self-exposure of Taglioni, "_qu'il fallait être sage pour danser comme
ça_," Miss S. observes, that it requires to be more or less than woman,
and proposes to divide the human species into men, women, and
OPERA-DANCERS, little suspecting that half her readers translate such a
classification into "men, women, and ANGELS;" or that they would see
herself and her sister moralist go down in the _President_ without a pang,
provided Elssler and Taglioni were saved from the deep!

Natural enough! we repeat it--natural enough! To create a good dancer,
requires the rarest combination of physical and mental endowments.
Graceful as the forms transmitted to us by the pottery of Etruria and the
frescoes of Herculaneum, she must unite with the strength of an athlete,
the genius of a first-rate actress. That even moderate dancing demands
immoderate abilities, is attested by the exhibition of human ungainliness
disfiguring all the court balls of Europe. There may be seen the
representatives of the highest nobility, tutored by the highest education,
shuffling over the polished floor with stiffened arms and bewildered
legs--often out of time--always out of place--as if acting under the
influence of a galvanic battery. Not one in ten of them rises even to
mediocrity as a dancer. A few degrees lower in the social scale, and it
would be not one in twenty. Amid the shoving, shouldering, shuffling mob
of dancers in an ordinary ball-room, the absence of all grace amounts even
to the ludicrous. Forty years long have people been dancing the quadrilles
now in vogue, which consist of six favourite country-dances, fashionable
in Paris at the close of the last century, and then singly known by the
names they still retain--"La Poule, L'Eté, Le Pantalon, Le Trenis," &c. &c.
To avoid the monotony of dancing each in succession, for hours at a time,
down a file of forty couple, it was arranged that every eight couple
should form a square, and perform the favourite dances, in succession,
with the same partner--a considerable relief to the monotony of the