ball-room. Yet, after all this experience, if poor Monsieur le Trenis
(after whom one of the figures was named, and who, during the consulate,
died dancing-mad in a public lunatic asylum) could rise, sane, from the
dead, it would be enough to drive him mad again to see how little had been
acquired, in the way of practice, since his decease. The processes and
varieties of the ball-room are just where he left then on his exit!

Previous to the introduction of quadrilles and country dances or
_contredanses_, the inaptitude of nine-tenths of mankind for dancing was
still more eminently demonstrated in the murders of the minuet. For (as
Morall, the dancing-master of Marie Antoinette, used passionately to
exclaim)--_que de choses dans un minuet_! What worlds of modest
dignity--of alternate amenity and scorn! The minuet has all the tender
coquetry of the bolero, divested of its licentious fervour. With the
minuet and the hoop, indeed, disappeared that powerful circumvallation of
female virtue, rendering superfluous the annual publication of a dozen
codes of ethics, addressed to the "wives of England" and their daughters.
All was comprehended in the _pas grave_. That noble and right Aulic dance
was expressly invented in deference to the precariousness of powdered
heads; and its calm sobrieties, once banished from the ball-room,
revolutionary _boulangères_ succeeded--and chaos was come again! The
stately _pavon_ had possession of the English court, with ruffs and
farthingales, in the reign of Elizabeth. With the Stuarts came the wild
courante or corante--

"Hair loosely flowing, robes as free"--

and if the House of Hanover, and minuets, reformed for a time the
irregularities of St James's--what are we to expect now that waltzes,
galops, and the eccentricities of the cotillon have possession of the