Others have played with the theme; he approaches it in a graver spirit. “I am not so impertinent,” he exclaims, “as to seek _to put_ (as the Greeks would have said) _my foot in the dance of those great geniuses_. Too well do I see the folly of attempting to jingle, after them, the bells of that bauble.” Following the example of the learned Jesuit, Mariantonio Lupi—who wrote a valuable although a brief dissertation on the Puppets of the Ancients—but allotting to himself a much broader canvass, M. Magnin purposes to write, in all seriousness, sincerity, and simplicity, a history of the “wooden comedians,” not only of antiquity, but of the middle ages, and of modern times. A subject of far less intrinsic interest than the one in question could not fail to become attractive in the hands of so agreeable and skilful a _savant_ as M. Magnin. But it were a mistake to suppose that the history of the Puppet family, from Euripides’ days to ours, has not a real and strong interest of its own. The members of that distinguished house have been mixed up in innumerable matters into which one would hardly have anticipated their poking their wooden noses and permanently blushing countenances. They have been alternately the tools of priestcraft and the mouthpiece of popular feeling. Daring _improvisatori_, in certain times and countries, theirs was the only liberty of speech, their voice the sole organ of the people’s opposition to its rulers. Their diminutive stature, the narrow dimensions of their stage, the smallness of their powers of speech, did not always secure impunity to their free discourse, which sometimes, as their best friends must confess, degenerated into license. So that we occasionally, in the course of their history, find the audacious dolls driven into their boxes—with cords cut and heads hanging—or at least compelled to revise and chasten their dramatic repertory. Sometimes decency and morality rendered such rigour incumbent upon the authorities; but its motive was quite as frequently political. It is curious to note with what important events the Puppet family have meddled, and what mighty personages they have managed to offend. At the present day, when the press spreads far and wide the gist and most salient points of a successful play, in whatever European capital it may be performed, allusions insulting or irritating to friendly nations and governments may be fair subject for the censor’s scissors. It was only the other day that a Russian official journal expressed, in no measured terms, its high indignation at the performance, at a fourth-rate theatre on the Paris boulevards, of a drama entitled “The Cossacks,” in which those warriors of the steppes are displayed to great disadvantage. The circumstances of the moment not being such as to make the French government solicitous to spare the feelings of the Czar, the piece continued to be nightly played, to the delight of shouting audiences, and to the no small benefit of the