them. Did Mr. Burin—who has the impression
of the Burgomaster Sex, with the mark when the
graver has slipped upon that magistrate's nose
—did he become a frequenter of Mr. Groves's
place of business? Did he purchase the Ostades
in this magnificent collection? Alas, neither of
these harmless lunatics—for no man in his senses
would give three hundred guineas for a print—
went near the place. It is true that to make
up for this deficiency there were other persons
who paid frequent visits to the front parlour
before spoken of. Nothing could exceed the
frequency of Mr. Lounger's visits to this
establishment. This gentleman was in the habit of
dropping in and having a pinch of poor Groves's
snuff, and a dish of chat at all hours. He and
Captain English (of the Militia) would spend
hours in the front parlour, turning over the
prints, and asserting that it was the finest
collection in London. But did this pay? By no
means. The unfortunate Groves was always
behindhand, and was obliged to eke out his
income by all sorts of honourable stratagems,
into which we need not enter.

For this unprosperous gentleman there was
always a cover at his brother-in-law's table, and
it was the joy of the little man to sit there
glowing with pride and satisfaction. He was
generally silent himself, but he listened and
enjoyed the conversation of others amazingly, and
now and then would get a chance, when Greatheart
turned the talk upon engravings and works
of art, with a view to bring him out. The
vendor of uncoveted prints worshipped his rich
brother-in-law for this heavenly mercy, nor was
there so much as a single grain of envy in that
worship. Greatheart had been disinterestedly
kind to him, and I suspect that you will rarely
be disinterestedly kind to anybody without
bringing such person to love and respect you.
The sister of Greatheart's governess is another
constant guest at the good man's table. This
worthy lady, from having been once a tolerably
prosperous miniature-painter, has been obliged
to come down to the colouring of photographs.
She gives all her ladies unexceptionable
complexions, red lips, and languid eyelids with
tremendous lashes, and gets something to do in
this way, none the less that she always sends the
portraits home entirely unlike the originals.
Between this good lady—she is deformed—and
Groves the unprosperous, there is kept up a great
flirtation and habitual interchange of civilities,
enlivened occasionally by arguments on art of a
very brilliant sort.

To give to people whose lives are so blank
and desolate not only a handsome meal, but the
change and—to them—the excitement of a feast,
is to render them a service of a far higher order
than at first sight appears. By such acts you
not only reconcile them to their lot, but you
soften their natures, you make them in turn
more kind and gentle in their thoughts, and
disarm of half its force that temptation to
bitterness and repining, which is one of the most
powerful that comes in a poor man's way.
This, at any rate, is hospitality, and that in
the highest sense of the word. That injunction
by which we are hidden, when we make a feast,
to call in the poor, the maimed, the halt, and the
blind, is (I think) to be taken as in some sort
figurative. At the time when it was given, there
would probably be one or two rich men in a
town or settlement, and a crowd of poor and
destitute. Rich men so situated and surrounded
by the poor should give such banquets in these
days, and in many cases they do so still. But to
most of us, that command applies in a more figurative
sense, and it seems to me that in Greatheart's
case it is entirely carried out according to
the spirit, if not the letter of the injunction. And
in this, as in all other matters, the right thing
answers. Greatheart is spared a hundred
mortifications which more ambitious and less
hospitable hosts come in for. He does not find
his lion engaged on the particular day when he
wants to feed him, or indisposed at the last
moment and unable to attend, or sulky and
unwilling to roar. He does not feel that the eye
of Gobble, who has a cordon bleu, is upon his
salmi, and that in that eye is contempt. He
has about him guests who neither laugh at him
nor are jealous of him, and it may possibly
happen that one day—we will not say when—he
will come to know that in opening his house to
such persons as we have spoken of above, he has
done a better action than he ever imagined, and,
looking for no such honour, anticipating no such
reward, has entertained an angel unawares at
his table.

                  THE BALLET.

AFTER a long and distinguished life, the ballet
has died among us and gone to its grave,
unhonoured even by a slight obituary notice.
Once as much sought for in London as even that
illustrious Italian guest the opera herself, ballet
is dead and gone. Her revengeful ghost usually
haunts some scene of every grand opera, or
revisits the glimpses of the footlights where
burlesque or pantomime usurps her inheritance.
But though her ghost walks, she is dead; dead
past all galvanizing into life again by the enterprise
of opera directors. This was evident during
the last opera season. And now, is not a sketch
of her life due from the journalist to her ancient
lineage and past distinction?

Ballet is descended, as her name shows, from
those bands of worshippers who were said in the
days of the Christian fathers "ballare et cantare,"
to sing as they swayed to and fro in dance
before their heathen idols. The word ballare,
which meant a measured swaying now to one
side and now to the other, belonged to mediæval
Latin, was adopted out of Greek, and was used
chiefly by the Christian fathers of the Church
to represent what they called the diabolical
dance movement of Pagan rites. The word was
taken purely into old French romance: as in the
romance of Robert le Diable we read of one who
now sings, now leaps, and sways to and fro, as
one who "puis chante, et puis espringe et bale."