When Madame Anna Pavlova was leaving Russia, she parted with an old general, who was saying good-bye to her, with the farewell wish, “May all that is best be yours!” To this he replied, “How can the best be ours when you are depriving us of the very best we had?” Not every member of the Imperial ballet has yet visited Paris and London, and therefore it is difficult for those who have never been to Russia to speak in terms of comparison, but we are willing to believe in the justice of the general’s appraisement. Madame Pavlova received her training at the Imperial Ballet School at St Petersburg. She speedily passed upwards through the various ranks of the ballet, until she became _prima ballerina_ at the Marianski Theatre. She made her début on the foreign stage at Munich, and subsequently appeared in Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and New York. When she came to London in 1910 she immediately had the town at her feet. London was at a disadvantage, however, compared with New York, for whereas in America she performed in the ballet, at the Palace Theatre in London she appeared exclusively in solo dances, or with her partner, Mikail Mordkin. The British amateur of the dance, therefore, has seen but a part of her genius, for that pure mimesis, in which she excels no less than in the actual dancing itself, requires for its full scope the interaction of characters which belongs to the ballet proper. She herself told me that she preferred playing in the ballet to dancing alone, but it is difficult to believe that her personality could find fuller expression than in the single dances in which she has the whole stage to herself. Moreover, when in England she was deprived of the splendid setting of the Russian _décor_, the backcloth at the Palace Theatre being a rather distracting and futile example of the British scene-painter’s art.