Did not Gregory Nazianzen implore Julian, before he became “the Apostate,” to be more discreet, saying in effect: “If you must dance, and if you must take part in these fêtes, for which you seem to have such a passion, then dance, if you must; but _why_ revive the dissolute dances of the daughter of Herodias, and of the pagans? Dance rather as King David did before the Ark; dance to the glory of God. Such exercises of peace and of piety are worthy of an Emperor and a Christian.” In short, wise cleric as he was, he found no fault with the healthy exercise of the dance itself, but only with such dance and other Byzantine entertainment as had tended, or might tend, to become merely an exhibition of depraved taste. Indeed, how could he have inveighed against the dance as an expression of clean rejoicing when it had been recorded: “And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels _and with dances_”?[1] Had not the servants of Achish said: “Is not this David the king of the land? did not they _sing one to another of him in dances_, saying, Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands?”[2] Had it not, too, been written: “And David danced before the Lord with all his might.”[3] No, the Church thunder had been directed against the licence by which the arts of dancing and miming had been corrupted, and against, not wholesome athleticism and healthy sport, but the hysterical brutalities and “professionalism” of the arena. And if further proof were required of ecclesiastical interest in and practice of the thing it only attacked when seen in degraded form, it is to be found in the fact that in 744, the Pope Zacharias promulgated a Bull suppressing all so-called “religious dances,” or “baladoires” as he called them, which were showing signs of becoming “degenerate.” These were dances which were performed in, or within the precincts of cathedrals and churches at certain festivals such as Easter, Midsummer and Christmas; and of which the old English bonfire dances of St. John’s Eve, were (and the modern carnival, and the Eastertide ceremonial seen in Seville to-day, _are_) probably survivals, though, to be sure, they should be accounted originally as survivals of earlier pagan dances in honour of the sun, and of the harvest, and not as originating with the Christian Church. It may seem a far cry from the date of Pope Zacharias’ edict of 744, to 1462, when the first of the _ballets ambulatoires_ is recorded, but it must not be supposed that dancing, if not miming, is entirely lacking in history during those seven hundred odd years. Any history of dancing would aid us in at least partly bridging such a gap; but it will be convenient in a chapter dealing more especially with early ecclesiastical influence on the evolution of Ballet, to deal now with a form of entertainment or of religious festival which was essentially a creation of the earlier Church.