Invention is also as much a requisite in our art as in any other. But to save the pains of study, we often borrow and copy from one another. Indolence is the bane of our art. The trouble of thinking necessary to the invention and composition of dances, appears to many too great a fatigue: this engages them to appropriate to themselves the fruits of other peoples invention; and they appear to themselves well provided at a small expence, when they have made free with the productions of others. Some again, instead of cultivating their talent, chuse indolently to follow the great torrent of the fashion, and stick to the old tracks, without daring to strike out any thing new, so that their prejudices are, in fact, the principles by which they are governed, and which sometimes serves them for their excuse; since they know better, but do not care to give themselves the trouble of acting up to their knowledge. Thus they plod in the safe, and broad road of mediocrity, but without any reputation or name. They are neither envied nor applauded. As for those who borrow from others, content with being copies, when they ought to strive to be originals; nothing can more obstruct their progress in the discoveries of the depths of their art, than this scheme of subsisting on the merit of others. Many, besides those who are incapable of invention, are tempted at once by their indolence, and by the hope of not being discovered or minded in their borrowing from others, to give stale or hackneyed compositions, which having seen in one country, they flatter themselves they may palm for new and original upon the public in another. Thence it is that the audience is cloyed with repetitions of pantomime dances; perhaps some of them very pretty at their first appearance, but which cannot fail of tiring when too often repeated; or when the same grounds or subject of action is only superficially or slightly diversified. It is this barrenness of invention that the ingenious Goldoni has so well exposed in one of his plays, in the following speech, addressed to a young man.