Speech is scarce more expressive, than the gestual language. The art of painting, which places before our eyes the most pathetic, or the most gay images of human life, composes them of nothing but of attitudes, of positions of the arms, expressions of the countenance, and of all these parts dancing is composed, as well as painting. But, as I have before observed, painting can express no more than an instant of action. Theatrical dancing can exhibit all the successive instants it chuses to paint. Its march proceeds from picture to picture, to which, motion gives life. In painting, life is only imitated; in dancing, it is always the reality itself. Dancing is, evidently, in its nature, an action upon the theatres; nothing is wanting to it but meaning: it moves to the right, to the left; it retrogrades, it advances, it forms steps, it delineates figures. There is only wanting to all this an arrangement of the motions, to furnish to the eye a theatrical action upon any subject whatever. The history of the art proves that the dancers of genius, had no other means or assistance in the world but this to express all the human passions, and the possibilities of it are in all times, the very same. Both here, and in France, there have been some of these dramatic pieces in action, by dance, attempted, which have been well received by the public. Some years ago, the Dutchess of Maine ordered simphonies to be composed for the scene of the fourth act of the _Horatii_; in which the young Horatius kills Camilla. Two dancers, one of each sex, represented this action at _Sceaux_; and their dance painted it with all the energy and pathos of which it was susceptible. In Italy especially many subjects of a what may be called low comedy, are very naturally expressed by dancing. In short, there is hardly any comic action but what they represent upon their theatres, if not with perfection, at least satisfactorily. And certainly the dance in action has the same superiority over sheer unmeaning dancing, that a fine history-piece has over cutting flowers in paper. In the last there is little more required than mechanical nicety, and, at the best, it affords no great pretention to merit. But it is only for genius to order, distribute and compose, in the other. A Raphael is allowed to take place in the Temple of Fame, by a Virgil; and the art of dancing is capable of having its Raphaels too. Pilades, and Bathillus were painters, and great ones, in their way. Picturesque composition is not less the duty of a composer of dances, than of a painter. Among the antients, that _Protheus_, of whom fabulous history records such wonders, was only one of their dancers, who, by the rapidity of his steps, by the strength of his expression, and by the employment of the theatrical deceptions, seemed at every instant, to change his form. The celebrated _Empusa_ was a female dancer, whose agility was so prodigious that she appeared and vanished like a spirit.