movement, and before you could say Jack Robinson (now Earl of Ripon) he started off into as grotesque a burlesque as ever was flung, and floundered, and flounced, and bounced, and shuffled, and scuffled, and draggled, and wiggle-waggled, shambled, gambolled, scrambled, and skimble-skambled by Grimaldi, in Mother Goose. Blessed were they who were born to behold it, though but from the mother’s arms. It was worth going five miles to see, the first mile trundling a coach-wheel, the second picking up eggs, the third hopping on one leg, the fourth backwards, and the fifth jumped in a sack. If any man think otherwise, may he dance, that is to say, in a ten-acre meadow, with a mohawking bully of a bull for a partner. [Illustration: A HIGHLAND FLING.] The whim next seized the Extraordinary, and he danced like a dancing Fakir. He jumped, and thumped, and twirled, and whirled, and so did the rest, till the great drops rolled down their foreheads, for it was in the very middle of the dog-days, and verily if Sirius did not become a dancing dog it was not for want of masters. The clock struck nine, and still they were at it, cross hands, down the middle, and back again--’twas a mercy the bolt held. Chassez-croisez, dos-a-dos!--it was getting on for ten, and yet they never called a fresh set! high time, my masters, for authority to interfere; but the Head of the Corporation had no sooner set the foot of the corporation on the scaffold, than the whole of the corporation gave way to the whim, and was carried off with a swagger into the medley, as if it had been the great ball at Easter. There, I say, was the Mayor of London, scarlet cloak, and fur, and gold chain and all, capering like a climbing boy, on the first of May. If you had seen that morris danced, ’tis long odds, Londoners, you would not have known your own May’r from a Hobbyhorse.