The performances terminated with a _bayle nacional_, executed by two couples of dancers and danseuses, in a very satisfactory manner. Although the Spanish danseuses do not possess the correct and accurate precision, or the elevated style of the French danseuses, they are, in my opinion, vastly superior to them by their graceful and fascinating appearance. As they study but little, and do not subject themselves, in order to render their bodies supple, to those terrible exercises which cause a professional dancing-room to resemble a chamber of torture, they avoid that race-horse sort of thinness which makes our ballet-dancers look rather too deathlike and anatomical; they preserve the outlines and fulness of their sex; they resemble women dancing and not danseuses, which is a very different thing. Their style has not anything in common with that of the French school. In the latter, the immovability and perpendicularity of the upper part of the body are expressly recommended, and the body never takes part in the movement of the legs. In Spain, the feet hardly leave the ground; there are none of those grand pirouettes or elevating of the legs, which make a woman look like a pair of compasses opened to their fullest extent, and which, in Spain, are considered revoltingly indecent. It is the body which dances, the back which undulates, the sides which bend, the waist which moves with all the suppleness of an Almee or a serpent. When a Spanish danseuse throws herself back, her shoulders almost touch the ground; her arms, in a deathlike swoon, are as flexible and limp as a floating scarf; you would think that her hands could scarcely raise and rattle the ivory castagnettes with their golden strings, and yet, when the proper moment is come, this voluptuous languor is succeeded by the activity of a young African lion, proving that the body as soft as silk envelopes muscles of steel. At the present day, the Moorish Almees follow the same system; their dancing consists of a series of harmoniously wanton undulations of the bust, the hips, and the back, with the arms thrown back over the head. The Arabian traditions have been preserved in the national dances, especially those of Andalusia. Although the Spanish male dancers are but mediocre, they have a dashing, bold, and gallant bearing, which I greatly prefer to the equivocal and vapid graces of ours. They are taken up neither by themselves nor the public, and have not a look or a smile for any one but their partner, of whom they appear passionately enamoured, and whom they seem ready to defend against all comers. They possess a ferocious kind of grace, a certain insolently daring demeanour, which is peculiar to them. After wiping off their paint, they would make excellent _banderilleros_, and might spring from the boards of a theatre to the arena of the circus.