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Updated: May 11, 2025
And if you wish for the moral of the whole affair, here it is from the vulgar nursery-maids, with their broad sense and bad English, and the good or bad French of the governess, to the elegant inuendo of the drawing-room, all is working to the same effect: dancing-masters, music-masters, and all the tribe, what is it all for, but to prepare young ladies for the grand event; and to raise in them, besides the natural, a factitious, an abstract idea of good in being married!
I think I might do without a governess now don't you, after having had a proposal from a General?" "Your mamma thinks she perfects your manners, Miss." "All nonsense! I never have any grace or manner when she is in sight. Minny, the truth is, I am prettier and more graceful when I am right here with you, than I would be with all the French dancing-masters and ornamental governesses in the world."
The deceased King, educated in a brilliant Court, where rule and grandeur were kept up with much distinction, and where continual intercourse with ladies, the Queen-mother, and others of the Court, had early fashioned and emboldened him, had relished and excelled in these sorts of fetes and amusements, amid a crowd of young people of both sexes, who all rightfully bore the names of nobility, and amongst whom scarcely any of humble birth were mixed, for we cannot call thus some three or four of coarser stuff, who were admitted simply for the purpose of adding strength and beauty to the ballet, by the grace of their faces and the elegance of their movements, with a few dancing-masters to regulate and give the tone to the whole.
The lower orders are ignorant, from want of means of instruction; the higher, from indolence and perpetually increasing incapacity. It is besides not a little curious that, even in the bygone days of ceremonious manners, the higher classes, by whom they were practiced, were uniformly taught by those illiterate persons of the lower classes who almost alone practice the art of dancing-masters.
Parlor-men, dancing-masters, the graduates of the Albe Bellgarde, may shrug their laced shoulders at the boisterousness of Allen in England. True, he stood upon no punctilios with his jailers; for where modest gentlemanhood is all on one side, it is a losing affair; as if my Lord Chesterfield should take off his hat, and smile, and bow, to a mad bull, in hopes of a reciprocation of politeness.
This wholesale and indiscriminate denunciation grew out of the utter dissoluteness of those ancient plays. So great at one time was the offence to all decency, that the Roman Senate decreed the expulsion of all dancers and dancing-masters from Rome. Yet we are not to discuss the customs of that day, but the customs of the present. We cannot let the fathers decide the question for us.
Few indeed among even the very lowest of the most impoverished class have grown into youth without obtaining some lessons in dancing from the travelling dancing-masters of their district; and certainly, in the way they use it, many would be disposed to grant a dispensation to the young peasant, which they would withhold from the young peer.
He took a random turn through the room; then he came back and planted himself wrathfully before her. "Can't you see the man's doing his best to make a fool of you?" She kept her amused gaze on him. "Does it strike you that it's such an awfully easy thing to do?" The edges of his ears were purple. "I sometimes think it's easier for these damned little dancing-masters than for one of us."
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