ABSTRACT
A man in his natural perfection is fiers, hardy, stronge in opinion, couaitous of glorie, desirous of knowledge, appetiting by generation to brynge forthe his semblable. Being a gentleman meant having that 'liberality of spirit' which Fielding has 'scarce ever seen in men of low birth and education': the professional was always to some extent a technician, his views limited by an element of demeaning specialism. The gentleman had a painful obligation to the dancing-master, and the dancing-master must have acquired pretensions of gentility which exacerbated the situation. The gentleman had to learn from a laboured specialist the graceful ease which was supposed to be his birth-right, and the dancing-master could feel that he did things better than his pupils. No 'genteel education' was complete without a dancing-master, and Atkinson's chief trouble, in the passage from Amelia, is that 'he had never learnt to dance'.
