of body is ever inseparable from the
greatest perfection of beauty, of which its possessor is
susceptible, it very naturally followed, that the good plight to
which exercise brought and preserved the females, gave also to
their shape, that delicacy and suppleness, and to their every
motion, that graceful agility which caracterized the Grecian
beauties, and distinguished them for that nymph-stile of figure,
which we to this day admire in the description of their
historians, of their poets, or in the representations that yet
remain to us in their statues, or other monuments of antiquity.

But omitting to insist on the Spartan austerity, and especially
on their gimnastic training for both sexes, and to take the
milder methods of exercise in use among the Grecians, we find
that the chace, that foot-races, and especially dancing,
principally composed the amusement of the young ladies of that
country; where, in the great days of Greece, no maxim ever more
practically prevailed, than that sloth or inactivity was equally
the parent of diseases of the body, as of vices of the mind.
Agreeable to which idea, one of the greatest physicians now in
Europe, the celebrated Tronchin, while at Paris, vehemently
declaimed against this false delicacy and aversion against
exercise; from which the ladies, especially of the higher rank
of life, derived their bad habits of body, their pale color,
with all the principles of weakness, and of a puny diseased
constitution, which they necessarily intail on their innocent
children. Thence it was that he condemned the using oneself too
much to coaches or chairs, which, he observed, lowers the
spirits, thickens the humors, numbs the nerves, and cramps the
liberty of circulation.

Considering the efficacy of exercise, and that fashion has
abolished or at least confined among a very few, the more robust
methods of amusement, it can hardly not be eligible to cultivate
and encourage an art, so innocent and so agreeable as that of
dancing, and which at once unites in itself the three great
ends, of bodily improvement, of diversion, and of healthy
exercise. As to this last especially, it has this advantage, its
being susceptible at pleasure, of every modification, of being
carried from the gentlest degree of motion, up to that of the
most violent activity. And where riding is prescribed purely for
the sake of the power of the concussion resulting from it, to
prevent or to dissipate obstructions, the s