"Scenes of this kind are seldom if ever to be seen in a common Theatre, where the other charges are so large and numerous, as well as the price so confined, that the profits of such a pompous apparatus would by no means answer the expence: the place in our English plays also is too often varied to allow of it; besides, the business of these stages is, properly speaking, to provide the understanding with substantial food, not to treat it with conserves and sweatmeats; and from this reason it proceeds that dances, which at the playhouses are only made use of as a garnish, are at the Opera (which may not unaptly be compared to a dessert or a collation) one of the principal parts of the entertainment. "I should be extremely glad were it in my power to oblige the readers even with a faint idea of these: they all know, I believe, that Signior Galini is universally allowed to be one of the finest dancers in Europe; but at the King's Theatre, where he at present performs, he not only gives us the strongest proofs of his executive powers, but also of his skill in designing, by having composed three of the prettiest ballets I ever saw; and for plot, movement, humour, and, if I may make use of the expression, gesticulated wit, they are equal, I believe, to any, even of those which Lewis the Fourteenth himself was so fond of. "In the first dance, the scene of which, by the way, may more properly be called an emulation than a copy of nature, being that of a forest half cut down, where the trees are represented in the liveliest manner, and the prospect of clouds and blue mountains extended to an amazing distance; Forti and Bononi, in the characters of a woodman and his wife, carry the grotesque to a most entertaining degree of extravagance. Bononi is allowed to excel in this way every one who has gone before her; for Galini, as his genius is very different, so it is greatly preferable to this. His dancing indeed may be considered as a kind of dumb musick, since there is hardly a note which he does not express by some significant gesture. Carlini, his partner, is pretty much in the same mode, and when they appear after the second act in a very extensive plain, interspersed with villages, there cannot perhaps be imagined two more agreeable figures. But the third and last ballet, in which the four principal dancers come out together, surpasses all the rest. The prospect is that of a rock, which being open in two or three different places, discovers a wide river, and, in appearance, at least half a mile long, the transparency of the water is so well imitated, that we see the shadows of several flags and bullrushes, which grow upon it; nor is a distant village, which appears at one side, a small addition to the beauty of the view: down this rock come the figure dancers, who are met at the door of a cottage by Signior Galini and his friends; it is a kind of rural feast, and the music is so antic and lively, that that alone would be sufficient, I should