The plea of confession and avoidance which is here set up for Punch and Judy is much the same as that set up by Charles Lamb for the frolicsome Restoration comedies. Lamb admitted that they were degradingly immoral--if you took them seriously and accepted them as pictures of life. But he insisted that they were not really amenable to this moral standard, since they were plainly impossible in any world known to man. Macaulay had no difficulty in showing that Lamb was judging others by his clever and sophisticated self. To Lamb the creatures of Wycherley and Congreve might reveal manners and customs which removed them from the sphere of recognizable humanity; but the majority of his fellow-spectators were not so nimble-witted; they saw characters on the stage personated by living performers, and they beheld these characters shamelessly doing shameful things. Because the persons in the play were represented by actual human beings they seemed indisputably human; and their deeds could not be considered as outside morality. Yet the plea made by Lamb for the Restoration comedies has a certain validity when it is put forward in behalf of Mr. Punch. He is not personated by an actual human being; and even the least sophisticated of juvenile spectators does not accept him as a fellow-creature strictly amenable to the human code. II Historians of the Greek drama have often commented on the fact that the Athenian actors wore towering masks, and that thereby they were deprived of all facial expression. In our snug modern theaters, with their well-lighted stages, we follow with our eyes the shifting emotions as these chase each other across the faces of the actors; and this is one of our keenest pleasures in the playhouse. In the huge theater of Dionysius at Athens, with its ten or twenty thousand spectators, seated tier on tier, along the curving hillside of the Acropolis, the actor was too far removed from most of the playgoers for any play of feature to be visible; and critics have commiserated the Attic dramatists on their deprivation of this element of potent appeal. Yet the question arises whether the Greek playwrights were really the losers by this immobility of the actors' faces; and we may be allowed to doubt that they were when we recall the fact that the faces of Mr. Punch and of Mrs. Judy, of the policeman and of the hangman, are also fixed once for all. The expression that Mr. Punch wears when he is fondling the baby is, perforce, the same which illuminates his face when he is engaged in joyful combat with the devil, a foeman worthy of his stick. Here the imagination of the spectator comes to the rescue. The wooden head of Mr. Punch is unchanging, no doubt; but those who gaze entranced upon his marvelous doings never miss the play of feature which they would expect if they were part of the audience in a playhouse for grown-ups. Quite possibly the Athenian spectators did not mind the immobility of the