the showman to insert his fingers in the sleeves of the actors, only half of whose body is visible. Master Peter’s show was of a much more elevated style, and seems to have possessed all the newest improvements; as for instance, when the Moor steals softly behind Melisendra and prints a kiss in the very middle of her lips, we are told that “she spits, and wipes them with the sleeves of her shift, lamenting aloud, and tearing for anger her beautiful hair.” If the Lady Melisendra really did spit—and that the word was not a figure of speech of Master Peter’s boy, whose flippancy his master and the Knight of the Rueful Countenance had more than once to reprove—the civilisation of Spanish puppets must have been in a very forward state, for we find M. Magnin recording, as a novel triumph of puppet-mechanism, similar achievements in Germany in the present century. When Goethe’s _Faust_ gave a fresh vogue to the marionette exhibition, from which he had derived his first idea of the subject, Geisselbrecht, a Viennese mechanician, got up the piece with those docile performers, under the title of _Doctor Faust_, the great Necromancer, in Five Acts, with songs, and performed it at Frankfort, Vienna, and at Weimar, Goethe’s residence. “He strove to excel Dreher and Schütz (other proprietors of marionettes) by the mechanical perfection of his little actors, whom he made raise and cast down their eyes. He even made them _cough_ and _spit_ very naturally, feats which Casperle,[3] as may be supposed, performed as often as possible. M. Von der Hagen, scoffing at this puerile marvel, applied Schiller’s lines, from _Wallenstein’s Camp_, to the Austrian mechanician:— ‘Wie er räuspert und wie er spuckt Das habt Ihr ihm glücklich abgeguckt; Aber sein Genie....’”[4] As regards his puppets’ expectorating accomplishments, Geisselbrecht appears merely to have revived the traditions handed down from the days of Gines de Passamonte. But we are again losing the thread of our discourse amongst those of the countless marionettes that glide, skip, and dance over the pages of M. Magnin. Having spoken in this paragraph of the general form and fashion of the ambulant puppet-show, and having in so doing strayed from Italy into Germany and Spain, we will go somewhat farther, to look at the most compact and portable of all exhibitions of the kind. This is to be found in China. There the peripatetic showman elevates himself upon a small platform, and puts on a sort of case or sheath of blue cotton, tight at the ankles, and widening as it approaches the shoulders. Thus accoutred, he looks like a statue in a bag. He then places upon his shoulders a box in the form of a theatre, which encloses his head. His hands, concealed under the dress of the puppets, present these to the spectators, and make them act at his will. The performance over, he shuts up actors and sheath in the box, and carries it away under his arm.