The history of Puppets and their shows may at first appear but a trivial subject to fix the attention and occupy the pen of a learned academician and elegant writer. The very word history may seem misapplied to a chronicle of the pranks of Punchinello, and of the contortions of fantoccini. Puppet-shows! it may be said; troops of tawdry figures, paraded from fair to fair, to provoke the laughter of children and the grin of rustics—is that a theme for a bulky octavo at the hands of so erudite and _spirituel_ an author as M. Charles Magnin? Had M. Magnin chosen to reply otherwise than with perfect candour to anticipated comments of this kind—the comments of the superficial and hastily-judging—he might easily have done so by saying that, whilst studying with a more important aim—for that history of the stage of which he has already published portions—he found the wooden actors so constantly thrusting themselves into the society of their flesh-and-blood betters, so continually intruding themselves, with timber joints, invisible strings, and piping voices, upon stages where human players strutted, that, to be quit of their importunity, he was fain to shelve them in a volume. This, however, is not the motive he alleges. He boldly breasts the difficulty, and stands up for the merits of his marionettes, quite deserving, he maintains, of a separate study and a special historian. He denies that time can be considered lost or lightly expended which is passed in tracing the vicissitudes of an amusement that, for three thousand years, has been in favour with two-thirds of the human race. And he summons to his support an imposing phalanx of great men—poets, philosophers, dramatists, musicians—who have interested themselves in puppets, taken pleasure in their performances, and even written for their mimic theatre. He reminds his readers how many pointed remarks and precious lessons, apt comparisons and graceful ideas, have been suggested by such shows to the greatest writers of all countries and ages, and heads the list of his puppets’ patrons with the names of Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Marcus Aurelius, Petronius, in ancient times; and with those of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Ben Jonson, Molière, Swift, Voltaire, and Goethe, amongst the moderns; to say nothing of Charles Nodier, Punchinello’s laureate, the assiduous frequenter of Parisian puppet-shows, who has devoted so many playful and sparkling pages to that favourite study of his literary leisure. M. Magnin begins to be alarmed at the shadows he has evoked. Is it not presumption, he asks himself, to enter a path upon which his predecessors have been so numerous and eminent? The subject, for whose frivolity he lately almost apologised, appears too elevated for his range when he reviews the list of illustrious names more or less connected with it, when he recalls the innumerable flowers of wit with which their fancy has wreathed it. So he marks out for himself a different track.