advise you of it, that you may so act as in your prudence shall seem fit.” It does not appear what result this advice had; but as the date of the note is little more than three months later than that of the edict of revocation, when Louis XIV. was exulting in the downfall of heresy in France, and when those who still clung to Protestantism were looked upon as hardened sinners, no better than common malefactors, it is quite probable La Reynie thought it needless to interfere with the puppet-scoffers at the Huguenots. D’Harlay, it will be remembered, was intimate with some of the chiefs of the proscribed party, and a particular friend of the Marquis de Ruvigny, although he some years afterwards betrayed, according to St Simon, the trust that friend had reposed in him. But we are wandering from our wooden play-actors. The first two sections of M. Magnin’s work, devoted to the puppets of Antiquity and of the Middle Ages, are far briefer, and upon the whole, less interesting than the portion of his volume allotted to those of modern times. All those parts display extensive reading and patient research. The author commences by defining and classing his marionettes. “Everybody knows that marionettes are small figures of wood, bone, ivory, baked earth, or merely of linen, representing real or fantastical beings, and whose flexible joints obey the impulse given to them by strings, wires, or catgut, pulled by a skilful and invisible hand.” He divides them into three classes: hierarchical, aristocratic, and popular. In ancient times and in the middle ages, the first of these classes was decidedly the most important and influential. Auguries were obtained and miracles wrought by its aid, indispensable to priestly ambition and to idolatrous or erroneous creeds, dependent upon prodigies for support. Even at the present day, and in highly civilised countries, puppets of this kind are not wholly in disrepute, nor are the services of bleeding saints and nodding madonnas uniformly declined by the pastors of credulous flocks. The practice is very ancient—if that can give it respectability. The statue of Jupiter Ammon, when carried in procession on the shoulders of priests, previously to uttering its oracles, indicated to its bearers, by a motion of its head, the road it wished them to take. The golden statue of Apollo, in the temple of Heliopolis, moved when it had an oracle to deliver; and if the priests delayed to raise it upon their shoulders, it sweated and moved again. When the high-priest consulted it, it recoiled if it disapproved of the proposed enterprise; but if it approved, it pushed its bearers forward, and drove them, as with reins. M. Magnin quotes, from the writers of antiquity, a host of instances of this kind, in which machinery, quicksilver, and the loadstone were evidently the means employed. “In Etruria and in Latium, where the sacerdotal genius has at all times exercised such a powerful influence, hierarchical art has not failed to