His deeper deeds as yet ye know by name ;
The slaughtered peasant and the ravished dame, 300
The rifled mansion and the foe-reaped field,

Ill suit with souls at home, untaught to yield.
Say with what eye along the distant down
Would flying burghers mark the blazing town?
How view the column of ascending flames

Shake his red shadow o'er the startled Thames?
Nay, frown not, Albion ! for the torch was thine
That lit such pyres from Tagus to the Rhine:
Now should they burst on thy devoted coast,
Go, ask thy bosom who deserves them most?
The law of Heaven and Earth is life for life,
And she who raised, in vain regrets, the strife."

310

INTRODUCTION TO THE WALTZ.

BYRON spent the autumn of 1812 "by the waters of Cheltenham," and, besides writing to order his Song of Drury Lane (the address spoken at the opening of the theatre, Oct. 10, 1812), he put in hand a Satire on Waltzing. It was published anonymously in the following spring; but, possibly, because it was somewhat coolly received, he told Murray (April 21, 1813) "to contradict the report that he was the author of a certain malicious publication on waltzing." In his memoranda "chiefly with reference to my Byron," Moore notes "Byron's hatred of waltzing," and records a passage of arms between "the lame boy" and Mary Chaworth, which arose from her "dancing with some person who was unknown to her." Then, and always, he must have experienced the bitter sense of exclusion from active amusements; but it is a hasty assumption that Byron only denounced waltzing because he was unable to waltz himself. Το modern sentiment, on the moral side, waltzing is unassailable; but the first impressions of spectators, to whom it was a novelty, were distinctly unfavourable.

In a letter from Germany (May 17, 1799) Coleridge describes a dance round the maypole at Rübeland. "The dances were reels and the waltzes, but chiefly the latter; this dance is in the higher circles sufficiently voluptuous, but here the motions of it were far more faithful interpreters of the passions." A year later, H. C. Robinson, writing from Frankfort in 1800 (Diary and Letters, i. 76), says, "The dancing is unlike anything you ever saw. You must have heard of it under the name of waltzing, that is rolling

and turning, though the rolling is not horizontal but perpendicular. Yet Werther, after describing his first waltz with Charlotte, says, and I say so too, I felt that if I were married my wife should waltz (or roll) with no one but myself.'" Ten years later, Gillray publishes a caricature of the waltz, as a French dance, which he styles, "Le bon Genre.” It is not a pretty picture. By degrees, however, and with some reluctance, society yielded to the fascinations of the stranger. "My cousin Hartington," writes Lady Caroline Lamb, in 1812 (Memoirs of Viscount Melbourne, by W. T. M‘Cullagh Torrens, i. 105), "wanted to have waltzes and quadrilles; and at Devonshire House it could not be allowed, so we had them in the great drawing-room at Whitehall. All the bon ton assembled there continually. There was nothing so fashionable."

"No event," says Thomas Raikes (Personal Reminiscences, p. 284), ever produced so great a sensation in English society as the introduction of the German waltz. . . . Old and young returned to school, and the mornings were now absorbed at home in practising the figures of a French quadrille or whirling a chair round the room to learn the step and measure of the German waltz. The anti-waltzing party took the alarm, cried it down; mothers forbad it, and every ballroom became a scene of feud and contention. The foreigners were not idle in forming their élèves; Baron Tripp, Neumann, St. Aldegonde, etc., persevered in spite of all prejudices which were marshalled against them. It was not, however, till Byron's "malicious publication" had been issued and forgotten that the new dance received full recognition. "When," Raikes concludes, "the Emperor Alexander was seen waltzing round the room at Almack's with his tight uniform and numerous decorations," or [Gronow, Recollections, 1860, pp. 32, 33] "Lord Palmerston might have been seen describing an infinite number of circles with Madame de Lieven," insular prejudices gave way, and waltzing became general.

THE WALTZ:

AN APOSTROPHIC HYMN.

BY HORACE HORNEM, Esq.

Qualis in Eurotæ ripis, aut per juga Cynthi,
Exercet DIANA choros."

VIRGIL. Æn. i. 502.

"Such on Eurotas's banks, or Cynthus's height,
Diana seems and so she charms the sight,
When in the dance the graceful goddess leads
The quire of nymphs, and overtops their heads."
DRYDEN'S Virgil.

NOTE. The title-page of the first edition (4to) of The Waltz bears the imprint: London: Printed by S. Gosnell, Little Queen Street, Holborn. For Sherwood, Neely and Jones, Paternoster Row. 1813. (Price Three Shillings.) Successive Revises had run as follows:

i. London: Printed for John Murray, Albemarle Street, Piccadilly. By S. Gosnell, Little Queen Street. 1813.

ii. Cambridge: Printed by G. Maitland. For John Murray, etc.

iii. Cambridge: Printed by G. Maitland. For Sherwood, Neely and Jones, Paternoster Row. 1813.

For the Bibliography of The Waltz, see vol. vi. of the present issue.