but it first became an art when Catharine de' Medici brought it to France.
"Drawing-room dances seem to have originated in stage-dancing," writes Sutherland Edward, in The English Illustrated Magazine, June, 1884, "and to have been derived directly from the modified forms of stage-dancing practised in palace or private houses by companies of amateurs."
The artistic progress of ball-room dancing has gone hand in hand with the renaissance of stage-dancing. So we see that the first is only a natural consequence of the latter. The sight of the beauty of motion on the stage has suggested to the spectators an introduction of the same thing into daily life. Perhaps not since the days of Louis Fifteenth of France, and later on at the gay court of unhappy Marie Antoinette, has social dancing reached the height it has at our present day. From the time when the Minuet and the Gavotte reigned supreme in the ball-rooms of the élite until our ultra-modern time, with its Tango and Maxixe, indolent grace or stateliness in dancing has been sleeping in peaceful obscurity. The Polka, the Mazurka, the Schottishe, the Pas-de-quatre, the hideous Turkey Trot and Bunny Hug have held their sway during the entire nineteenth century and a part of the twentieth.
From the time of the perspiring, disordered, ex-
170
