Cracoviennes,

Highland Fling Bohemianised, I suppose Warsoviennes, Mazourkas, Redowas, and the like. The very Waltz, imported about the time of the battle of Waterloo, came out in duplicate, and was the valse à deux temps. When that graceful and captivating dance first made its appearance it was pronounced highly improper. That grave censor of manners and bright exemplar of morality, my Lord Byron, was severely satirical upon the simple-minded, affectionate German exotic. People of old English prejudices, partisans of hard-working, romping gymnastics, such as Country Dances, and "Sir Roger de Coverley," were scandalised at the intertwinings and gentle embracings of the Waltz; although I dare say the Country Dances and the Sir Roger de Coverleys were both introduced from abroad, and were thought decidedly improper on their first acclimation among us. I should very much like to know, daughter of mine, what has not been pronounced in its time "improper" by the gabies and the thickheads. These Letters, even, have been declared to be tainted with impropriety.

I was not in my youth a very great dancer. Perhaps I may have preferred gossiping-talking scandal if you willand the Waltz, whose coming in was coeval with my " coming out," may have had something to do with my distaste for dancing. In the grave, courteous figures of a Quadrille it is easy enough to converse, to say pretty or ugly things, to speak good or evil of your neighbours as you choose. You may stab a rival's reputation, or cast slow and disdainful glances at an unfaithful rival as you stalk past, or make grave reverences to them. So, too, with the Menuet de la Cour. I have often thought the elaborate poses and complicated gestures necessary to the efficient performance of that most aristocratic dance eminently favourable to the composition of stinging epigrams, or the interchange of high-flown

compliments. You can think as you dance a Quadrille or a Menuet; but what mental process can be resorted to amidst the spinnings and whirlings of all these wild Waltzes, Polkas, Schottisches, Redowas, and the like? Surely one has enough to occupy the mind in endeavouring to keep time and step, and to avoid tumbling down. What can you say to your partner beyond a panting "slower," or "faster, if you please?" Whether young ladies can find time, or have the inclination, to beg their cavaliers not to squeeze them quite so tightly, I don't know; but from the coloured lithographs on the dance music I see, I am inclined to think that much room exists for the delicate remonstrance at which I have hinted. Gentlemen put their arms certainly about their partners' waists in my old dancing days; at least, the hand and coat-cuff hovered somewhere in the mystic region where the ladies' waist was supposed to be; but if the coloured lithographs are to be trusted

and I hope they are not, my dear-the hugging of bears, and the pawings of monkeys, are as nothing compared with the Terpsichorean embraces of the present day.

After all, are we, or am I, to set up rules and canons—to draw the exact lines of demarcation between the decorous and the indecorous, in the indulgence of this astonishing and incomprehensible amusement; utterly destitute as it is—in its western phase, at least-of sense or meaning; essentially frivolous, exceedingly fatiguing, and quite void of any results beyond clamour and heat, and yet delighted in by the wisest as well as the most foolish of man and womankind? I have heard people say that it is beneath a man's dignity to dance well; and many modern dandies seem to endorse the opinion by dancing in as lazy and slovenly a manner as possible. Again, a notable wiseacre of my acquaintance declares that he never sees an accomplished male dancer-not professional, bien entendu―without thinking of the vast amount

of

time the man must have lost; time that might have been advantageously devoted to some more rational and useful pursuit. But there is much of the vanity of that. sham wisdom, which is a thousand times worse than candid folly, in all these opinions and assertions. I grant that very brainless puppies of men, and silly bits of girls, are often exquisitely beautiful dancers. I know a born idiot-a perfect crétin, a ganache, a "natural"-who dances with the grace of Parisot and the agility of Armand Vestris. And, per contrá, there is the Honourable Mrs. Golightly, painter, poetess, musician-a woman who is full of soul to the roots of her hair and the tips of her fingers, and who in society used to be called the "White Elephant;" for she was very fair, and her performances in the ball-room very much resembled the uncouth gambols one might expect from the animals sacred to Siam.

The gift of dancing goes by favour. Some are born with it as with a caul; and, ere now, the lightness of men's heels has saved their heads. Yes; people are born to dance well, and some to dance not at all. See, at a boarding-school, or at Madame Bizet Michau's academy, how little Minnie Cherrytoes will caper like a small sylph, from her earliest days of pinafore and trouserhood. She seems to know all the new dances by intuition. She skips, and winds, and bounds about, to the delight of the dancing-mistress, and the applause—almost unmingled with envy of her comrades. See, at the other end of the class, that unhappy, gawky Miss Leadbitter. She is the best Minnie can't approach her in

use of the globes; but you

French scholar in the school. drawing, in ciphering, in the can't teach her to dance. With about equal ease could you instruct her in the art of walking barefoot over red-hot ploughshares. Agonies have been suffered by this devoted

scholar, in the stocks, with back-boards, dumb-bells, Indian sceptres, and other implements of calisthenic torture. By methods almost as rude as those employed by mountebanks to teach a poodle destined for the stage, Miss Lead bitter's instructors have striven to make a graceful dancer of her. But all in vain. It wasn't in her; and it never will be in her, were you to drum and drill the elements of the poetry of motion into her poor dull perception till doomsday.

Am I but describing myself under the pseudonym of Leadbitter, you may ask? Nay, not altogether. I was never a great dancer, as I have told you, and scarcely a moderately graceful one. I used to think when I danced-and which surely showed that I had no occasion for the art—I was always glad when the set was terminated. I have skipped and ambled through some thousands of Quadrilles, I suppose, but in Waltzing I was never a proficient, nor of it was I ever a votary. It made me giddy; it made me hot; it gave me palpitation at the heart, and took away my appetite for supper; and, to this day, I can't help thinking that the Waltz is, as a dance, thoroughly unsuited to our sober-sided England, and should be indulged in only by the volatile and light-hearted nations of the south; unless, indeed, it was invented by that ingeniously philosophical nation the Germans, as a relief to the dryness of their favourite metaphysical studies, and as a means, by rapid evolution, of clearing their heads from the accumulated nicotian vapours proceeding from their meerschaums.

But what good is there in my counselling you one way or another as to the dances you are to dance, or how you are to dance them, or how often, or when, or where? Obedient in most things, my Louisa will, in this one, I conclude, claim her prerogative as a woman, and consult only her own sweet

will and the exigencies of the fashion. 'Tis quite a Lex non scripta, and one impossible to be codified, that regulates, or rather fails to regulate, the infinite varieties of that same fashion. The vulgar dance of to-day may be the aristocratic pas of to-morrow. Reels, jigs, flings, clog-hornpipes, may have wonderful names given to them, and be danced with immense applause in the saloons of Belgravia, when their original and genuine habitat may be the gipsy's camp or the village ale-house. What was it that Herodias danced when she so captivated the King of Galilee? It may have been a jig. It may have been such a pas seul as Miss Lydia Thompson executes in "Magic Toys" to the huge delectation of the sixpenny gallery. It may have been such a sensual saraband as the bangled and painted nautch-girls of India, or the be-kohled and be-henna'd Ghawazie of Egypt lounge through, now, to the music of tom-toms and fifes before some Bengal baboo, or some blasé Pacha. How do we know, any more than we do of that awfully mysterious gambado which the Jewish king performed before the ark? Yet we must be certain, that as Herodias lived in the very best society, it was of the most fashionable Galilean dance of the period that Herodias must have been the

executant.

Set down no dances as purely ridiculous. At one time thousands of years ago, perhaps they may have formed the delight of kings, and priests, and lawgivers. The sages of the Athenian Areopagus, or the magicians of old Egypt, may have joined in dances almost identical to those slow and solemn or grotesque measures paced through round about the great hall fires by the judges and benchers of our old inns of court at Christmas and Shrovetide; and these, again, from the descriptions handed down to us by antiquaries, may have been the self-same dances as