“With real conservatism,” writes Maindron, “the English have preserved the figure and repertory of Punch almost as it was in the oldest days of Piccini and his predecessors.” And it is thus one might find Punch on the street corner to-day, maltreating his long-suffering wife, teasing the dog, hanging the hangman. Mr. W. H. Pollock tells us of stopping with Robert Louis Stevenson to watch a Punch and Judy show given by a travelling showman in “bastard English and slang of the road.” Stevenson delighted in it, and Mr. Pollock himself exclaimed: “Everybody who loves good, rattling melodrama with plenty of comic relief must surely love that great performance.” But to return to the shows and showmen of other times. In the Elizabethan period the motions were very prominent. The puppets sometimes took over plays of the day, and satirized them cleverly upon their own stages, the dolls costumed as nearly as possible like the prominent actors whom they imitated. Later, when for a time the Puritans abolished the theatres, the marionettes were allowed to continue their shows, and thus the entire repertory of the real stage fell into their hands. Permanent puppet stages grew up all over London: people thronged to the puppets. In Ben Jonson’s _Bartholomew Fair_ he allows the showman, Lanthorn Leatherhead, to describe his fortunes: “Ah,” he said, “I have made lots of money with _Sodom and Gomorrah_ and with the _City of Norwich_ but _Gunpowder Plot_, that was a veritable gift of God. It was that that made the pennies rain into the coffers. I only charged eighteen or twenty pence per head for admission, but I gave sometimes nine or ten representations a day.” Captain Pod, a seventeenth century showman mentioned in other writings of Ben Jonson, had a large repertory including, among other plays, _Man’s Wit_, _Dialogue of Dives_, _Prodigal Son_, _Resurrection of the Saviour_, _Babylon_, _Jonah and the Whale_, _Sodom and Gomorrah_, _Destruction of Jerusalem_, _City of Nineveh_, _Rome and London_, _Destruction of Norwich_, _Massacre of Paris with the Death of the Duke de Guise_ and _The Gunpowder Plot_. In 1667 Pepys records in his _Diary_ that he found “my Lady Castlemane at a puppet play, Patient Grizell.” _The Sorrows of Griselda_, indeed, was very popular at the time, also _Dick Whittington_, _The Vagaries of Merry Andrew_ and _The Humours of Bartholomew Fair_. The marionettes, indeed, grew so much the vogue, and the rivalry was felt so keenly by the regular theatres, that in 1675 the proprietors of the theatre in Drury Lane and near Lincoln’s Inn Fields formally petitioned that the puppets in close proximity be forbidden to exhibit, or be removed to a greater distance, as they interfered with the success of their performances.