Audience response was divided – some people loved the beauty of spectacle and some people were offended by it. Mark Twain was in the former camp: "Beautiful bare-legged girls … nothing but a wilderness of girls – stacked up, pile on pile, away aloft to the dome of the theatre, diminishing in size and clothing, till the last row, mere children, dangle high up from invisible ropes, arrayed only in camisa. The whole tableau resplendent with columns, scrolls, and a vast ornamental work, wrought in gold, silver, and brilliant colors – all lit up with gorgeous theatrical fires, and witnessed through a great gauzy curtain that counterfeits a soft silver mist! It is the wonders of the Arabian Nights realized. Charles Dickens had an opposite reaction: "is the most preposterous peg to hang ballets on that was ever seen. The people who act in it have not the slightest idea of what it is about". Both awe and outrage fueled the show's increasing popularity until "nobody could hold his own in conversation unless he had seen it".