To England M. Magnin allots nearly as many pages as to his own country, and displays in them a rare acquaintance with our language, literature, and customs. It would in no way have surprised him, he says, had the playful and lightsome muse of the puppet-show been made less welcome by the Germanic races than by nations of Greco-Roman origin. The grave and more earnest temper generally attributed to the former would have accounted for their disregard of a pastime they might deem frivolous, and fail to appreciate. He was well pleased, then, to find his wooden clients, his well-beloved marionettes, as popular and as well understood on the banks of the Thames, the Oder, and the Zuyder Zee, as in Naples, Paris, or Seville. “In England especially,” he says, “the taste for this kind of spectacle has been so widely diffused, that one could hardly name a single poet, from Chaucer to Lord Byron, or a single prose-writer, from Sir Philip Sydney to Hazlitt, in whose works are not to be found abundant information on the subject, or frequent allusions to it. The dramatists, above all, beginning with those who are the glory of the reigns of Elizabeth and James I., supply us with the most curious particulars of the repertory, the managers, and the stage of the marionettes. Shakespeare himself has not disdained to draw from this singular arsenal ingenious or energetic metaphors, which he places in the mouths of his most tragic personages at the most pathetic moments. I can name ten or twelve of his plays in which this occurs.” (The list follows.) “The cotemporaries and successors of this great poet—Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Milton, Davenant, Swift, Addison, Gay, Fielding, Goldsmith, Sheridan—have also borrowed many moral or satirical sallies from this popular diversion. Thanks to this singular tendency of the English dramatists to busy themselves with the proceedings of their little street-corner rivals, I have found in their writings much assistance—as agreeable as unexpected—in the task I have undertaken. Deprived, as one necessarily is in a foreign country, of direct sources and original pamphlets, having at my disposal only those standard works of great writers that are to be met with on the shelves of every library, I have found it sufficient, strange to say! to collate the passages so abundantly furnished me by these chosen authors to form a collection of documents concerning English puppets more circumstantial and more complete, I venture to think, than any that have hitherto been got together by the best-informed native critics.” Others, if they please, may controvert the claim here put forward; we shall content ourselves with saying that the amount of research manifested in M. Magnin’s long essay on English puppets does as much credit to his industry as the manner of the compilation does to his judgment, acumen, and literary talent. It must be observed, however, that he has not