They have also in Turky, as well as India and Persia, professed dancers, especially of the female sex, under the name of dancing-girls, who are bred up, from their childhood, to the profession; and are always sent for to any great entertainment, public or private, as at feasts, weddings, ceremonies of circumcision, and, in short, on all occasions of festivity and joy. They execute their dances to a simphony of various instruments, extremely resembling the antient ones, the _tympanum_, the _crotala_, the _cimbals_, and the like, as well as to songs, being a kind of small dramatic compositions, or what may properly be called _ballads_, which is a true word for a song at once sung and danced: _ballare_ signifying to dance; and _ballata_, a song, composed to be danced. It is probable that from these eastern kind of dances, which are undoubtedly very antient, came the name, among the Romans, of _balatrones_. Nothing can be imagined more graceful, nor more expressive, than the gestures and attitudes of those dancing-girls, which may properly be called the eloquence of the body, in which indeed most of the Asiatics and inhabitants of the southren climates constitutionally excel, from a sensibility more exquisite than is the attribute of the more northern people; but a sensibility ballanced by too many disadvantages to be envied them. The Siamese, we are told, have three dances, called the _Cone_, the _Lacone_, and the _Raban_. The _Cone_ is a figure-dance, in which they use particularly a string-instrument in the nature of a violin, with some others of the Asiatic make. Those who dance are armed and masked, and seem to be a fighting rather than dancing. It is a kind of Indian Pirrhic. Their masks represent the most frightful hideous countenances of wild-beasts, or demons, that fancy can invent. In the _Lacone_ the performers sing commutually stanzes of verses containing the history of their country. The Raban is a mixed dance, of men and women, not martial, nor historical, but purely gallant; in which the dancers have all long false nails of copper. They sing in this dance, which is only a slow march without any high motions, but with a great many contortions of body and arms. Those who dance in the Raban and Cone have high gilt caps like sugar-loaves. The dance of the _Lacone_ is appropriated to the dedication of their temples, when a new statue of their _Sommona-codom_ is set up.