LOOK between four and five feet high, but are really much smaller;
for when a musician in the orchestra happens to put his hat on the
stage, it becomes alarmingly gigantic, and almost blots out an
actor. They usually play a comedy, and a ballet. The comic man in
the comedy I saw one summer night, is a waiter in an hotel. There
never was such a locomotive actor, since the world began. Great
pains are taken with him. He has extra joints in his legs: and a
practical eye, with which he winks at the pit, in a manner that is
absolutely insupportable to a stranger, but which the initiated
audience, mainly composed of the common people, receive (so they do
everything else) quite as a matter of course, and as if he were a
man. His spirits are prodigious. He continually shakes his legs,
and winks his eye. And there is a heavy father with grey hair, who
sits down on the regular conventional stage-bank, and blesses his
daughter in the regular conventional way, who is tremendous. No
one would suppose it possible that anything short of a real man
could be so tedious. It is the triumph of art.

In the ballet, an Enchanter runs away with the Bride, in the very
hour of her nuptials, He brings her to his cave, and tries to
soothe her. They sit down on a sofa (the regular sofa! in the
regular place, O. P. Second Entrance!) and a procession of
musicians enters; one creature playing a drum, and knocking himself
off his legs at every blow. These failing to delight her, dancers
appear. Four first; then two; THE two; the flesh-coloured two.
The way in which they dance; the height to which they spring; the
impossible and inhuman extent to which they pirouette; the
revelation of their preposterous legs; the coming down with a
pause, on the very tips of their toes, when the music requires it;
the gentleman's retiring up, when it is the lady's turn; and the