g about
life, sways over to one principle or the other, and laughs with the
reverence for right and the love of truth in his heart, or laughs at these
from the other side. Didn't I tell you that dancing was a serious business
to Harlequin? I have read two or three of Congreve's plays over before
speaking of him; and my feelings were rather like those, which I daresay
most of us here have had, at Pompeii, looking at Sallust's house and the
relics of an orgy, a dried wine-jar or two, a charred supper-table, the
breast of a dancing girl pressed against the ashes, the laughing skull of
a jester, a perfect stillness round about, as the cicerone twangs his
moral, and the blue sky shines calmly over the ruin. The Congreve muse is
dead, and her song choked in Time's ashes. We gaze at the skeleton, and
wonder at the life which once revelled in its mad veins. We take the skull
up, and muse over the frolic and daring, the wit, scorn, passion, hope,
desire, with which that empty bowl once fermented. We think of the glances
that allured, the tears that melted, of the bright eyes that shone in
those vacant sockets; and of lips whispering love, and cheeks dimpling
with smiles, that once covered yon ghastly yellow framework. They used to
call those teeth pearls once. See! there's the cup she drank from, the
gold chain she wore on her neck, the vase which held the rouge for her
cheeks, her looking-glass, and the harp she used to dance to. Instead of a
feast we find a gravestone, and in place of a mistress, a few bones!

Reading in these plays now, is like shutting your ears and looking at
people dancing. What does it mean? the measures, the grimaces, the bowing,
shuffling and retreating, the _cavalier seul_ advancing upon those
ladies--those ladies and men twirling round at the end in a mad galop,
after which everybody bows and the quaint rite is celebrated. Without the
music we can't understand that comic dance of the last century--its strange
gravity and gaiety, its decorum or its indecorum. It has a jargon of its
own quite unlike life; a sort of moral of its own quite unlike life too.
I'm afraid it's a heathen mystery, symbolizing a Pagan doctrine;
protesting, as the Pompeians very likely were, assembled at their theatre
and laughing at their games--as Sallust and his friends, and their
mistresses protested--crowned with flowers, with cups in their hands,
against the new, hard, ascetic, pleasure-hating doctrine, whose gaunt
disciples,