certain external images with the fashionable types of greatness they admire. The philosophic young coxcomb would be willing to kick up his heels at home, or to skip through the Virginia Reel with his sisters and cousins. Why not, then, in public? He fears to be thought foolish. The coxcomb in question is fond enough of applause, and especially of the applause of ladies. If they told him that he danced well, he would soon discover that he liked dancing. It is the impression he makes upon others, then, of which he is thinking. This last is always an important consideration, but not at all an heroic one. Let not the philosopher ascribe the very commonplace fear of ridicule to a grand and indefinite sense of his own superior unfitness for the frivolous amusement.
Omne ignotum pro mirifico, says the proverb. I should have been taught to dance in order to learn that dancing is no very wonderful thing. A man who could put his arm round the waist of a pretty woman, and calmly trust himself with the guidance of his floating argosy of lace and tarletan about a ball-room, was formerly to me like a being from another sphere. I could not understand how that man felt. His ego was an exalted mystery. A few steps at Brookes's academy would have taught me that this man was but mortal, and might have cured me of my depressing sense of inferiority.
I once did attend the dancing-school of a little village in Western New York. This village was the seat of a very radical water-cure, in the chapel of which there was a service on Sundays and a dance on Tuesday evenings. The ladies were all in Bloomer costume, and as the institution was radical socially as well as in religion and politics, the cooks, laundreses and chambermaids were always asked to the balls. These were, in fact, the only healthy people present. Your vis-à-vis was usually a lady with an affection of the neck or a gentleman with a wet towel round his forehead. One gentleman, I remember, with a towel about his head and a neck awry, had a chair set for him which he occupied while the side couples were dancing: when the time came he sprang up with great alacrity, gallantly and playfully flung out his right foot, and walked through the step in the most punctilious manner.
One's imagination was not fascinated by the felicity of whirling round the room one of these invalids in short clothes and trousers. Still, I did go to the village dancing-school with the intention of learning to waltz. But I found it was only the little girls who were pupils: their sisters merely came to look on and chat. I did not care to enact the directions of the master before all the smiling young society of Bunbury. The only pupil of riper age I ever saw at the school was Miss Carker, the lady doctress from the water-cure, who sometimes rode her horse man-fashion through the streets of the village. She was dressed at the time almost like a man, and her hair was parted on the side. She presented herself as a scholar, and the professor, who had never seen her before, was sorely puzzled where to put her. He did not like to ask her. There was a long continuous row of children standing at the time, the upper half of which were girls and the lower half boys. The professor wittily extricated himself by placing her just in the middle and letting her decide for herself.
In London I found it quite necessary that I should put myself under the care of some instructor, and I was commended to the academy of Mrs. Watson in Tavistock Square. Tavistock Square, the reader will remember, is situate in the dim regions of Bloomsbury, once an aristocratic quarter, but now quite given up to lodging-houses and the private dwellings of attorneys and merchants. Here lives on the first floor an economical widow, who supports a son at the university; a Spanish conspirator, Communist or exile of the Thiers government occupies the third; an American Senator, even, who is green or unambitious, may find his way with his family into the first. Upon the whole, it is a gloomy neighborhood. Just round the corner is Russell Square, the famous
