It has been hastily inferred that, in the time of Cicero, dancing was not held in good repute among the Romans, but I prefer to consider his ungracious dictum (in De Ami citia, I think,) “Nemo sobrius saltat”—­no sober man dances—­as merely the spiteful and envious fling of a man who could not himself dance, and am disposed to congratulate the golden youth of the Eternal City on the absence of the solemn consequential and egotistic orator from their festivals and merry makings whence his shining talents would have been so many several justifications for his forcible extrusion.  No doubt his eminence procured him many invitations to balls of the period, and some of these he probably felt constrained to accept, but it is highly unlikely that he was often solicited to dance, he probably wiled away the tedious hours of inaction by instructing the fibrous virgins and gouty bucks in the principles of juris prudence.  Cicero as a wall flower is an interesting object, and, turning to another branch of our subject, in this picturesque attitude we leave him.  Left talking.

VI

CAIRO REVISITED

Having glanced, briefly, and as through a glass darkly, at the dance as it existed in the earliest times of which we have knowledge in the country whence, through devious and partly obliterated channels, we derived much of our civilization, let us hastily survey some of its modern methods in the same region—­supplying thereby some small means of comparison to the reader who may care to note the changes undergone and the features preserved.

We find the most notable, if not the only, purely Egyptian dancer of our time in the Alme or Ghowazee.  The former name is derived from the original calling of this class—­that of reciting poetry to the inmates of the harem, the latter they acquired by dancing at the festivals of the Ghors, or Memlooks.  Reasonably modest at first, the dancing of the Alme became, in the course of time, so conspicuously indelicate that great numbers of the softer sex persuaded themselves to its acquirement and practice, and a certain viceregal Prude once contracted the powers of the whole Cairo contingent of Awalim into the pent up Utica of the town of Esuch, some five hundred miles removed from the viceregal dissenting eye.  For a brief season the order was enforced, then the sprightly sinners danced out of bounds, and their successors can now be found by the foreign student of Egyptian morals without the fatigue and expense of a long journey up the Nile.