the word is old, perhaps older than _titere_) indicates an Italian origin.” Legends of saints and the book of ballads (_Romancero_) supplied most of the subjects of the plays performed by Spanish puppets. Of this we have an example in the drama selected by Cervantes for performance by Master Peter’s _titeres_ before Don Quixote. In the course of his researches, M. Magnin was surprised to find (although he ought, perhaps, to have expected it) that bull-fights have had their turn of popularity on the boards of the Spanish puppet-show. He traces this in a curious old _picaresque_ romance, the memoirs of the _picara Justina_. This adventurous heroine gives sundry particulars of the life of her great-grandfather, who had kept a theatre of _titeres_ at Seville, and who put such smart discourse into the mouths of his actors that, to hear him, the women who sold fruit and chestnuts and _turrones_ (cakes of almonds and honey, still in use in Spain) quitted their goods and their customers, leaving their hat or their _brasero_ (pan of hot embers) to keep shop. The popular manager was unfortunately of irregular habits, and expended his substance in riotous living. His money went, his mules, his puppets—the very boards of his theatre were sold, and his health left him with his worldly goods, so that he became the inmate of an hospital. When upon the eve of giving up the ghost, his granddaughter relates, he lost his senses, and became subject to such furious fits of madness, that one day he imagined himself to be a puppet-show bull (_un toro de titeres_), and that he was to fight a stone cross which stood in the court of the hospital. Accordingly, he attacked it, crying out, “_Ah perra! que te ageno!_” (words of defiance), and fell dead. The sister of charity, a good simple woman, seeing this, exclaimed, “Oh the thrice happy man! he has died at the foot of the cross, and whilst invoking it!” At a recent date (1808), a French _savant_, travelling in Spain, went to the puppet theatre at Valencia. _The Death of Seneca_ was the title of the piece performed. In presence of the audience, the celebrated philosopher, the pride of Cordova, ended historically by opening his veins in a bath. The streams of blood that flowed from his arms were simulated cleverly enough by the movement of a red ribbon. An unexpected miracle, less historical than the mode of death, wound up the drama. Amidst the noise of fireworks, the pagan sage was taken up into heaven in a _glory_, pronouncing, as he ascended, the confession of his faith in Jesus Christ, to the perfect satisfaction of the audience. The smell of powder must have been a novelty to Seneca’s nostrils; but doubtless the rockets contributed greatly to the general effect of the scene, and Spain, the country of anomalies, is not to be disconcerted by an anachronism.