Independent, indeed, of the high prosperity and vast perquisites of such posts as executioner of the Tower of London or the Grève of Paris, there was honour and satisfaction in the office. A royal master knew when he was well served. Henry III. stood by, in his chateau of Blois, to see, not only the heads severed from the dead bodies of the Duke and Cardinal de Guise, but their _flesh cut into small pieces_, preparatory to being burned, and the ashes scattered to the winds. "His majesty," says an eyewitness, "stood in a pool of blood to witness the hacking of the bodies." This Italian _gusto_ for the smell of blood, appears to have been introduced into the palaces of France from those of Italy by alliance with the Medici--those ennobled pawnbrokers of the middle ages, whose _parvenu_ taste engendered the fantastic gilding of the _renaissance_, which they naturalized in the Tuileries and at Fontainbleau, in common with the stiletto and acqua tofana of their poisoners, and the fatalism of their judicial astrology. But enough of Catharine de Medicis and her sanguinary son--enough of Henry Tudor and his savage daughters--enough of the monstrous professions flourishing in their age of monstrosities. And turn we for relief to the exquisite vocation completing the antithesis--the vocation whose execution is that of _pas de zéphyrs_, and the tortures of whose infliction are the tortures of the tender heart! The calling of the _danseuse_, we repeat, is among the most lucrative of modern times, and nearly the most influential. The names of Taglioni and Elssler are as European, nay, as universal, as those of Wellington and Talleyrand-Metternich or Thiers; and modern statesmanship and modern diplomacy show pale beside the Machiavelism of the _coulisses_. With what pomp of phraseology are the triumphs and movements of these _danseuses_ announced, by the self-same journal which despatches, with a stroke of the pen, the submission of a province or revolution of a kingdom! One poor halfpenny-worth, or half a line, suffices for the death of a sultana; while fiery columns precede the departure and arrival of the steamer honoured by conveying across the Atlantic some ethereal being, whose light fantastic toe is to give the law to the United States. Her appearance in the Ecclesiastic States, on the other hand, is announced in Roman capitals; and her triumphal entry into St Petersburg received with regiments of notes of admiration!!! Were Taglioni, by the malediction of Providence, to break her leg, what corner of the civilized earth but would sympathize in the casualty? Or were Elssler epidemically carried off, on the same day with the Pope, the Archbishop of Dublin, a chancellor of an university, an historiographer, or astronomer-royal--_which_ would be most cared for by society at large, or to which would the public journals distribute the larger share of their dolefuls?