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Rh pleasure-loving Parisians, and when the Austrian Embassy in Paris introduced its famous "déjeuner dansant" in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Waltz was the prime favorite at these gatherings. Its reception by the English public was less cordial when the French dancing-master Cellarius introduced the Waltz into London society in 1812. Caricatures appeared in the papers picturing the sentiments of the ultra-purist section of the community, who had persuaded themselves that the introduction of the Waltz into England was a conclusive step on the national Downward Path. There is still in existence a letter from a shocked parent, who hurried his daughter away from a ball-room where he saw his precious offspring held by a young man in a position that he could not describe better than the "very reverse of back to back."

This first real round dance did not become popular until the Rrussian Emperor Alexander, with Countess Lieven as partner, had danced it in 1813 at Almachs, then the meeting-place of the fashionable world of London.

For a long time, however, the Waltz was a perpetual thorn in the side of the anemic moralist, and even as late as 1870 a pamphlet by John Haven Dexter was issued against it, in which he objected to the lawless arm of the sterner sex