tripudistic or beating character than is now esteemed consistent with a
correct ball-room performance. The _Gagliarda_ too, which we play now so
constantly, possesses a singular power of assisting the imagination to
picture or reproduce such scenes as those which it no doubt formerly
enlivened. I know not why, but it is constantly identified in my mind
with some revel which I have perhaps seen in a picture, where several
couples are dancing a licentious measure in a long room lit by a number
of silver sconces of the debased model common at the end of the
seventeenth century. It is probably a reminiscence of my late excursion
that gives to these dancers in my fancy the olive skin, dark hair, and
bright eyes of the Italian type; and they wear dresses of exceedingly
rich fabric and elaborate design. Imagination is whimsical enough to
paint for me the character of the room itself, as having an arcade of
arches running down one side alone, of the fantastic and paganised
Gothic of the Renaissance. At the end is a gallery or balcony for the
musicians, which on its coved front has a florid coat of arms of foreign
heraldry. The shield bears, on a field _or_, a cherub's head blowing on
three lilies--a blazon I have no doubt seen somewhere in my travels,
though I cannot recollect where. This scene, I say, is so nearly
connected in my brain with the _Gagliarda_, that scarcely are its first
notes sounded ere it presents itself to my eyes with a vividness which
increases every day. The couples advance, set, and recede, using free
and licentious gestures which my imagination should be ashamed to
recall. Amongst so many foreigners, fancy pictures, I know not in the
least why, the presence of a young man of an English type of face, whose
features, however, always elude my mind's attempt to fix them. I think
that the opening subject of this _Gagliarda_ is a superior composition
to the rest of it, for it is only during the first sixteen bars that the
vision of bygone revelry presents itself to me. With the last note of
the sixteenth bar a veil is drawn suddenly across the scene, and with a