There is a portentous column to which my attention is attracted (I know not why, for it has never concerned me in the slightest degree), having reference to dancing. I don’t allude to the casinos, or masquerades, or public full-dress balls, to which a man may go, lounge about, stare at the votaries of Terpsichore, and go away again without ever shaking a leg; but to the advertisements of the professors of dancing and “drawing-room deportment,” who really mean business, and give instruction in those elegant and graceful arts, and hold their academies daily and nightly all over London, from the farthest East to the extremest West. Now I am myself no dancer. I remember as a boy, in the grim Parisian _pension_, or school boarding-house attached to the College where I had my scant Humanities hammered into me, a certain obese professor, to whom my parents and guardians paid a certain quarterly sum for my instruction in the poetry of motion. I remember him well, for whenever we took our walks abroad in Paris, we could scarcely pass a dead wall without seeing it placarded, or a _porte cochère_ without seeing it hung, with a little yellow black framed bill, screened with a wire trellis-work, proclaiming “Boizot” and his “_cours de danse_.” This was in ’39; yet last winter in Paris the same walls and _portes cochères_ still sounded the praises of Boizot. He appears to be immortal, like Cockle of the pills, Grimstone of the eye-snuff, and Elizabeth Lazenby of the sauce. The square _toqued_ and black-gowned professors of the College Bourbon—now Lycée Bonaparte—could by dint of locking me up in cellars, making me kneel across sharp rulers and rapping my knuckles with ferulas (for corporal punishment never—oh! never—enters into the scheme of French education), impel me to construe Cæsar indifferently well; but Boizot, in all his _cours de danse_, failed in teaching me the difference between _cavalier seul_ and _en avant deux_—between the _pastorale_ and the _chaine des dames_. A more incorrigible dunce at dancing than your humble servant, never, I believe, existed. In the attempt to instruct me in the enchanting and vertigo-giving waltz, Boizot made a most lamentable _fiasco_, although he resorted to his famous specific of stamping on the pupil’s toes with heavy-heeled shoes till he made the right steps to the right time. But our gyrations always ended in my doing all my waltzing on _his_ toes; and he flung me away from him at last, denouncing me as a hopeless _butor_, _ganache_, _cretin_, and _cancre_—a Vandal, a Goth, an Ostrogoth, and a Visigoth—the three first being terms perfectly comprehensible to the French schoolboy, but for which it is difficult to find equivalents in this language. I am sure that Boizot left me with the utmost dislike and contempt, and with the most sinister forebodings for my future career. Thenceforth I was released from the dancing-lessons. In after years, I have heard it reported on