coloured pasteboard, and were worked with
strings. They originated the toy-shop clowns,
and other paper and string characters which
are twitched into convulsions by the children
of to-day. In Paris, however, a little more
than a century ago, steady men (if steady
men ever existed in Paris) carried them in
their pockets. Sage magistrates pulled them
out during morning visits, and filled up
gaps in conversation by jerking their strings
for recreation. Many epigrams were needed
before this folly was chased away. One of
them may be rendered thus:

A people frivolous and vain,
Pantin chose, their God to be;
The image well their hearts may gain,
Since they are the reality.

The Salle Fourré, established by a puppet-
showman, was taken, a little more than fifty
years ago, by Audinot, an opera singer, who
had quarrelled with his colleagues, and
burlesqued them with a set of puppets, which
became extremely popular. He added to his
performance ballets d'action, a dwarf, and
other odd things; defining, after a way, the
nature of its amusements, by calling his
theatre the Ambigu Comique. That name
the theatre still retains; although Audinot
afterwards substituted children for his
puppets.

Marionnettes in France were, in fact, labouring
at last under a decline. They held their
ground on the Boulevards, where the
metamorphoses of Arlequin and those of
Marlborough (Marlbrook) pleased the people.
Spasmodic efforts at revival need not be
narrated; nor need we tell how puppets
dying, held ground in ghostly form, as
"Ombres Chinoises" moving shadows cast on
an illuminated curtain. Latterly there has
been a faint revival; Punch is still to be seen,
on fête days, in the Champs Elysées.

Travelling home to England, we find the
origin of puppets dating before the Reformation,
and their management originating
exactly in the same manner as that of their
priest-managed brethren in France and Italy
In our country, they have usually gone by the
name of "puppets," which appears first in our
literature (where it is spelt " popets ") in
Chaucer's " Rime of Sir Topas." Puppet
comes from the Latin pupa, a doll. The
ancient fondness for these little actors leaves its
trace in the terms of endearment applied to
children. The Romans fondled their babies to
the exclamation "pupus! " English mothers
soothe them with " poppet,"—the old form
expressive of a pure and simple pleasure. Our
subsequent more humorous and satirical
enjoyment of Marionnettes lives in the more
modern form " puppet," when we apply it to sorne
representatives in Parliament, or other person
who is said to be the mere instrument of
another's will.

At the time of the Elizabethan dramatists,
the name and fame, as such, of puppets was
established. They had also, at that time,
another very common name—" Motions." In
the " Two Gentlemen of Verona," Shakspeare
uses both words in a single line:

"O excellent Motion! exceeding Puppet!"
Beaumont and Fletcher, also, in the
"Pilgrim ":
"Nothing but motion,
A puppet pilgrim."

And Ben Jonson, in the " Silent Woman."
makes Epicene say, " Why, did you think you
had married a statue, or a motion only—one
of the French puppets, with the eyes turned
with a wire? " Another name for these
small characters was " Mammets." The sort
of drama most performed by the puppets, after
they had got out of church, is illustrated by
a showman in Ben Jonson's " Bartholomew
Fair," who says to his friends, " O! the
motions that I, Lanthorn Leatherhead, have
given light to, in my time, since my master
Pod* died! Jerusalem was a stately thing,
and so was Nineveh, and the City of
Norwich; but the Gunpowder Plot, there was
a get-penny! I have presented that to an
eighteen or twenty pence audience nine times
in an afternoon." Other puppets took higher
flights; and "Julius Caesar " and "The Duke
of Guise " were in the repertory of " tragical,
puppet-plays," or, as Dekker says, were
"acted by mammets." The legitimists in
France, thus pinched by wooden rivalry,
went to law; in England they took to scolding.
That was in vain. The motion-men made for
themselves permanent abodes, at Paris Garden,
on Holborn Bridge, in Fleet Street, at Eltham,
at Brentford, and elsewhere; and people came
from distances to see them. Phantaste
declares, in "Cynthia's Revel," that she
would, "as a country gentlewoman, keep a
good house, and come up to town to see the
Motions."

When the Puritans put down the regular
drama, puppets escaped the interdict; and on
the restoration of the legitimists, the old
jealousy of imitation-sticks against real wood
returned with them. In 1675, the two Royal
Companies, then playing together in Dorset
Gardens, petitioned the King to remove the
puppet-show established at that time in their
neighbourhood;—where Cecil Street now
stands. About the period of the Revolution of
1688, Punch entered the country. Mr. Payne
Collier declares his entry to have been
simultaneous with that of William of Orange. The
"amusing vagabond " soon found a biographer
in Addison, at the time when he was fellow
of Magdalen, who celebrated all his deeds and
virtues in a Latin poem.

The glory of puppets is widely diffused
through our English literature. Addison
and Steele wrote much of them. The first

* Captain Pod was one of our first puppet-showmen.