Natural enough! we repeat it—­natural enough!  To create a good dancer, requires the rarest combination of physical and mental endowments.  Graceful as the forms transmitted to us by the pottery of Etruria and the frescoes of Herculaneum, she must unite with the strength of an athlete, the genius of a first-rate actress.  That even moderate dancing demands immoderate abilities, is attested by the exhibition of human ungainliness disfiguring all the court balls of Europe.  There may be seen the representatives of the highest nobility, tutored by the highest education, shuffling over the polished floor with stiffened arms and bewildered legs—­often out of time—­always out of place—­as if acting under the influence of a galvanic battery.  Not one in ten of them rises even to mediocrity as a dancer.  A few degrees lower in the social scale, and it would be not one in twenty.  Amid the shoving, shouldering, shuffling mob of dancers in an ordinary ball-room, the absence of all grace amounts even to the ludicrous.  Forty years long have people been dancing the quadrilles now in vogue, which consist of six favourite country-dances, fashionable in Paris at the close of the last century, and then singly known by the names they still retain—­“La Poule, L’Ete, Le Pantalon, Le Trenis,” &c. &c.  To avoid the monotony of dancing each in succession, for hours at a time, down a file of forty couple, it was arranged that every eight couple should form a square, and perform the favourite dances, in succession, with the same partner—­a considerable relief to the monotony of the ball-room.  Yet, after all this experience, if poor Monsieur le Trenis (after whom one of the figures was named, and who, during the consulate, died dancing-mad in a public lunatic asylum) could rise, sane, from the dead, it would be enough to drive him mad again to see how little had been acquired, in the way of practice, since his decease.  The processes and varieties of the ball-room are just where he left then on his exit!

Previous to the introduction of quadrilles and country dances or contredanses, the inaptitude of nine-tenths of mankind for dancing was still more eminently demonstrated in the murders of the minuet.  For (as Morall, the dancing-master of Marie Antoinette, used passionately to exclaim)—­que de choses dans un minuet!  What worlds of modest dignity—­of alternate amenity and scorn!  The minuet has all the tender coquetry of the bolero, divested of its licentious fervour.  With the minuet and the hoop, indeed, disappeared that powerful circumvallation of female virtue, rendering superfluous the annual publication of a dozen codes of ethics, addressed to the “wives of England” and their daughters.  All was comprehended in the pas grave.  That noble and right Aulic dance was expressly invented in deference to the precariousness of powdered heads; and its calm sobrieties, once banished from the ball-room, revolutionary boulangeres succeeded—­and chaos was come again!  The stately pavon had possession of the English court, with ruffs and farthingales, in the reign of Elizabeth.  With the Stuarts came the wild courante or corante—­