Over three centuries ago--nay, nearly four, we come upon a somewhat sage and elderly gentleman, Thoinot Arbeau, whose book with its strange title, _Orchésographie_, was published in 1588. Was it shyness, or sheer fraud that made him write it under a false name, a _nom de théâtre_ it would almost seem. For Thoinot Arbeau was _not_ his name, but a sort of anagram on his real one, which was Jehan Tabourot. Moreover, he was sixty-seven when he wrote it, and was a Canon of the Church! He was born at Dijon in 1519, and was the son of one Estienne Tabourot, a King’s Counsellor! Think of it--born four hundred years ago, yet he speaks to our time, telling us, albeit in somewhat stiff and difficult French, of the dances that were in vogue in _his_ dancing days. As to the strange title of his work, its meaning will of course be apparent to all who know anything of the history of the subject, for they will remember that the Greek word for the dance was _Orcheisthai_ (the _Orchestra_ being the floor-space where the dancers performed); and so Orchéso_graphie_ is merely a treatise on the writing of dances; that is, the setting of them down in such form that subsequent readers could study the dances therefrom. The recording of the actual steps of dances has always been a problem, and other leading masters in France (such as Beauchamps, Pécourt, Feuillet) and in England (such as Weaver) had several more or less successful shots during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at inventing a sort of dance-shorthand. The very first author to attempt such a thing with any real success was apparently our friend Arbeau; for earlier works, such as that of Caroso, are very poor. Into the full details of his system, however, I do not propose to enter now, for the matter is somewhat technical. The interest of Arbeau’s work, however, is by no means mainly technical. The book, which was published at Lengres in 1588, is written in the form of a dialogue “by which everyone can easily learn and practise the honest exercise of the dances,” to give the quaint phraseology of the original, the two speakers being Arbeau the author, and Capriol, a youth who some few years earlier had left Lengres to go to Paris and Orleans and now, on his return, has sought out Arbeau to learn from him all that he can of dancing. Thoinot at first does not recognise him because, as he says, “You have grown so, and I believe that you have also enlarged your spirit by virtue and knowledge.” He asks the young man’s opinion of the study of Law, remarking that he was also once a law-student.