chra dies nota
Neu promtae modus amphorae
Neu morem in Salium sit requies pedum etc.

Let not the day forego its mark
Nor lack the wine jug's honest bark
Like Salian priests we'll toss our toes--
Choose partners for the dance--here goes!

It has been hastily inferred that, in the time of Cicero, dancing was
not held in good repute among the Romans, but I prefer to consider his
ungracious dictum (in _De Ami citia_, I think,) "_Nemo sobrius
saltat_"--no sober man dances--as merely the spiteful and envious fling
of a man who could not himself dance, and am disposed to congratulate
the golden youth of the Eternal City on the absence of the solemn
consequential and egotistic orator from their festivals and merry
makings whence his shining talents would have been so many several
justifications for his forcible extrusion. No doubt his eminence
procured him many invitations to balls of the period, and some of these
he probably felt constrained to accept, but it is highly unlikely that
he was often solicited to dance, he probably wiled away the tedious
hours of inaction by instructing the fibrous virgins and gouty bucks in
the principles of juris prudence. Cicero as a wall flower is an
interesting object, and, turning to another branch of our subject, in
this picturesque attitude we leave him. Left talking.

VI

CAIRO REVISITED

Having glanced, briefly, and as through a glass darkly, at the dance as
it existed in the earliest times of which we have knowledge in the
country whence, through devious and partly obliterated channels, we
derived much of our civilization, let us hastily survey some of its
modern methods in the same region--supplying thereby some small means of
comparison to the reader who may care to note the changes undergone and
the features preserved.

We find the most notable, if not the only, purely Egyptian dancer of our
time in the _Alme_ or _Ghowazee_. The former name is derived from the
original calling of this class--that of reciting poetry to the inmates
of the harem, the latter they acquired by dancing at the festivals of
the Ghors, or Memlooks. Reasonably modest at first, the dancing of the
Alme became, in the course of time, so conspicuously indelicate that
great numbers of the softer sex persuaded themselves to its acquirement
and practice, and a certain viceregal Prude once contracted the powers
of the whole Cairo contingent of Awalim into the pent up Utica of th