Mdlle.  Salle, it seems, achieved extraordinary success in the year 1734 at Covent Garden Theatre, which a French journal of that date describes curiously as the Theatre du Commun Jardin.  The lady was an admirable dancer, and brought with her complete dramatic ballets, the characters in which were appropriately dressed according to the time and place of the story they related; for Mdlle.  Salle was a reformer in the matter of stage costumes.  She discarded paniers and hoops and false hair.  As Galatea in a ballet upon the story of Pygmalion, she wore nothing, we are told, “in addition to her bodice and under petticoats, but a simple robe of muslin draped after the manner of a Greek statue.”  She won great applause, too, by her performance of Ariadne in a ballet called “Bacchus and Ariadne,” the beauty of her dances, attitudes, and gestures, and her skill in depicting by movements without words, grief, anger, love, and despair, obtaining the warmest approval.  She was patronised by the king, queen, and the royal family, and her benefit produced an “overflow” and something more; tickets were sold at most exorbitant prices, and the people fought for places both with swords and fists.  There are stories, too, of purses full of gold being flung upon the stage, with showers of bonbons—­not ordinary sugar-plums, but rouleaux of guineas tightly wrapped up in bank-notes.  The dancer is said to have profited by her benefit to the extent of some L10,000.  It must be owned, however, that the story of Mdlle.  Salle’s success is of a very highly-coloured description, and can only be credited absolutely by persons largely endowed with credulity.

Satire, of course, found occupation in the successes of the ballet-dancers.  In 1742 Hogarth published his “Charmers of the Age,” a caricature of the aspects and attitudes of M. Desnoyer and the Signora Barberina, then performing at Drury Lane Theatre.  A grotesque air was given to these artists, popularly regarded as personifications of grace and elegance, and a measured line was added to the drawing that their leaps and bounds might be fairly estimated.

It was in France, however, that the ballerina secured her greatest triumph, and the ballet d’action attained its fullest vitality.  The dancer became a power in the State, influencing princes, ministers, and people.  Poets were her slaves, and oftentimes philosophers were caught in her toils.  From Mdlle. la Fontaine of two centuries since, “la premiere des premieres danseuses,” who received the title of “La Reine de la Danse,” there being at the time, however, but three other professional dancers in Paris, through a long line of most distinguished artists, the ballerina of to-day may trace her descent.  But now, however, there is pause in her success, a cloud over her career.  Indeed, it must be said, that for a generation almost there has been no new triumph registered of the ballet and its artists.  Here the “opera-dancers,”