varieties of the ball-room are just where he left then on his exit! Previous to the introduction of quadrilles and country dances or _contredanses_, the inaptitude of nine-tenths of mankind for dancing was still more eminently demonstrated in the murders of the minuet. For (as Morall, the dancing-master of Marie Antoinette, used passionately to exclaim)--_que de choses dans un minuet_! What worlds of modest dignity--of alternate amenity and scorn! The minuet has all the tender coquetry of the bolero, divested of its licentious fervour. With the minuet and the hoop, indeed, disappeared that powerful circumvallation of female virtue, rendering superfluous the annual publication of a dozen codes of ethics, addressed to the "wives of England" and their daughters. All was comprehended in the _pas grave_. That noble and right Aulic dance was expressly invented in deference to the precariousness of powdered heads; and its calm sobrieties, once banished from the ball-room, revolutionary _boulangères_ succeeded--and chaos was come again! The stately _pavon_ had possession of the English court, with ruffs and farthingales, in the reign of Elizabeth. With the Stuarts came the wild courante or corante-- "Hair loosely flowing, robes as free"-- and if the House of Hanover, and minuets, reformed for a time the irregularities of St James's--what are we to expect now that waltzes, galops, and the eccentricities of the cotillon have possession of the social stage? WHAT NEXT? as the pamphlets say--"What will the lords do?"--what the ladies? Thus much in proof, that the boss of pirouettiveness is strangely wanting in human conformation, and that there is consequently all the excuse of ignorance for the wild enthusiasm lavished by London on the operative class. Ten guineas per night--five hundred for the season--is the price exacted for a first-rate opera-box; and as the exclusives usually arrive at the close of the opera, or, if earlier, keep up a perpetual babble during its performance, they clearly come for the dancing.--"_On voit l'opéra, et l'on écoute le ballet_," used to be said of the Académie de Musique. But it might be asserted now, with fully as much truth, of the Queen's Theatre, where the evolutions of Carlotta Grisi, Elssler, and Cerito, keep the audience in a state of breathless attention denied to Shakspeare.