“In a synod held at Orihuela, a little Valencian bishopric, at the commencement of the seventeenth century, it was found necessary to renew the orders against the admission into churches of small images (_statuettes_) of the Virgin and female saints, curled, painted, covered with jewels, and dressed in silks, and resembling courtezans.” The abuse, nevertheless, continued; and we believe there would be little difficulty in authenticating instances of it in Spain within the present century. That it was an actual puppet-show which the ecclesiastical authorities thus strove to suppress, or at least to expel from churches, is clearly proved by a passage M. Magnin quotes from the proceedings of the synod: “We forbid the representation, in churches or elsewhere, of the actions of Christ, of those of the most holy Virgin, and of the lives of the saints, by means of those little movable figures vulgarly called _titeres_.” This last word is the exact Spanish equivalent to the French marionettes and the English puppet-show. It was a _titerero_ who fell in with Don Quixote at a Manchegan hostelry, and exhibited before him “the manner in which Señor Don Gayferos accomplished the deliverance of his spouse, Melisendra,” and whose figures of paste were so grievously mishandled by the chivalrous defender of dames. And it may further be remarked, as a sign of the ancient alliance in Spain between the church and the theatre, that an altarpiece and the stage or theatre upon which a puppet-show is exhibited are both expressed, to the present day, by the word _retablo_. To the _titeres_, by no means the least diverting and original of the European marionette family, we shall hereafter come. The precedence must be given to Italy, the cradle and the paradise of puppets.