"How you go on!" said Mr. Baxter. "Don't you know that those pantomimes, for the most part, are nothing but a tissue of stale jokes taken at random from the last volume of _Punch_?"
"No matter! The jokes, however stale, strike one as new by dint of a clever arrangement and a judicious intermixture of all the follies of the season. It is not an easy matter, let me tell you, to translate a printed witticism into an intelligible and striking _tableau_. Quick and dreamlike as the scenic changes are, not a single allusion can escape the audience: they are all executed in a lapidary style. Life in London garrets and streets, shops and cellars, shown up in a sort of carnival procession--surely there is a good deal of art in that! Hogarth might have sketched this sort of thing with a drop or so more of gall; but I doubt whether he could have surpassed it in striking truthfulness. Besides I prefer seeing such scenes acted to seeing them engraved. These are the plays to bring out the mechanical excellence of your countrymen. Your young gentleman appears stiff and awkward enough in the drawing-room. But your clown on the stage is the _beau ideal_ of mercurial agility. The fellow has patent steel springs in every one of his joints. Our own misnamed 'English riders' are mere lay-figures if compared to the clowns which overleap one another in your Christmas pantomimes. There is but one dark spot in their representations, namely, the ballet. To see twenty or thirty female Englishmen of full regulation-size dancing a ballet, is an overpowering luxury. To this day I protest that nothing was farther from the thoughts of those worthy virgins than the performance of a dance, but that their elongated legs were so many geometrical instruments moving about with a view to the practical demonstration of the various problems in Euclid. English ladies, as all the world knows, are madly fond of the higher branches of abstract science."