rcumstances. The French are
notoriously faulty in over-dressing their characters, and in
making them fine and showy, where their simplicity would be
their greatest ornament. I do not mean a simplicity that should
have any thing mean, low or indifferent in it; but, for example,
in rural characters, the simplicity of nature, if I may use the
expression, in her holy-day-cloaths.

As to the decorations and machines especially, I know of no
place where there is less excuse for their being deficient in
them than in London, where they are too manifestly, to bear any
suspicion of flattery in the attributing it to them, executed to
a perfection that is not known in any other part of Europe. The
quickness with which the shifts and deceptions in the pantomime
entertainments are performed here, have been attempted in many
other parts; but the persons there employed, not having the same
skill and depth in mechanics as the artists here, cannot come up
to them in this point. And it is in this point precisely that a
composer of dances may be furnished with great assistence in the
effects from the theatrical illusion. And in an entertainment,
where by an established tacit agreement between the audience and
performers, there is such a latitude of introducing superhuman
personages, either of the heathen deities, or of fairy-hood,
inchanters, and the like, those transformations and deceptions
of the sight are even in the order of natural consequences, from
the pre-supposed and allowed power of such characters to operate
them. At the same time the rules of probability must even there
be observed. Nor is it amiss to be very sparing and reserved in
the composition of those dances, grounded on the introduction of
purely imaginary beings, such as the allegorical impersonation
of the moral Beings, whether the Virtues or the Vices. Unless
the invention is very interesting indeed, the characters
distinctly marked, and the application very just and obvious;
their effect is rarely answerable to expectation, especially on
the audiences of this country. The taste here for those airy
ideal characters is not very high, and perhaps not the worse for
not being so.

Among the many losses which this art has sustained, one surely,
not the least regrettable, even for our theatres, was that of
the dances in armour, practised by the Greeks, which they used
by way of diversion and of _exercise_ for invigorating their
bodies. Sometimes they had only bucklers