Is this dancing? Shades of the filial and paternal Vestris! can
this be a specimen of the art which gives elasticity to the most inert
confirmation, which sets the blood glowing with a warm and genial flow,
and makes beauty float before our ravished senses, stealing our
admiration by the gracefulness of each new motion, till at last our
souls thrill to each warning movement, and dissolve into ecstasy and
love?
People seem even to labour to be awkward. One would think a gentleman
might shake hands with a familiar friend without any symptoms of
cubbishness. Not at all. The hand is jerked out by the one with the
velocity of a rocket, and comes so unexpectedly to the length of its
tether, that it nearly dislocates the shoulder bone. There it stands
swaying and clutching at the wind, at the full extent of the arm, while
the other is half poked out, and half drawn in, as if rheumatism
detained the upper moiety and only below the elbow were at liberty to
move. After you have shaken the hand, (but for what reason you squeeze
it, as if it were a sponge, I can by no means imagine,) can you not
withdraw it to your side, and keep it in the station where nature and
comfort alike tell you it ought to be? Do you think your breeches'
pocket the most proper place to push your daddle into? Do you put it
there to guard the solitary half-crown from the rapacity of your friend;
or do you put it across your breast in case of an unexpected winder from
your apparently peaceable acquaintance on the opposite side?
Is it not quite absurd that a man can't even take a glass of wine
without an appearance of infinite difficulty and pain? Eating an egg at
breakfast, we allow, is a difficult operation, but surely a glass of
wine after dinner should be as easy as it is undoubtedly agreeable.
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