We go to a ball.  Mercy upon us! is this what you call dancing?  A man of thirty years of age, and with legs as thick as a gate-post, stands up in the middle of the room, and gapes, and fumbles with his gloves, looking all the time as if he were burying his grandmother.  At a given signal, the unwieldy animal puts himself in motion; he throws out his arms, crouches up his shoulders, and, without moving a muscle of his face, kicks out his legs, to the manifest risk of the bystanders, and goes back to the place puffing and blowing like an otter, after a half-hour’s burst.  Is this dancing?  Shades of the filial and paternal Vestris! can this be a specimen of the art which gives elasticity to the most inert confirmation, which sets the blood glowing with a warm and genial flow, and makes beauty float before our ravished senses, stealing our admiration by the gracefulness of each new motion, till at last our souls thrill to each warning movement, and dissolve into ecstasy and love?

People seem even to labour to be awkward.  One would think a gentleman might shake hands with a familiar friend without any symptoms of cubbishness.  Not at all.  The hand is jerked out by the one with the velocity of a rocket, and comes so unexpectedly to the length of its tether, that it nearly dislocates the shoulder bone.  There it stands swaying and clutching at the wind, at the full extent of the arm, while the other is half poked out, and half drawn in, as if rheumatism detained the upper moiety and only below the elbow were at liberty to move.  After you have shaken the hand, (but for what reason you squeeze it, as if it were a sponge, I can by no means imagine,) can you not withdraw it to your side, and keep it in the station where nature and comfort alike tell you it ought to be?  Do you think your breeches’ pocket the most proper place to push your daddle into?  Do you put it there to guard the solitary half-crown from the rapacity of your friend; or do you put it across your breast in case of an unexpected winder from your apparently peaceable acquaintance on the opposite side?

Is it not quite absurd that a man can’t even take a glass of wine without an appearance of infinite difficulty and pain?  Eating an egg at breakfast, we allow, is a difficult operation, but surely a glass of wine after dinner should be as easy as it is undoubtedly agreeable.  The egg lies under many disadvantages.  If you leave the egg-cup on the table, you have to steady it with the one hand, and carry the floating nutriment a distance of about two feet with the other, and always in a confoundedly small spoon, and sometimes with rather unsteady fingers.  To avoid this, you take the egg-cup in your hand, and every spoonful have to lay it down again, in order to help yourself to bread; so, upon the whole, we disapprove of eggs, unless, indeed, you take them in our old mode at Oxford; that is two eggs mashed up with every cup of tea, and purified with a glass of hot rum.