Exercet Diana choros,”
and with a prefatory letter from “Horace Hornem, Esq.,” the professed author. This imaginary personage is a country gentleman of a Midland county, who has married a middle-aged Maid of Honor. During a winter in town with his wife’s relative, the Countess of Waltzaway, Hornem sees his spouse at a ball, waltzing with an hussar, and, after several vain attempts to master the new dance himself, composes the satire in its honor, “with the aid of William Fitzgerald, Esq.—and a few hints from Dr. Busby.” In the poem, however, Byron apparently makes no effort to fit the language or style to this fictitious figure.
Although the waltz, brought originally from Germany, was, in 1812, steadily winning its way to acceptance by the more fashionable element of society, its introduction was still meeting with opposition from many quarters. Byron, as censor of the Italian Opera and of Little’s Poems, was certainly not inconsistent in disapproving of the foreign dance on the ground of its immodesty. Doubtless, too, his own lameness, which prevented him from participating in the amusement, had some influence on his attitude. He had denounced the dance in English Bards in the line,
“Now in loose waltz the thin-clad daughters leap,”
and in Section 25 of The Devil’s Drive, he had made the Devil’s fairest disciples waltzers, and had quoted Satan’s words:
“Should I introduce these revels among my younger devils,
They would all turn perfectly carnal.”
Byron’s declaration that The Waltz is in the style of English Bards is not altogether exact, for though the metre of the two satires is the same and the same machinery of prose notes is used in both poems, the first-named work has a kind of jocularity which distinguishes it from the more severe earlier production. The Waltz, moreover, has some features of the mock-heroic, although the conventional structure of that genre is not made conspicuous. Thus it begins with an apostrophe to “Terpsichore, Muse of the many-twinkling feet,” and later, in true heroic manner, the author exclaims,
“O muse of Motion! say
How first to Albion found thy Waltz her way?”