“WANTS A SITUATION—­An able-bodied, middle-aged man, without encumbrance, who can have an undeniable character from his last situation, as headsman, hangman, and general executioner.  He is accustomed to the use of thumbikins and the most approved and fashionable modes of torture; and officiated for many years as superintendent of the wheel of a foreign prince, renowned for the neatness of his rack.  Drawing and quartering in all their branches.  Pressing to death performed in the most economical style.  Impalement in the Turkish manner; and the pile, as practised by the best Smithfield hands, &c. &c. &c.”

Independent, indeed, of the high prosperity and vast perquisites of such posts as executioner of the Tower of London or the Greve of Paris, there was honour and satisfaction in the office.  A royal master knew when he was well served.  Henry III. stood by, in his chateau of Blois, to see, not only the heads severed from the dead bodies of the Duke and Cardinal de Guise, but their flesh cut into small pieces, preparatory to being burned, and the ashes scattered to the winds.  “His majesty,” says an eyewitness, “stood in a pool of blood to witness the hacking of the bodies.”

This Italian gusto for the smell of blood, appears to have been introduced into the palaces of France from those of Italy by alliance with the Medici—­those ennobled pawnbrokers of the middle ages, whose parvenu taste engendered the fantastic gilding of the renaissance, which they naturalized in the Tuileries and at Fontainbleau, in common with the stiletto and acqua tofana of their poisoners, and the fatalism of their judicial astrology.

But enough of Catharine de Medicis and her sanguinary son—­enough of Henry Tudor and his savage daughters—­enough of the monstrous professions flourishing in their age of monstrosities.  And turn we for relief to the exquisite vocation completing the antithesis—­the vocation whose execution is that of pas de zephyrs, and the tortures of whose infliction are the tortures of the tender heart!

The calling of the danseuse, we repeat, is among the most lucrative of modern times, and nearly the most influential.  The names of Taglioni and Elssler are as European, nay, as universal, as those of Wellington and Talleyrand-Metternich or Thiers; and modern statesmanship and modern diplomacy show pale beside the Machiavelism of the coulisses.

With what pomp of phraseology are the triumphs and movements of these danseuses announced, by the self-same journal which despatches, with a stroke of the pen, the submission of a province or revolution of a kingdom!  One poor halfpenny-worth, or half a line, suffices for the death of a sultana; while fiery columns precede the departure and arrival of the steamer honoured by conveying across the Atlantic some ethereal being, whose light fantastic toe is to give the law to the United States.  Her appearance in the Ecclesiastic States, on the other hand, is announced in Roman capitals; and her triumphal entry into St Petersburg received with regiments of notes of admiration!!!