Fre-Bailivay Life in London. 163 



noble quartette in the " Don ; " and reminiscences of the 

 great singers come back to the mind ; and the figures of the 

 dancers, Taglioni, Elsler, Cerito, Carlotta Grisi, and Lucille 

 Grahn, not forgetting Perot and St, Leon, flit across the 

 stage. People should have seen the old ojDera ballet of the 

 past to understand what ballet dancing was when the 

 danseuses had to tell a story in dumb show. When the old 

 basket-maker, who drank on the sly from a bottle concealed 

 under his chair, was found sitting outside his trellis-work 

 cottage at early morning, scolded in good-humoured dumb 

 show by his old wife, who was preparing an al fresco break- 

 fast of wooden loaves and indiarubber grapes, and paper 

 apples, and the audience saw impossible peasants, male and 

 female, coming down an impossible mountain, the males 

 with gold reaping-hooks, and atcired in striped stockings 

 and the girls with striped stockings too, and carrying 

 bouquets of paper and muslin flowers ; everybody knew 

 what would happen. The villagers would all come round 

 the old lady and shake hands, whilst the old gentleman had 

 another pull at the bottle, and would point to a lattice- 

 window with smiling expression, whilst the men clinked 

 their reaping-hooks and drank bumpers of nothing out of 

 gold cups, filled from a bottle the size of an imperial pint ; 

 and the girls danced for glee, and in dumb show offered 

 their tribute of flowers, whereon the old woman would enter 

 the cottage, obviously for the purpose of calling her 

 daughter — for of course nobody else could be upstaii's. And 

 when the villagers had danced themselves out, and retired 

 to rest on banks and seats, the daughter would come to 

 family prayers in the way that is common to the beauties of 

 Spain or Ttaly ; in fact, the reigning favourite woidd reach 

 the centre of the stage with two or three bounds, and turn 

 a pirouette, and drop into a curtsey to the crash of the 

 orchestra, and would receive an ovation which an emperor 

 M— 2 



