willing but unskilled, that persuaded the British public that ballet was a bore. The result was that popular enthusiasm was directed towards skirt-dancing, and the art of the ballerina fell into undeserved contempt. Although practically extinct in England the ballet continued to maintain a healthy, if not a flourishing, existence on the Continent. This was due not only to the fact, of which I have already spoken, that the Continental schools of ballet were attached to the great opera houses and usually subsidised by the Government, but also to a high level of criticism and technical knowledge of the ballet on the part of the general public. The indifference of the British public was at once the cause and the excuse of the indifferent performance of the British ballet. This aspect of the decline of the ballet has been well stated by Mr S. L. Bensusan, whose authority on all that concerns the art of theatrical dancing is supreme. “Not only are many of the steps that must be studied exceedingly difficult,” he says, speaking of the work of the Continental ballerina, “but the dancer who has learnt her work in the schools of Vienna, Milan, Moscow, or Paris knows well enough that should she falter in their execution, she will have no chance at all with the public. In Italy, for example, the audience understands the technical side of a dancer’s art just as well as it understands the quality of a singer’s voice, or just as well as the patrons of a London music-hall understand the chorus of a comic song.... The dancer who failed in ballet to execute a difficult step with absolute neatness and precision, would find a decidedly unpleasant reception awaiting the end of the movement. Her audience have a standard of judgment and will understand what the movement should have been like. In London, on the other hand, several great dancers have told me that it is not worth their while to take trouble about very difficult steps, because unfortunately they are not understood; while something that is obvious and childlike in its simplicity, like a _pas de bourrée_, is safe to meet with a measure of applause at least as great as that which rewards some movements which can only be acquired at the end of long years of study by a very few dancers whose natural gifts are exceptional. If you watch a really distinguished dancer, you are bound to notice that she never has an ungraceful movement or unhappy pose. It is not a case of occasional happy moments, but of one long succession of movements whose rhythm has the beauty of fine verse. The results that make the great dancers so much admired by those who are at any pains to study their work, are quite within the reach of English girls; but it is an unfortunate fact, for which every great ballet-mistress will vouch, that English girls as a class do not take the trouble to work hard enough to acquire the perfect control over limbs and movement that is the reward of their Continental sisters. It is on this account that what