some improvement, and to make it something more than motion without meaning, the fable of Mars and Venus was formed into a connected presentation of dances in character, wherein the passions were so happily expressed, and the whole story so intelligibly told by a mute narrative of gesture only, that even thinking spectators allowed it both a pleasing and a rational entertainment.”  This was certainly a ballet of action, and it is remarkable that the production involved but a small outlay; the managers, distrusting its reception, did not venture “to decorate it with any extraordinary expense of scenes or habits.”  Great success, however, attended the performance, and from it is to be dated the establishment both of ballet and pantomime upon our stage.  “From this original hint, then, but every way unequal to it, sprang forth that succession of monstrous medleys that have so long infested the stage, and which arose upon one another alternately at both houses, outvying in expense, like contending bribes on both sides at an election, to secure a majority of the multitude.”  Cibber indeed waxes very wrath over the matter, and appears to desire that lawful authority should “interpose to put down these poetical drams, these gin-shops of the stage, that intoxicate its auditors and dishonour their understanding with a levity for which I want a name.”  But Cibber’s anger is in truth very much that of a manager vying with the liberal outlay of a rival, and in such wise forced to expend large sums in costly entertainments.

At an earlier date ballet-dancers had been imported from France.  Some time about 1704 the great Mr. Betterton and his company, suffering from insufficient patronage at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, had been reduced to resort to “foreign novelties.”  Three of the most famous dancers of the French Opera, L’Abbee, Balon, and Mademoiselle Subligny, were at several times brought over at extraordinary rates to revive that sickly appetite which plain sense and nature had satiated.  In Paris, indeed, the ballet was very securely instituted.  The Academie Royale de Musique et de Danse had been founded in 1669, and from that date the ballet, as an entertainment of dancing only, may be said to have come into being.  There had been earlier ballets, but these were of the nature of old English masques, and consisted of songs and spoken dialogues in addition to dances; the term ballet, it need hardly be explained, being derived from the Italian ballata, the parent of our own ballad.  At first the French Opera or Academy suffered from the smallness of its troop; vocalists could be obtained from the church choirs, but for the ballet it was hard to find recruits; and sometimes young boys were pressed into the service, and constrained to personate nymphs, dryads, and shepherdesses—­“danseurs,” writes a French historian of the Opera, “qui sous un masque et des vetements feminins, les formes arrondies par l’art et le coton, n’excitaient