Dancing is styled the Terpsichorean Art in honour of Terpsichore, the daughter of Jupiter and Mnemosyne, whom the ancients regarded as its inventress. The Morris Dance, from which our “Jack in the Green” and his fellow May-day revellers trace their origin, was the military dance of the Moors, or Moriscoes, introduced into this country by John of Gaunt on his return from Spain in the reign of Edward III. Five men and a boy took part in it, and from the fact of the boy wearing an ill-fitting helmet called a morione, he received the name of “Mad Morion,” which was subsequently corrupted into Maid Marian. The Saraband was invented by Zarabanda, a famous dancer of Seville in the sixteenth century. The Gavotte arose among the Gavots, a people who inhabited the department of the Upper Alps and the province of Dauphiny, in France. Quadrille is the literal French for “a little square,” so called from the position taken up by the dancers; while the Lancers derived their name from a company of Lancers who originally improvised this variation of the Quadrille for their own amusement while seated in their saddles. The Polka, of Polish origin, is so designated on account of the Bohemian word pulka, a half, in allusion to the half step occurring in it; the Schottische is a variation of the Polka; the Mazourka is the national dance of Poland—all of which, with the addition of the Redowa, are native terms. The Waltz is a contraction of the German Waltzer, derived from the verb waltzen, to roll, to revolve, alluding to the revolutions made by the pairs of dancers placed vis-À-vis. The Country Dance, so far from being a peasants’ dance, is nothing more than a corruption of the French contre-danse, signifying that the parties place themselves opposite to each other during the dance. Strictly speaking, the Contre-danse and the Quadrille are one and the same. The Roger de Coverley derived its name from the great-grandfather of Roger de Coverley, or rather, to be precise, of Roger of Cowley, near Oxford, who invented it. The Minuet (Latin minutus, small) is so called wholly on account of the short steps peculiar to this dance. The Tarantella was invented in Italy out of the supposition that the profuse perspiration which it induced was a certain cure for the poisonous bite of the Tarantula Spider, named after the city of Taranto, where its baneful presence was first manifested. Cinderella Dances are those which terminate before midnight, in allusion to Cinderella of nursery renown.

The origin of the word Ball, in its application to a dancing-party, is somewhat singular. Centuries ago there was in vogue on the Continent a three-fold game, in which the players danced to the sound of their own voices while they threw to one another a ball. In all probability this arose out of the curious “Ball-Play in Church” by the Neapolitans during the Saturnalia, or “Feast of Fools,” corresponding to our Easter-tide. There is even now a statute in existence which regulated the size and character of the ball to be used on such occasions. In opening the ceremony, the Dean took the ball in his left hand, and commenced an antiphon, which the organ took up; whereupon he tossed the ball to first one and then another of the choir-boys, as they joined hands, sang, and danced around him. When, therefore, the three-fold game alluded to above divided and its three sets of dancers became independent of each other, the dance itself took the name of the article that was, as if by common consent, discarded—to wit, the ball; and the song was styled the Ballata, or, according to the modern English, a Ballad indicative of a dancing-song; while the verb ballare, to dance, gave existence to the French Ballet, signifying a dance tune. Apropos of the Ballet, the term CoryphÉe, as applied to a ballet-dancer, traces its origin from the Greek coryphoeus, the designation of one who danced to the lute in the theatres of the ancients. En passant, the famous war dance of the Greeks, executed in very quick time and known as the Phyrric Dance, was so denominated after Pyrrichos, a celebrated Dorian flautist.

The Hornpipe is an inversion of pib-gorn, the name of the old Welsh instrument consisting of a pib, or pipe, with a gorn, or horn, at each end, to which this dance was originally stepped; the Reel has reference to the whirling evolutions performed by the dancer, as of winding cotton on a reel; whereas the Jig comes from the French gigue, a lively dance, and gige, a stringed instrument, the usual accompaniment to this rough-and-ready style of pedal exhilaration. The term Breakdown is an Americanism, denoting the last boisterous dance before the breaking up of a dancing-party towards early morning. Appropriately enough, such a dance invariably constitutes the final item of a negro-minstrel entertainment.