range mad
vortexes, and then suddenly fixing themselves motionless, each
upon her left or right great-toe, with the other leg stretched
out at an angle of ninety degrees;--as if you had suddenly
pricked into the floor, by one of their points, a pair, or
rather a multitudinous cohort, of mad restlessly jumping and
clipping scissors, and so bidden them rest, with opened blades,
and stand still, in the Devil's name! A truly notable motion;
marvellous, almost miraculous, were not the people there so
used to it. Motion peculiar to the Opera; perhaps the ugliest,
and surely one of the most difficult, ever taught a female
creature in this world. Nature abhors it; but Art does at least
admit it to border on the impossible. One little Cerito, or
Taglioni the Second, that night when I was there, went bounding
from the floor as if she had been made of Indian-rubber, or
filled with hydrogen gas, and inclined by positive levity to
bolt through the ceiling; perhaps neither Semiramis nor
Catherine the Second had bred herself so carefully. Such
talent, and such martyrdom of training, gathered from the four
winds, was now here, to do its feat, and be paid for it.
Regardless of expense, indeed! The purse of Fortunatus seemed
to have opened itself, and the divine art of Musical Sound and
Rhythmic Motion was welcomed with an explosion of all the
magnificences which the other arts, fine and coarse, could
achieve. For you are to think of some Rossini or Bellini in the
rear of it, too; to say nothing of the Stanfields, and hosts of
scene-painters, machinists, engineers, enterprisers--fit to
have taken Gibraltar, written the History of England, or
reduced Ireland into Industrial Regiments, had they so set
their minds to it!

"Alas, and of all these notable or noticeable human talents,
and excellent perseverances and energies, backed by mountains
of wealth, and led by the divine art of Music and Rhythm
vouchsafed by Heaven to them and us, what was to be the issue
here this evening? An hour's amusement, not amusing either,
but wearisome and dreary, to a high-dizened select populace of
male and female persons, who seemed to me not worth much
amusing! Could any one have pealed into their hearts once, one
true thought, and glimse of Self-vision: 'High-dizened