From 1850 onwards it was the period of the Great Utilities, of which Ballet was not one! Save for a few good examples later at the old Canterbury Music Hall, with Miss Phyllis Broughton as _première danseuse_, at Weston’s Music Hall, Holborn, and at the Alhambra under Strange’s management, and some good productions at the Crystal Palace arranged by M. Leon Espinosa, it was practically a close time for artistic dance and ballet for something like a quarter of a century. The state of public disfavour into which the art had fallen is well seen from the interesting extract from the _Era Almanack_ of 1872, in which one reads: “Judging from Mr. Mapleson’s extensive productions the ballet was another sheet anchor on which he relied. Madame Katti Lanner, a Viennese _danseuse_ of great repute, was, with other foreign artists, engaged for the _express purpose of reviving an interest in the old-fashioned, elaborate ballet of action_. The experiment was boldly made, but failed; and it is clear that all modern audiences care for is an incidental _divertissement_ which may mean something or nothing. As for a story worked out by clever pantomime, people refuse to stay and see it, and the deserted appearance of the theatre while ‘Giselle’ and other ballets were in progress was a significant hint that incidental dances only are appreciated by opera-goers of the present day. The ballets invented by Madame Katti Lanner were ‘La Rose de Séville,’ ‘Hvika’ and one or two nameless _divertissements_. She danced in them all, and in the first act of ‘Giselle.’” Thus, London audiences from, roughly, 1850 to 1870, had not that burning interest in the art of ballet which they had displayed for the twenty years or so preceding 1850; indeed, they had little or no interest in it. In Paris conditions were much the same. There were dancers of some ability and transient popularity, as we have noted, but no ballet and no dancer appeared of outstanding merit such as those of the great periods of the eighteenth century, the mid-nineteenth, or such as we have seen to-day. Even dancing, apart from ballet, was of comparatively little interest. In London, with the ’eighties came the dear old Gaiety and another _pas de quatre_, that in “Faust Up-to-Date,” a very different one from that of the ’forties, not the toe-dancing of classic ballet, but step-dancing of the characteristic and admirable English school; and it was a very bright and inspiring dance done with tremendous _verve_ by the Misses Florence Levey, Lillian Price, Maud Wilmot, and Eva Greville. Supreme, however, as an exponent of the English school of dancing was, unquestionably, Kate Vaughan, who, with Sylvia Grey, Alice Lethbridge, Letty Lind, and others of that period, and for well into the ’nineties, were the delight of London.