BALLET. The ballet is a more modern entertainment even than the opera, with which it has long been intimately connected. The name seems to have been derived from the Italian ballata, the parent of our own ‘ballad
’; and the earliest ballets (Ballets de Cour), which corresponded closely enough to our English masques, were entertainments not of dancing only, but also of vocal and instrumental music. M. Castil Blaze, in an interesting monograph (‘La Dance,
’ etc.; Paris, Paulin), traces back...
