Yet another artist of marked individuality and intellectual distinction, Miss Isadora Duncan, was really the first to appear in London who showed any marked ability to break away from the traditional schools of ballet and step-dancing, and, casting back to the days of ancient Greece, began deliberately to use posture and movement as a means of expressing poetic ideas. I first saw her at her London _début_, when she appeared in a performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” one of a series of Shakespearian revivals which Mr. F. R. Benson was giving--on February 22nd, 1900--at the old Lyceum. She had but lately arrived from America, and was fired with an enthusiasm for the graceful dance of classic days, an enthusiasm which found ample expression in her dance as a wood-nymph in a Shakespearian production which I still remember as one of the most beautiful I have seen. Shortly after Miss Duncan gave a special _matinée_ at the old St. George’s Hall entitled, “The Happier Age of Gold,” at which idylls of Theocritus, poems by Swinburne and other poets of classic inspiration, were recited to music and were either accompanied or followed by an appropriate dance designed and performed by Miss Duncan, who also set herself the task of interpreting well-known musical _morceaux_ by means of a dance. One of the items on her programme was Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song,” which received a thoroughly graceful and sympathetic interpretation. Miss Duncan has, of course, appeared in London frequently since then, and all dance-lovers will remember the extraordinary charm of the series of _matinées_ which she gave at the Duke of York’s Theatre at which she introduced a number of child pupils. There has never been anything meretricious or pretentious about the work of Miss Isadora Duncan. It has always been marked by a sense of deep-rooted culture, classic dignity and poetic charm, and to her, certainly, so far as London is concerned, belongs the credit of having first introduced a form of dancing which has only too often since been parodied under the term of “classic dancing”; and even as she was the first, so, in my humble judgment, she is the best and truest exponent of a school which is justified by the beauty of its results, and which is having, and is likely yet to have, far-reaching influence. [Illustration: _Dover St. Studios_ Miss Isadora Duncan]