hearing? Poems are written, and we cease to admire. Lady Jones invites
us, and we yawn; she ceases to invite us, and we are resigned. The
last time I saw a ballet at the opera--oh! it is many years ago--I
fell asleep in the stalls, wagging my head in insane dreams, and I
hope affording amusement to the company, while the feet of five hundred
nymphs were cutting flicflacs on the stage at a few paces' distance. Ah,
I remember a different state of things! Credite posteri. To see those
nymphs--gracious powers, how beautiful they were! That leering, painted,
shrivelled, thin-armed, thick-ankled old thing, cutting dreary capers,
coming thumping down on her board out of time--THAT an opera-dancer?
Pooh! My dear Walter, the great difference between MY time and yours,
who will enter life some two or three years hence, is that, now, the
dancing women and singing women are ludicrously old, out of time, and
out of tune; the paint is so visible, and the dinge and wrinkles of
their wretched old cotton stockings, that I am surprised how anybody can
like to look at them. And as for laughing at ME for falling asleep, I
can't understand a man of sense doing otherwise. In MY time, a la bonne
heure. In the reign of George IV., I give you my honor, all the dancers
at the opera were as beautiful as Houris. Even in William IV.'s time,
when I think of Duvernay prancing in as the Bayadere,--I say it was a
vision of loveliness such as mortal eyes can't see now-a-days. How well
I remember the tune to which she used to appear! Kaled used to say to
the Sultan, "My lord, a troop of those dancing and singing gurls called
Bayaderes approaches," and, to the clash of cymbals, and the thumping
of my heart, in she used to dance! There has never been anything like
it--never. There never will be--I laugh to scorn old people who tell me
about your Noblet, your Montessu, your Vestris, your Parisot--pshaw, the
senile twaddlers! And the impudence of the young men, with their
music and their dancers of to-day! I tell you the women are dreary old
creatures. I tell you one air in an opera is just like another, and they