The reader need not be told that his objections were not puritanical, but physical. The moralist who cautioned his friend to refrain from dancing, because it was owing to a dance that John the Baptist lost his head, talked, he said, like a fool. Nor would he have formed a much more favourable opinion of the Missionary in South Africa, who told the Hottentots that dancing is a work of darkness, and that a fiddle is Satan's own instrument. At such an assertion he would have exclaimed a fiddlestick![4]—Why and how that word has become an interjection of contempt, I must leave those to explain who can. The Albigenses and the Vaudois are said to have believed that a dance is the Devil's procession, in which they who dance break the promise and vow which their sponsors made for them at their baptism that they should renounce the Devil and all his works, the pomps and vanities of this wicked world,—(not to proceed further,)—this being one of his works, and undeniably one of the aforesaid vanities and pomps. They break moreover all the ten commandments, according to these fanatics; for fanatics they must be deemed who said this; and the manner in which they attempted to prove the assertion by exemplifying it through the decalogue, shows that the fermentation of their minds was in the acetous stage. [Footnote 4: The explanation following is given in Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. FIDDLESTICK'S END. Nothing: the ends of the ancient fiddlesticks ending in a point: hence metaphorically used to express a thing terminating in nothing.]