The school, the style, and language of M. Taglioni père was quite different; it demanded a graceful facility of motion, lightness, especially elevation, du ballon; but it did not permit to his daughter a gesture or an attitude which betrayed an absence of decency or shame. He used to say to her, "Women and young girls must see you without blushing; let your dance be austere while it is tasteful and replete with delicacy."
Vestris wished liis pupils to dance as at Athens, like bacchantes; M. Taglioni insisted upon a simplicity in dancing; which was almost mystical and religious. The one taught Pagan dancing; it might be said that the other preferred Catholic dancing. Mademoiselle Taglioni danced differently and better than any one had ever danced before her. "Her name," says the learned director and enthusiastic admirer, "represents a whole school of dancing, and will live in the annals of the art Known to the ancients, and which modifies itself according to the laws, manners, and religion!" Long may that school live, is all we can add; it teaches that grace is not essentially licentious, nor to be charming does it require to be frivolous.
DE QUINCEY'S "MISCELLANIES."[1]
This, the third volume of Mr. de Quincey's "Selections"—each volume, however, being complete in itself (albeit we understand not their taste who would be satisfied with the single-blessedness of such completeness)—
—But we must draw breath after that parenthesis, and begin again. This, then, being volume the third of "Selections, Grave and Gay," is admirably adapted, at once by the variety and the unity of its contents, to the study of those who may be, as yet, slenderly conversant, or even quite unacquainted, with the genius of the illimitable author. It forms a kind of epitomised sample of his discursive powers—a "cunningly-devised" trysting-place of his most salient characteristics. Grave and Gay still weave the warp and weave the woof—still, as in this vari-coloured life, cross, and intertwine, and relieve one the other—meeting us, like the being "beautiful and bright" in Coleridge's romaunt,
sometimes from the darksome shade,
And sometimes starting up at once
In green and sunny glade.
The author's grandeur of speculative thought, wandering at its own high will through eternity of time, and infinitude of space; his pathos, deeper than ever plummet sounded, deeper than (too deep for) tears; his scholarship, mastered with so much labour, but wielded with such sprightly ease; his narrative art (in his hands really an art), in which every paragraph is so matterful and every epithet so telling; his stores of illustrations, culled from "a' the airts," and ingeniously introduced in all sorts of places; his pensive humour, now dry, now unctuous, alternating and
- ↑ Miscellanies: Chiefly Narrative. By Thomas de Quincey. London: Groombridge. 1854. (Forming the third volume of De Quincey's "Selections, Grave and Gay.")
