about and received enormous salaries, and their
portraits were all over the town. We have
outgrown this taste, and we have done well.
Not entering into the question of the propriety
or impropriety of the ballet, we may at least say
that it was preposterously ridiculous and often
preposterously ugly. There were tragic situations
too, if you please, in your ballet. It has
been thought rather a difficult thing to swallow
the musical misery of the opera; and some
matter-of-fact persons have been unable to
sympathise with the sorrows of a lady or gentleman
who could sing bravura songs about his or her
injuries and afflictions. What was this, however,
to the dancing miseries of the ballet heroine?
We might put up with horror expressed in a
high note; but in a hop, skip, and a jump, who
could recognise despair? "Yet you were asked
to do this. Contracts of marriage were signed
by maidens pirouetting with very despair, who
were hunted about the stage by bounding elder
brothers of ferocious appearance. The confidante
who sympathised with the maiden, expressed her
emotion by means of a succession of lofty capers;
and the village-girls who espoused the injured
one's cause, gave vent to their indignation by
turning their backs on the frantic victim and
dancing away at the public with might and
main.

And how ugly, for the most part, everything
was that was connected with this ballet. What
hideous dresses were worn. It would be hard to
imagine anything more ungraceful than the short
petticoats sticking out like a pen-wiper. And
what a misapprehension of what is beautiful
and fit, to encourage women in those tours de
force by which the muscles of their legs were
enlarged and their feet swelled to gouty proportions!
The wonderful achievements of the old
ballet were impossible except to performers
gifted with a strength of bone and muscle
altogether incompatible with womanly grace or
beauty. Yet how those connoisseurs of the old
time used to flock to their omnibus-box. How
knowing they thought it to be seen there with
their opera-glasses. What a triumph to get, or to
fancy they got, one of the professional "wreathed
smiles" which it was a point of business to
lavish around. The frequenters of that omnibus-box
belonged for the most part to an age earlier
than that which comes within the province
of a Small-Beer Chronicler. Their wigs, and
their rouge, and their plastered-up crow's-feet,
show no longer. They died even before the
ballet.

It is all up—to use a popular expression—
now, with the ferocious old miller with a
daughter to marry; all up with Lubin, who,
when the miller's back was turned, would skip
on to the stage and solace himself with a pas de
deux in company with his beloved, and which
pas de deux was supposed to be expressive of
eternal constancy. It is all up with the rich
and wicked neighbour whom the miller thought,
and perhaps with reason, a better match, on the
whole, than the sprightly Lubin. It is all up
with the old foster-mother (Madame Copère),
who used to wring her hands and swear that
Pauline should be made happy yet. All up
with the mill and the splashing water, all up
with the happy peasants, and the notary, and
the benevolent priest—for all these things were
parts of the ballet, and the ballet is no more.
Its ghost haunts the stage in feeble entertainments
introduced in the main body of the opera,
but the thing itself is virtually dead, and so we
will bury it in peace without more ado.

OWEN'S MUSEUM.

IT was a national museum was the museum
originated by this great Englishman, and called
(by the nation) after him; free to all comers
and open at all times; so I walked in to learn
a little of what the world was like when life
was young, and to follow in the track of those
fine progressive steps which have led up from
the rude beginnings of all things, to the highest
development yet known to humanity.

I turned first to the geological room, where
the grim old primary rocks of granite, and quartz,
and felspar, and mica, and soft dark-grey slate,
and bright sprinklings of ruby-coloured garnet
like the first drops of blood, stood out as the
bones of the earth, before clothed with flesh or
muscle.

Then came the Silurian or limestone, with fossil
remains of encrinites, those graceful " stone
lilies" which once waved their lovely living
fronds in the warm seas side by side with corals
and sponges and feathery polypes, and molluscs,
soft and flabby, living in their cockle-shaped
shells, and fishes of low organisation, and other
sea things of early date—a stratum, in fact,
due to these molluscs and polypes, who had
left their stone houses in remembrance of
their existence, and in aid of the future,
which they, too, were destined to advance and
inform.

The next series was the coal formation,
with its mighty forests of reeds and pine;
the organic life of the world not yet going
beyond sea things, and a huge fish passing into
the lizard—the first hint of the future
severance of land and water, and an earnest of
the great changes to be soon wrought. And
yet not so soon; for in the next deposits,
the red sandstones, called also the saliferous,
or salt-bearing, we have very few fossils,
and chiefly of the same class as before, but of
higher types and larger size; adding, though,
one important link, the amphibious labyrinthodon,
that huge-snouted toad-like reptile,
the first air-breathing animal as yet born into
time, equally at home in the water among the
fishes, or on the mud with the worms and slimy
things abounding. But if poor in remains of
organic life, how rich that series is in other
things—how full of iron blood, pouring colour
and strength and vigour through the veins of
the earth!—how grand in its magnificent
preparation for the wonders to come!

For now we fall upon the oolite or freestone
layer—that speckled granular stratum,