A Galliard of the seventeenth century, an Allemande by an English composer, Robert Johnson (1540-1626), Handel’s Oboe Concerto (1734), a Sarabande by Destouches (1672), “Lady Elizabeth Spencer’s Minuet” performed at Blenheim in 1788--all these and other historically interesting items were encored by the audience, not because of their historic interest, but simply because of their joyousness and charm; while a _bourrée_ by Mouret (1742), and the fascinating Old English dance, “Once I loved a maiden fair” (one of a group including “Althea,” “Lord of Carnarvon’s Jig,” and Stanes’ Morris-dance) had to be given three times. This was all complimentary, of course, to the beautiful way in which the dances and music were performed; but it was an interesting revelation of the eternal appeal to humanity, whatsoever the degree of caste or wealth, of the really good thing in art, and certainly the centuries are bridged with ease by the charm and joyousness of these old-time dances to their appropriate music, seen and heard more recently and to such advantage amid congenial environment in “Shakespeare’s England” at Earl’s Court. Veritably we seem to have seen every known form of dance and type of dancer in London during the past twenty years or so, and latterly we have had at the Royal Opera-House, and, since, at Drury Lane, such a festival of ballet as has not been seen in England since the ’forties of last century, for here we have seen a galaxy of dancers from the two great opera-houses of Russia, that of the Mariensky at Petrograd, and that of the great theatre in Moscow, where the traditional training for ballet has been kept up and infused with a new artistic spirit such as is hardly to be found in any other continental opera-house. Early in last century Carlo Blasis brought the Milan school to perfection, and thence went teachers to Paris, Vienna, Dresden, Moscow, Petrograd, wherever they went carrying something of the artistic spirit and culture of their master, one of the most versatile _maîtres de ballet_ there has ever been, for there seems to have been scarcely an art of which he did not know something, and of which he could not say something worth hearing. But since those days probably nowhere quite as in Russia has the ballet moved with the times and been so imbued with the new artistic spirit which has been at work within the past generation. Painter, musician, poet, dramatist, and _maître de ballet_, are called upon to produce the homogeneous and individual spectacle which we call the Russian ballet.