Consider, again, some of the living Englishmen we have mentioned. Has Mr. Lewis Morris ever come near the melody of Mr. George Meredith's "Love in the Valley," or the fire and speed of his Nuptials of Attila"? Has he touched the dramatic power of Sir Alfred Lyall's "Old Pindaree, or the grace of Lord Lytton's "Transformations"? Can he match the workmanship of Mr. Andrew Laug's ballades? Or can he sound elemental human feeling with Mrs. Woods? To every one of these questions our own answer is a firm negative. We will do honor to the best of our power to all excellence, greater and lesser, according to its kind. But we will not honor pretentious and factitious mediocrity; and that is all we can find in Mr. Lewis Morris at his best.

Another living poet who is believed to have a certain following, and to call no living man his master, is Mr. Alfred Austin. We must be excused from discussing Mr. Alfred Austin's claims at any great length. His principles consist in repudiating the whole history of English poetry since Byron, and his practice in imitating Byron, by no means to the ex clusion of his faults, with considerable facility and creditable fidelity. One stanza from "The Human Tragedy" will serve as well as another. The subject is the defeat of the Garibaldians by the fire of the French chassepots at Mentana.

"And ever as in scattered rout they fled, Back o'er the ground they late as victors trod,

The swift-pursuing steel hissed overhead, And many a lip kissed the ensanguined sod,

And ah! fall many a dying prayer was said,

As took the soul its farewell of the clod, And deaf though heaven seemed grown to cries and plaints,

Wild vows were breathed to long-forgotten saints."

sound with calling things by their right naines. Then hissed' is as bad a word as can be to describe the sound of bullets in the air, and so long as bullets fly, hissing or otherwise, overhead, they do not produce much effect. And, when a man falls on his face, which is not always, his lip is not the feature most likely to touch the ground. But Byron is full of faults as bad as these, and yet lives? Very true. We might say that Byron's immense Continental reputation was partly due to Continental readers not perceiving faults of this kind. But it is enough to say that Mr. Alfred Austin is not Byron. He has also essayed dramatic and lyric verse, the former with rather less plausibility than the narrative form, the latter sometimes better and sometimes worse. We are willing to admit that he has never written, or could write, such bad verses as the worst of Mr. Lewis Morris's. Indeed, if we had to choose between the two, we would rather take Mr. Alfred Austin for a Laureate than Mr. Lewis Morris. For, although we do not think Mr. Alfred Austin's purpose a very wise one, or his power quite competent to the execution, the purpose is definite and sinccre. The so-called classical architecture of the eighteenth century is an unsatisfactory thing; but, if we had the building of a mansion or a college, we should prefer an honest following of the eighteenth-century ideas, by an architect who had a congruous design of some sort, to a sham Gothic made up of mere stonemason's imitation of medieval details. Mr. Alfred Austin does write like some sort of a man and not like an overgrown schoolboy. Also Mr. Alfred Austin does not, in his later works, reprint the opinions of the press, or cite eminent persons to declare that they found his poenis very interesting.

Fortunately the lovers of English poetry are not yet driven to choose between Mr. Alfred Austin and Mr. Lewis Morris. Next to Lord Tennyson, the primacy belongs to Mr. Swinburne. And on Mr. Swinburne the choice ought of right to fall when the time comes for the Crown to make the decision which ought to be the visible symbol of the best English judgment in matters of poetry. If it may not be so, for any personal or other reason, then let the name and office of Laureate be done away rather than sink below the level at which we and our fathers have

seen them maintained. Meanwhile our readers, whether they agree with our criticisms or not, will all join in repeating our wish that we may not yet have heard the last of the present Laureate's voice, the master's voice which so lately, in the lines "To Virgil," added a new and stately measure to English verse. *

As this paper is unsigned, the author thinks it right to say that he is not a poet or a professional critic, and that he has no motive whatever of private favor or affection, for good or for ill, toward any of the writers whose work has been principally discussed.-Fortnightly Re

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WHAT induced man to dance in the first instance? When the woods were his habitation, and when dancing at the very best must have been an uncomfortable and awkward performance, what cause was sufficiently powerful to propel him to gyrations? Some say that love was the origin of dancing, and that as birds whistle, peacocks spread their tails, and turkeys strut, to show their respect for the fair, so man took to capering and gyrating to evince his pleasure at the sight of her, in the days before manners less unsophisticated and a sad experience taught him to restrain his buoyancy within reasonable bounds. There are or were specimens of these love dances" to be found among the Society Islands-Captain Cook describes them to us-but their area seems to be limited to that small territory. The main objection, however, to the above view, is that dances, as we find them in their most primitive forms, are all collective, not individual. The solo-dancer, and even the pairing with special partners, are both quite recent, comparatively speaking. The dances of the most primitive cast are war dances and theatrical dances; such were found in a high state of perfection among the Australians at the time of their discovery, among the North American Indians, and most other kindred peoples.

The war dances have been correctly described by novelists who never saw them. Fancy cannot go far wrong in such a mat

*The Italian form in the last couplet"I salute thee. Mantovano,

I that loved thee since my day began "— has been called a conceit. If it be so, it is exactly analogous to Virgil's own use of Greek names, which he certainly would not have spared in celebrating a Greek poet.

In

ter, and is corroborated by the evidence of travellers. The war dance of the Maories has been characterized by an eyewitness as a universal effort on the part of everybody assembled to make himself look as ugly as possible. The faces of the dancers were contorted, their tongues twisted up into their nostrils, their eyes rolling asunder or contracted into a diabolical squint. The theatrical dances are as widespread as these. Every savage loves to fight; and every savage has also, perhaps, a passion for the drama. The bull dances of the North American Indians, the kangaroo dances of the Australians, the dramatic dances of the Itelmes and the Arreois, are perhaps the best specimens of this form of dancing. the first-named, the point at issue is for one of the dancers to disguise himself as a buffalo, and dance in the centre of crowds of his companions, much in the way of our Jack in the Green. The kangaroo dance leads to more general disguise -most of the dancers assume the figure and hide of the animal whose name the dance bears, and in this guise, like mummers, they carry on their evolutions. use the last word under protest-figures there are none in these primitive dances, steps are limited to a jump on the right foot, followed by one on the left, while the general aspect of the dance is that of a wild confusion which may vary, and, indeed, almost certainly does, from time to time.

We

The earliest description of dancing which we can make anything out of-for vague allusions are particularly useless in the present subject-is the account of the dance on the shield of Achilles. Youths and maidens danced in a ring there, holding one another by the hand. They spun

round and round like a potter's wheelthe effect of this might be represented by loosening the top of a round table, and setting it twirling round. Evidently this primitive dance was nothing more nor less than the " 'jingering' of children at the present day, who keep up the tradition of this most ancient form of dance when they take one another's hands and caper round in a ring. The antiquity of the "jingering" dance must not be limited to the early days of the Greeks. In the time of Achilles it was a dance for kings' daughters to indulge in. But with our Aryan ancestors it constituted one of the ceremonies of religion-thus do things descend from unexpected altitudes, till they find refuge in the nurseries of children: in the Vedic times in India, which constitute the morning twilight of our existence as a race, the priest and people were used to assemble round the altar every morning to perform the accustomed sacrifice to the Dawn. They sang a hymn; and when the first streak of gray illumined the eastern sky, they began the religious dance, which consisted in them all joining hands and dancing in a ring round the altar, first in one direction, then in an other. This form had survived till Homer's time, when it became secularized, and passed from grave-robed priests to youths and maidens.

The "jingering" had now a curious experience in its history. It became the dance of Bacchus, and attained a very unenviable repute as the dithyramb. The Greeks, who were perhaps the greatest dancers that the world has ever seen, soon rose above this most elementary forin of dancing. They learned to divide dances into round and square, the word round being used in the signification already alluded to, and not by any means as equivalent to "round." our Their square dances were military and spectacular; their round dances were the dances of pleasure and of revelry. The distinction is natural; for the former required some art, the latter nothing more than the capacity for motion. As the "round dance, the dithyramb was danced round blazing altars to the sound of drums and cymbals. The tipsy priests, who presided over these rites of Bacchus, staggered sputtering and foaming, gashing them selves occasionally with knives to excite their companion dancers to greater enNEW SERIES.-VOL. LII, No. 1.

thusiasm and frenzy. The square dances of the Greeks were meanwhile proceeding at Sparta and other military centres, while the foreign and wanton dithyramb was utterly ruining the art of motion in less stern and conservative cities. The dances of the Spartans took place in the great square of the town, which was called on that account "the dancing-place," nearly every Dorian city being built in such a form as to have a dancing place in the centre of the surrounding streets and buildings. Youths and men, generally dressed in full armor, moved in regular and rhythmical figures to the music of flutes and lyres, clashing their weapons in time to the music, and occasionally joining in with a hymn or martial song to the melody of the instruments. So eminent was the dance in the social life of the Spartans, that the term "front-rankdancer" was the highest encomium which could be bestowed on a citizen, and had the same impressive signification which

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a man of means" possesses with us at the present day. Any action either of crime, cowardice, shabbiness, or ill behavior, was punished by degradation from the first rank' to the ranks behind, and by the loss of the estimable term which the citizen beforehand bore. Occasionally youths and maidens, or maidens alone, took part in these Spartan dances; but, as a rule, they retained their character almost exclusively as military exercises and preparations for the evolutions of the field. The operations of the Spartans in battle differed in a very inappreciable degree from the orchestric figures which had become familiar to them in the public dances. The prelude to commencing their engagements was, with these greatest warriors of the world, the sacrifice of a victim to the Muses; after which, arrayed in their long scarlet cloaks, and crowned with garlands of flowers, which they each took in turn from the temporarily constructed altar as they passed, they struck up, with loud strong voices, a hymn to Apollo, their feet keeping time with the long and short notes of the music in a manner marvellous to behold." Still singing and carrying on their pompous dance of war, they marched in billows of red and white, the white from the flowers that crowned them, the red from the cloaks that wrapped them, into the midst of the enemy, driving irresistibly through and never being

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known to turn or swerve from the mark assigned them.

The influence of the square military dances of Greece on the round dithyramb was observable in the dances of tragedy. By the time Eschylus and Sophocles were writing, and the great theatre of Bacchus had been built at Athens capable of accommodating thirty thousand spectators, the tipsy dance of the god, which had formerly swept in revelry round blazing altars, was chastened and improved into the sober spectacle of "square" evolutions round the altar by a chorus variously stated at fifty and fifteen. The figures trod by the chorus were so elaborate that chalk lines had to be drawn on the floor of the orchestra to guide the dancers in their evolutions. These lines had the appearance of complex mathematical figures of the very worst type-as if all the propositions of the third and fourth books of Euclid had been suddenly multiplied to tenfold their horrible proportions and cast in confusion on the ground. The study of the chalk angles, squares, circles, and rhomboids which they were to tread, must have been a very serious undertaking for the dancers; yet excessive practice brought their proficiency to such perfection, that, judging from contemporary accounts, a confusion scarcely ever, if at all, occurred.

The dances of the Roman pantomimes differed very considerably from those of Greek tragedy. They were not the intricate, artistic, and plastic representations of moving form which these were, but resembled far more closely the more gorgeous ballets of the present day. The pantomime" itself answered almost exactly to the ballet d'action. The stage was provided with scenery, an orchestra with musicians, while places were apportioned on either side of the stage for singers, who, by the words of their melodies, should elucidate and explain the dumb show of the pantomimists which was going on in the centre of the boards. Troops of female dancers, arrayed in flowing and transparent attire, bands of young boys, premières danseuses and danseurs, who, in sparingness of costume entirely outvied the leading nymphs of the present day

such are the accounts that reach us of the dance in the Roman pantomimes: There was little art apparently, but much display; dancing passed off into a gorgeous

spectacle of dresses, scenery, beautiful poses, and dumb action. Paris and Bathyllus, the two leading dancers of the Imperial times, are celebrated more for their glowing portrayal of human passion in that most fascinating form of dumb motion, than for any mastery over steps and figures, such as constituted the main title to praise among the Greeks. The dances in the circus of Constantinople, at which the Empress Theodora figured in her younger days, playing the part of Leda to the gambols of a swan, which Gibbon very irreverently considers to have been a goose, were, from all accounts, but merely reiterations of the licentious displays in the Roman theatres, though scarcely carried to such extremes owing to the strict Christianity of the citizens.

One or two dances of the Greeks are deserving of mention before passing from this division of the subject:-the flower dance and the ball dance; both unique and both extremely elegant. In the flower dance, the dancers were separated into two lines, in the manner of our country dances; but instead of the figure flowing from the motions of the top and bottom couples, the two lines advanced and retreated from each other, holding flowers in their hands-roses, violets, and occasionally the herb parsley-which they scattered on the ground as they trod, or flung in mimic warfare from side to side. Perhaps the Battle of Flowers at Nice, reduced to artistic form, accompanied by tuneful music and carried on to the lively steps of a dance, would give some idea of the Greek "flower dance," a spectacle at once beautiful and symmetrical."

The ball dance has been immortalized by Homer. Who does not recall the enchanting picture of Nausicaa and her maidens dancing the ball dance and flinging a golden ball from one to the other, when Ulysses landed on the shore of Phæacia? The description of Homer, however, does not give us much insight into the details of the dance, which were as follows:-The leading maiden of the dance faced the rest, at a short distance, holding the ball in her hand. At the side of the dancer sat a musician, who played a melody on a lyre, with which the maidens kept step; so that they were never still throughout the dance, but in constant graceful motion from beginning to end. The leader then threw the ball to one in

the band before her. At short distances the hands only were allowed to be used in catching it, while the arms remained perfectly still. The ball thus received by the girl in the band, was flung back to the Nausicaa of the part, who immediately returned it to another. It was thus plied with dizzy swiftness between them, while meanwhile, like a great wheel whirling, or a company of soldiers wheeling, they conducted not only the steps but the figures of an intricate dance. At longer distances, the arms were allowed to be employed in catching the ball; and the motions of the Dorian girls, when engaged in this part of the ball play, are particularly commended. Their dress reached only to the knee, and their white arms were bare likewise; and they arched their body into a thousand graceful flexions to catch the bouncing ball. When men played the ball dance, it was usual to cast the ball high into the air; and, on its descent, to catch it off the ground, neither of the dancers-for there were generally two only in this game-losing the step of the dance for a moment in making the spring up into the air, but alighting on such a foot and with such a motion as should not ruffle the smoothness of the

The

measure for an instant. The balls were made of scarlet or purple leather, and filled in the inside with flour or feathers, grass or wool, fig seeds or sand. employment of a golden ball was limited to the fancy of poetry, or when the imaginations of the poet were incorporated on the stage; in the play of Nausicaa, Sophocles, who acted the part of the maiden, employed a golden ball when executing the dance.

In the earlier days of the Middle Ages, when our next accounts of the art are forthcoming, we find dancing to have suffered from a lamentable collapse in the interim. The more primitive form of dance -the "jingering'-appears again as the almost universal form employed among the simple people of the time. The name has now changed, and it is called the roundelay. Taking our accounts from the eighth century, we find that the roundel or roundelay was danced by men and women holding one another by the hand, or linked arm-in arm. Standing in a ring in this position, they would dance round and round, first one way and then the other. The dance concluded by each man kissing

his partner, after which he would select another, and submit her to the same ordeal on the termination of the second roundelay.

An extraordinary survival of the ball dance deserves to be chronicled. Every Easter-day, in commemoration of the general joy at the Resurrection, there was a ball dance in the chancel of the mediæval cathedrals, which was conducted as follows: The congregation having gathered as close to the chancel entrance as they could conveniently come, in order to see the sport, the organ struck up a spirited secular melody which was to serve as the tune of the dance. The Dean stood with the ball in his hand, and, gathering his vestments tightly behind him, he threw it to one of the choristers; that chorister flung it to another, and so it was passed all round the choir. Even an archbishop, if he were there, did not disdain to bandy it. Meanwhile, the choir-boys were leaving their places in the stalls, and bounding and leaping all over the chancel, the elder clergy joining in with them and footing it to the sound of the organ. *

From this, and from other similar testimonies, we may gather that dancing was a very widespread practice in the Middle Ages. "Men and women may be seen dancing everywhere," says a contemporary historian. "At every corner they are at it," remarks another. And the story of the Doomed Dancers is but the testimony of tradition to the same fact: "I, Othbert, a sinner," runs the legend, "have lived to tell the tale. It was the vigil of the Blessed Mary, and in a town of Saxony, where was a church of St. Magnus. The priest had just begun the mass; and I, with my comrades, fifteen young men and three young women, were dancing outside the church. We were laughing and screaming so loudly amid our pleasure that the noise we made was distinctly heard inside the building, and interrupted the service of the mass. The priest came out and told us to desist; and when we did not, he prayed God and St. Magnus that we might dance, as our punishment, for a year to come. A youth, whose sister was dancing with us, seized her by the arm to drag her away, but it came off in his hand, and we danced on.

* Rowbotham's History of Music, vol. iii., p. 337.