“Hair loosely flowing, robes as free”—­

and if the House of Hanover, and minuets, reformed for a time the irregularities of St James’s—­what are we to expect now that waltzes, galops, and the eccentricities of the cotillon have possession of the social stage?  WHAT NEXT? as the pamphlets say—­“What will the lords do?”—­what the ladies?

Thus much in proof, that the boss of pirouettiveness is strangely wanting in human conformation, and that there is consequently all the excuse of ignorance for the wild enthusiasm lavished by London on the operative class.  Ten guineas per night—­five hundred for the season—­is the price exacted for a first-rate opera-box; and as the exclusives usually arrive at the close of the opera, or, if earlier, keep up a perpetual babble during its performance, they clearly come for the dancing.—­“On voit l’opera, et l’on ecoute le ballet,” used to be said of the Academie de Musique.  But it might be asserted now, with fully as much truth, of the Queen’s Theatre, where the evolutions of Carlotta Grisi, Elssler, and Cerito, keep the audience in a state of breathless attention denied to Shakspeare.

In two out of these instances, it may be advanced that they are consummate actresses as well as graceful and active dancers.  Elssler’s comedy is almost as piquant as that of Mademoiselle Mars.  Nor is the ballet unsusceptible of a still higher order of histrionic display.  We never remember to have seen a stronger levee en masse of cambric handkerchiefs in honour of O’Neill’s Mrs Haller, or Siddons’s Isabella, than of the ballet of “Nina;” while the affecting death-dance in “Masaniello” is still fresh in the memory of the admirers of Pauline Leroux.  We have heard of swoons and hysterics along the more impressionable audiences of La Scala, during the performance of the ballet of “La Vestale;” and have witnessed with admiration the striking effect of the fascinative scene in “Faust.”

Of late years, the union of Italian blood and a French education has been found indispensable to create a danseuse—­“Sangue Napolitano in scuola Parigiana;”—­and Vesuvius is the Olympus of all our recent divinities.  Formerly, a Spanish origin was the most successful.  The first dancer who possessed herself of European notoriety was La Camargo, whose portraits, at the close of a century, are still popular in France, where she has been made the heroine of several recent dramas.  To her reign, succeeded that of the Gruinards and Duthes—­in honour of whose bright eyes, a variety of noblemen saw the inside both of Fort St Eveque and St Pelagie; the opera being at that time a fertile source of lettres de cachet.  To obtain admittance to the private theatricals of the former dancer, in her magnificent hotel in the Chaussee d’Antin, the ladies of fashion and of the court had recourse to the meanest artifices; while the latter has obtained historical renown, by having