not to
play--especially, the edict said, "not in public in their shirts."[238]
Our Englishman, of course, thought this enthusiasm was beyond bounds.
"Ye have seene them play Sets at Tennise in the heat of Summer and
height of the day, when others were scarcely able to stirre out of
doors." Betting on the game was the ruin of the working-man, who
"spendeth that on the Holyday, at Tennis, which hee got the whole weeke,
for the keeping of his poore family. A thing more hurtfull then our
Ale-houses in England."[239]

"There remains two other exercises," says the _Method for Travell_, "of
use and necessitie, to him that will returne ably quallified for his
countries service in warre, and his owne defence in private quarrell.
These are Riding and Fencing. His best place for the first (excepting
Naples) is in Florence under il Signor Rustico, the great Dukes
Cavallerizzo, and for the second (excepting