Note 86 — Chapter IV · MARRIAGE CEREMONIES.

If octogenarian dancers were held in admiration in England, it would, according to Lord Bacon, be easy to form an army of them; since “there is, he says, scarce a village with us, if it be any whit populous, but it affords some man or woman of fourscore years of age; nay, a few years since there was, in the county of Hereford, a May-game, or morrice-dance, consisting of eight men, whose age computed together, made up eight hundred years, inasmuch as what some of them wanted of an hundred, others exceeded as much.” History of Life and Death, p. 20.