Dancing was certainly an ancient and favourite pastime with the women of this country: the maidens even in a state of servitude claimed, as it were by established privilege, the license to indulge themselves in this exercise on holidays and public festivals; when it was usually performed in the presence of their masters and mistresses.[113] In the middle ages, dice, chess, and afterwards tables, and cards, with other sedentary games of chance and skill, were reckoned among the female amusements; and the ladies also frequently joined with the men in such pastimes, as we find it expressly declared in the metrical romance of Ipomydon. The passage alluded to runs thus: When they had dyned, as I you saye, Lordes and ladyes yede to playe; Some to tables, and some to chesse, With other gamys more or lesse.[114] In another poem, by Gower,[115] a lover asks his mistress, when she is tired of "dancing and caroling," if she was willing to "play at chesse, or on the dyes to cast a chaunce." Forrest, speaking in praise of Catharine of Arragon, first wife of Henry VIII., says, that when she was young, With stoole and with needyl she was not to seeke, And other practiseings for ladyes meete; To pastyme at tables, tick tacke or gleeke, Cardis and dyce--&c.[116] XLIII.--LADIES' RECREATIONS IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. The English ladies did not always confine themselves to domestic pastimes, they sometimes participated with the other sex in diversions of a more masculine nature; and engaged with them in the sports of the field. These violent exercises seem to have been rather unfashionable among them in the seventeenth century; for Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, speaks of their pastimes as much better suited to the modesty and softness of the sex. "The women," says he, "instead of laborious studies, have curious needle-works, cutworks, spinning, bone-lace making, with other pretty devices to adorn houses, cushions, carpets, stool-seats," &c.[117] Not but some of these masculine females have occasionally made their appearance: and at the commencement of the last century, it should seem that they were more commonly seen than in Burton's time, which gave occasion for the following satirical paper in one of the Spectators,[118] written by Addison: "I have," says he, "very frequently the opportunity of seeing a rural Andromache, who came up to town last winter, and is one of the greatest fox-hunters in the country; she talks of hounds and horses, and makes nothing of leaping over a six-bar gate. If a man tells her a waggish story, she gives him a push with her hand in jest, and calls him an impudent dog; and, if her servant neglects his business, threatens to kick him out of the house. I have heard her in her wrath call a substantial tradesman a lousie cur; and I remember one day when she could not think of the name of a person, she described him, in a large company of men and ladies,