onstitutive parts. Thus it
will be more or less perfect, according as its exposition shall
be more or less clear, its plot more or less ingenious, its
unravelment more or less striking.

But this division is not the only one that should be known and
practised. A dramatic work is commonly composed of five or fewer
acts; and an act is composed of scenes in dialogue or soliloquy.
Now every act, every scene, should have, subordinately, its
exposition, its plot, and its unravelment, just as the total of
the piece has, of which they are the parts.

So ought, also every representation in dancing to have those
three parts, which constitute every thing that is action.
Without their union, there is no action that is perfect: a fault
in one of those parts will have a bad effect on the others; the
chain is broke; the picture, whatever beauty it may have in
other respects, is without any theatrical merit.

Besides these general laws of the theatre, which are in common
to those compositions of dances, that are to be executed on it,
they are subjected to other particular rules, which are derived
from the primitive principles of the art.

As the art of dancing essentially consists in painting by
gestures and attitudes, there is nothing of what would be
rejected by a painter of good taste, that the dancer can admit;
and, consequentially, every thing that such a painter would
chuse, ought to be laid hold of, distributed, and properly
placed in a dance of action.

Here, on this point, recurs that never too often repeated rule,
as infallible as it is plain: _let nature, in every thing, be
the guide of art; and let art, in every thing, aim at imitating
nature_: a rule this, than which there is not one more trite,
more hackneyed in the theory, nor less regarded in the practice.

Nature then being always Nature, always invariable in her
operations and productions; there is no false conclusion, nor
straining inferences, in avering, that the art of dancing could
not but be a great gainer by a revival of the taste of the
antients for the pantomime branch; which, upon the theatre,
converted a transient flashy amusement of the eye, into a
rational or sensible entertainment, and made of dancers, who are
otherwise, a mere mechanical composition of feet, legs, and
arms, without spirit or meaning, artists formed to paint with
the most pathetic expression, the most striking situations of
human nature: I am not afraid of using here the term of