is always in the nature of an echo, or answer, or like an _antiphony_
in cathedral services. But nothing could be more absurd than that one of
these antiphonies should be sung, and another said. That he was also
compelled to dance, I am satisfied. The chorus only _sometimes_
moralized, but it _always_ danced: and any actor, mingling with the
chorus, must dance also. A little incident occurs to my remembrance, from
the Moscow expedition of 1812, which may here be used as an illustration:
One day King Murat, flourishing his plumage as usual, made a gesture of
invitation to some squadrons of cavalry that they should charge the enemy:
upon which the cavalry advanced, but maliciously contrived to envelope the
king of dandies, before he had time to execute his ordinary manoeuvre of
riding off to the left and becoming a spectator of their prowess. The
cavalry resolved that his majesty should for once ride down at their head
to the melee, and taste what fighting was like; and he, finding that the
thing must be, though horribly vexed, made a merit of his necessity, and
afterwards pretended that he liked it very much. Sometimes, in the
darkness, in default of other misanthropic visions, the wickedness of this
cavalry, their _mechancete_, causes me to laugh immoderately. Now I
conceive that any interloper into the Greek chorus must have danced when
_they_ danced, or he would have been swept away by their impetus:
_nolens volens_, he must have rode along with the orchestral charge,
he must have rode on the crest of the choral billows, or he would have
been rode down by their impassioned sweep. Samson, and Oedipus, and
others, must have danced, if they sang; and they certainly _did_ sing, by
notoriously intermingling in the choral business.[6]

'But now,' says the plain English reader, 'what was the object of all
these elaborate devices? And how came it that the English tragedy, which
surely is as good as the Greek,' (and at this point a devil of defiance
whispers to him, like the quarrelsome servant of the Capulets or the