Or on thy lips the fierce, fond boy Marks with his teeth the furious joy. When kissing was a common civility of daily intercourse, it is not to be wondered at that it should find its way into the courtesies of dancing, and thus we learn that a kiss was anciently the established fee of a lady’s partner. In a dialogue between Custom and Verite, concerning the use and abuse of dancing and minstrelsie, is the following verse: But some reply, what fool would daunce, If that, when daunce is doone, He may not have, at lady’s lips, That which in daunce he woon. In the “Tempest” this line occurs: Curtsied when you have and kissed. And Henry says to Anne Boleyn: Sweetheart, I were unmannerly to take you out, And not to kiss you. A correspondent having bitterly complained of the lascivious character of the dancing of the period, Budgell, in the course of his reply, remarks: “I must confess I am afraid that my correspondent had too much reason to be a little out of humor at the treatment of his daughter; but I conclude that he would have been much more so had he seen one of those kissing dances, in which Will Honeycomb assures me they are obliged to dwell almost a minute on the fair one’s lips, or they will be too quick for the music, and dance quite out of time.” Sir John Suckling, in his “Ballad of the Wedding,” published some years before this period, said: O’ th’ sudden up they rise and dance; Then sit again, and sigh, and glance; Then dance again, and kiss. Brand, in his “Popular Antiquities,” tells us that the custom of kissing in dancing, is still prevalent in many parts of the country. “When the fiddler thinks young couples have had music enough, he makes his instrument squeak out two notes, which all understand to say ‘kiss her.’” The panting bucolic swains are not slow to claim this privilege from their blushing partners. In the “Banquet” of Xenophon, quoted by Burton in his “Anatomy of the Melancholy,” there is an account of an interlude, or dance, in which Dionysius and Ariadne were engaged, which was of such a pleasing character that the account states that “the audience were so ravished with it, that they that were unmarried swore they would forthwith marry, and those that were married called instantly for their horses and galloped home to their wives.”